Explanation link was provided in my comment. Saying “but banks are also bad” doesn’t change the fact that cryptocurrency/NFT/web3 scene is rife with scams.
But he didn’t really say that banks are bad, or that the cryptocurrency/NFT/web3 scene isn’t rife with scams.
Scams also existing in fiat currency (his point) doesn’t make fiat bad, in the same way as cryptocurrency/NFT/web3 having good uses doesn’t mean that it cannot also be “rife with scams”.
Are hammers bad because people can use them to smash skulls? imho what we need is measures to prevent, block, minimize or discourage that kind of behavior, not necessarily ban hammers.
Personally, I think the open source and p2p nature of blockchain technology can be a better way to introduce measures of control and protection in a way that is fairer and more transparent than using obscure private ledgers on the hands of more central authorities managed by humans that we have to trust…
But he didn’t really say that banks are bad, or that the cryptocurrency/NFT/web3 scene isn’t rife with scams.
He dropped a bunch of links with zero context, initially. Interpretation was left to the reader.
Are hammers bad because people can use them to smash skulls? imho what we need is measures to prevent, block, minimize or discourage that kind of behavior, not necessarily ban hammers.
No. But how a tool is designed influences heavily what it’s good for and how it’s used. A war hammer and a nail hammer are different hammers, useful for different things. One is way more useful for killing people. The other can also be used that way, but not nearly as effectively.
Same with the crypto scene. Most of the tools there are designed in such a way that they promote the power structures they claim to work against. Just look at secondary centralization of Bitcoin and Ethereum mining, how centralized wealth is in BTC and other cryptocurrencies. The scams there also don’t come from nowhere and it is very telling that to deal with some of them (the Ethereum DAO thing I mentioned time and again, for example) the core promises of these very tools had to be broken (hard fork, blacklisted wallets, etc).
Just to be very clear, I am not claiming that these tools had been designed this way on purpose. Maybe, maybe not, I don’t know. But that’s what their design lends itself very well to.
Personally, I think the open source and p2p nature of blockchain technology can be a better way to introduce measures of control and protection in a way that is fairer and more transparent than using obscure private ledgers on the hands of more central authorities managed by humans that we have to trust…
Sure, and there are interesting projects in this scene. Nano Coin is one of them. Why? Because it explicitly acknowledges and tries to address the problems with almost all other cryptocurrency-ish projects out there.
And this is the conversation we should have had in this thread. But when somebody just knee-jerks, foams at their mouth, and keeps calling people names because they can’t get over the fact that maybe their pet tech might have some problems that need to be recognized and addressed, it’s hard to have such a conversation. One can either ignore such a person, or extract some entertainment value from their aggro. 😜
Those are fair points. But I’m used to seeing so much bad press against NFT from people who blindedly criticise it and assotiate it with any possible bad use of it… to the point that they think “NFT=bad”, and this kind of news paints that picture for anyone who doesn’t know better…
It would be like highlighting in the news every crime perpetrated by someone of color and then complain about “whataboutism” when someone says that white people also commit crimes.
I’m afraid that all this demonization will make it much much harder for any fair and honest project that we ever attempt in the future related to blockchain technology (such as the one you mentioned).
Those are fair points. But I’m used to seeing so much bad press against NFT from people who blindedly criticise it and assotiate it with any possible bad use of it… to the point that they think “NFT=bad”, and this kind of news paints that picture for anyone who doesn’t know better…
There is also an astonishing amount of shilling and pushing of NFTs. Media, sadly, often just prints ICO/NFT/etc projects’ press releases and helps hype them, instead of doing some delving. And coinbros exploit that, extracting cold hard cash from people who see themselves as “investors”, and who are in fact just participants in ponzi/pyramid schemes; crypto folk are even quite open about this sometimes:
Join a pyramid. It’s not a bubble unless it bursts.
And what I find particularly damning for the whole scene is that nobody from within the scene calls such crap out! FLOSS community is not perfect, for example, but bullshit gets called out. Projects that make exorbitant claims about security (snakeoil, etc), get called out. But crypto scene acts as if that’s bad for business. Can’t generate “bad press”, right? Because if one does, they and potentially the whole scene is NGMI, HFBP!
And frankly, I have not yet seen a single use of NFTs that is not either unnecessary (as in: whatever is being done could be done as well or better without NFTs), or outright scammy/snakeoily (most of the time). Not. One.
So this “NFT=bad” association is, sadly, well-deserved. And those negative stories are, I feel, necessary; they would not be necessary if crypto people dealt with scams and snakeoil themselves. But they don’t. 🤷♀️
It would be like highlighting in the news every crime perpetrated by someone of color and then complain about “whataboutism” when someone says that white people also commit crimes.
