Not to mention multi-player editing [1]. They nailed the execution and no competitor comes close
[1]: https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology...
845 karma · joined January 20, 2011
[1]: https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology...
The above is a quote from the Wikipedia article. I suspect that with interest rates at an all time low, the environment is not exactly ripe for this kind of insurance model.
Viagra was originally developed as chest pain medication. Did it utterly fail, simply because a new use-case was unveiled?
Which begs the question, what is the new use case for Bitcoin? Some say digital gold, but only time will tell.
I think "nice" downplays the importance of the possibility of self-custody. Despite the majority of people perhaps not opting to control their own keys, the mere possibility has interesting game theoretical implications that will keep neobanks like Coinbase in check.
The point is that energy consumption due to mining on the Ethereum network does not scale with transaction count. So it does not matter if NFTs are issued ("minted") or not. They add no marginal energy cost in the mining process. That is why calling them an "ecological disaster" is a misnomer.
NFTs do not cause carbon emissions themselves, just like you don't add carbon emissions by occupying a seat on a public transportation bus. The bus is doing its daily route and has a fixed amount of emissions per day whether it has any occupants or not. This analogy breaks quickly, so I wouldn't look too much into it.
Maybe a better analogy is to think of your WiFi router. Its energy use is (predominantly) static regardless of how many packets you route through it. So by browsing, you are not causing additional carbon emissions.
In more technical terms: more transactions do not cause more hashrate. Ethereum's CO2 footprint does not scale with transactional count. So asking people to use the network less will not cause the hashrate to go down. The only way you reduce energy consumption is by getting miners to mine less, which triggers the protocol to adjust the mining difficulty accordingly. As laid out above, this has nothing to do with how many transactions are happening on ETH, or whether NFTs are being minted on it.
Share buybacks. Tech businesses are buying their own shares to pump the stock price (and their options' value) rather than investing in building stuff.
https://www.coindesk.com/miami-mayor-previews-favorable-cryp...
[0]: https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carme...
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tranquility-1...
> Untraceable theft from your wallet
Blockchain analysis is a flourishing field. Vanilla bitcoin is far from untraceable, in fact it is LE’s wet dream.
> Unregulated merchants who aren't incentivized to play by the rules
There are two distinct sets of rules here. The ones merchants have to legally abide by (government imposed) and the ones that fit PayPal’s agenda. The latter is usually the problem (c.f. WikiLeaks blockade) because it is entirely based on the whims of a private company.
> No third-party intermediary in the event you get ripped off.
I often see this argument. Schneier also mentions it as a drawback. Note that reversible transactions can be built on top of bitcoin, if it is desirable. The opposite is not true. At least bitcoin gives you the option to do irreversible transactions if you wish.
> Ability for weed shops and porn sites to accept digital payments (This depends on your stance on these issues. Not everyone feels the same as you).
People need to be able to break the law and operate gray markets to move society forward. See Moxie’s excellent essay on the subject [0]
> If you buy something on ebay, ebay and the credit card company have a record of your purchase. If you buy something from a bitcoin merchant, they will have a record of your purchase. How is that different?
The reason eBay needs your real name is to combat chargeback fraud and tax evasion (for merchants). The former is irrelevant with irreversible transactions, the latter remains valid in that particular case. But what about Joe-random-SaaS? Why does {Spotify|Shopify|Expensify} need my real name besides payment?
[0] https://moxie.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/
It is not up to the miners to increase the block size, in fact miners were very much in favor of doing it. Bitcoin has other important constituents (users, core devs, wallet devs, exchanges) that would need to be on board for any modifications made to the core protocol to go through.