I find that analogy really strained (especially in the context of all what I wrote above and the general scammyness of the whole crypto/NFT/web3 sphere) and difficult to engage with without touching on sensitive stuff related to xenophobia, racism, etc.
I’m afraid that all this demonization will make it much much harder for any fair and honest project that we ever attempt in the future related to blockchain technology (such as the one you mentioned).
It probably will. But not calling out crypto/NFT/web3 scams just to preserve the few potentially useful and non-scammy projects would be effectively aiding and abeting the scammers. If people connected to the crypto community are worried about this kind of stuff, it’s high time they start calling scammers and snakeoil peddlers in that community out and otherwise dealing with it themselves, instead if pushing back against any and all criticism.
FLOSS community is not perfect, for example, but bullshit gets called out. Projects that make exorbitant claims about security (snakeoil, etc), get called out. But crypto scene acts as if that’s bad for business.
I think we have to differentiate the technical factors from the human ones. Calling out security vulnerabilities is not a problem, but when the cause is between the monitor and the chair then things get much more complicated.
Can’t generate “bad press”, right? Because if one does, they and potentially the whole scene is NGMI, HFBP!
Just not for the wrong reasons. It would be silly to say “internet” = “porn”, or “peer to peer” = “piracy”, so for the same reason, “NFT” = “fraud” is just as misdirected, imho.
I’ll agree to not continue with the simil about xenophobia since it’s true that it’s sensitive (though I do still think it does fit), but at least I hope you do accept these other broad generalizations that are mischaracterizing entire technologies that are very much different from that negative purpose someone might want to attribute to them due to how circunstancially “optimal” some specific instances might be for those purposes.
Saying “the association is well-deserved” already is admitting to the mischaracterization.
And frankly, I have not yet seen a single use of NFTs that is not either unnecessary (as in: whatever is being done could be done as well or better without NFTs)
It would be great to find a solution for distributed domain names that was done well or better than what can be done with NFTs, it’s something that p2p distributed networks haven’t managed to solve without blockchain tech.
not calling out crypto/NFT/web3 scams just to preserve the few potentially useful and non-scammy projects would be effectively aiding and abeting the scammers
I’m all for calling any and all scams. Just as long as we separate the technology from the scam. My problem isn’t with this article, but with the reactions in the comments that seem to jump to conclusions and paint things with broad strokes, assuming NFT = fraud.
I think we have to differentiate the technical factors from the human ones. Calling out security vulnerabilities is not a problem, but when the cause is between the monitor and the chair then things get much more complicated.
This is all human-made. One way or another, the cause is always between monitor and the chair. One of the reasons I find the crypto space so toxic and dangerous is their insistence on technosolutionism.
Just not for the wrong reasons. It would be silly to say “internet” = “porn”, or “peer to peer” = “piracy”, so for the same reason, “NFT” = “fraud” is just as misdirected, imho.
Your analogy falls apart due to how small the ratio of non-scammy uses of NFTs to scammy ones is. Internet is actually useful for other things than porn, peer-to-peer is actually useful for more things than unlicensed non-gatekeeped access to culture (“piracy” is stealing shit on the high seas). There might be useful ways to employ NFTs, but I have not seen them.
And again: the fact that NFT proponents focus on pushing back against any and all criticism instead of spending this energy on pushing back against scammers in the crypto sphere is very telling.
It would be great to find a solution for distributed domain names that was done well or better than what can be done with NFTs, it’s something that p2p distributed networks haven’t managed to solve without blockchain tech.
And they will not be able to solve it with blockchain tech.
The difficult problems in domain names are not related to figuring out who controls which name when, they are related to whether or not someone should be allowed to control a given name at a given time.
We’re talking legal issues (trademarks, scams, malware watering holes, etc), disputes (should I be allowed to control the name associated with a different entity/person? sometimes I should, parody and criticism are important; sometimes I shouldn’t, online harassment is a real thing). Neither of these can be written down in code, be it on blockchain or not.
These are ultimately human issues that need to be sorted out (often piecemeal, due to infinite complexity of human relations) by humans. As are other issues that blockchain-based boondoggles were proposed for, like: the “AbortionDAO” galaxy-brained idea linked before, or the “fix journalism with crypto” idea from a few years back, or the “fix climate with crypto” thing, or trying to pretend NFTs help artists (they don’t).
There is a reason I keep saying that blockchain tech is a solution in search of a problem. But it’s worse than that: what keeps happening, as with all the “great ideas” mentioned above, is that cryptobros decide “we will solve <this complicated problem> with crypto”, and ignore the nuances and complexities involved. This inevitably leads to people who have been involved in a given scene for years or decades going “oh for fuck’s sake, just stop!”, and now they have to spend their limited energy and resources not only on trying to fix the problem itself, but also on pushing back against clueless technosolutionists whose ideas actually make things worse.
It’s literally this XKCD, but with “crypto” instead of “algorithms”. And with even less self-awareness (in the comic strip at least the “algo bro” admits in the end that the problem is perhaps a bit more complicated than he expected; haven’t seen such behavior from cryptobros yet).
And the worst part is that this is assuming that the cryptobro in question honestly and genuinely wants to help solve a problem, instead of trying to cash out by associating their crypto scam with an important issue and using this to drive it “to the moon”. Which seems to be the case quite often, too.
I’m all for calling any and all scams. Just as long as we separate the technology from the scam. My problem isn’t with this article, but with the reactions in the comments that seem to jump to conclusions and paint things with broad strokes, assuming NFT = fraud.
Ah, I see. Idk why they saying that, why defend crypto/NFTs? They are extremely predatory, and I can tell that from just looking in from the outside. have a nice day
What alternative does the book suggest? All the reviews only note them suggesting debt relief for the world’s poorest countries and that we’re all imperfect communists because we act out of altruism sometimes and how that proves communism works
I guess you’ll have to read the book to find out. Really not inclined to do a book review for someone who’s throwing f-bombs at people he disagrees with.
But here’s a hint: perhaps the problem is not the specific technical implementation of a financial system, but the power structures that financial system promotes and enshrines.
Yeah so anarchist communes but don’t we have enough information on preindustrial societies that have existed/that still exist to show that they aren’t as egalitarian as claimed and they aren’t free as of violence either to know that’s completely stupid and violence is in the nature of man and not any particular system which is why no matter how free the market is , people will still be exploited
Wow, you either read books very fast and understand very little from them, or you just pull crap out of your arse without even bothering at all to dive into the source material.
The synopsis and reviews of the source material just talk about it exploring the history of money and giving evidence to point out to it’s origin as credit. All reviews of the book whether good/bad mention the end of the book recommending debt relief and it’s talks about everyday communism in none are any concrete alternatives mentioned. So regarding your critique of capitalism and the author’s background as an anarchist it serves to reason that any alternative system to capitalism that would be promoted must be anarchism so what pray tell did I pull out of my arse even jacobin doesn’t really find it that enlightening https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/08/debt-the-first-500-pages/
I guess we’ll never know until you read the book. 😄
But here’s another hint: perhaps debt relief can be implemented without an “anarchism”. You might also want to explore the author’s definition of “everyday communism”, and how it doesn’t have much to do with a communist state.
I never said you can’t. I only said it’s getting tedious. But hey, whatever floats your boat! 🤷♀️
whataboutism? what you talking about?
Explanation link was provided in my comment. Saying “but banks are also bad” doesn’t change the fact that cryptocurrency/NFT/web3 scene is rife with scams.
But he didn’t really say that banks are bad, or that the cryptocurrency/NFT/web3 scene isn’t rife with scams.
Scams also existing in fiat currency (his point) doesn’t make fiat bad, in the same way as cryptocurrency/NFT/web3 having good uses doesn’t mean that it cannot also be “rife with scams”.
Are hammers bad because people can use them to smash skulls? imho what we need is measures to prevent, block, minimize or discourage that kind of behavior, not necessarily ban hammers.
Personally, I think the open source and p2p nature of blockchain technology can be a better way to introduce measures of control and protection in a way that is fairer and more transparent than using obscure private ledgers on the hands of more central authorities managed by humans that we have to trust…
He dropped a bunch of links with zero context, initially. Interpretation was left to the reader.
No. But how a tool is designed influences heavily what it’s good for and how it’s used. A war hammer and a nail hammer are different hammers, useful for different things. One is way more useful for killing people. The other can also be used that way, but not nearly as effectively.
Same with the crypto scene. Most of the tools there are designed in such a way that they promote the power structures they claim to work against. Just look at secondary centralization of Bitcoin and Ethereum mining, how centralized wealth is in BTC and other cryptocurrencies. The scams there also don’t come from nowhere and it is very telling that to deal with some of them (the Ethereum DAO thing I mentioned time and again, for example) the core promises of these very tools had to be broken (hard fork, blacklisted wallets, etc).
Just to be very clear, I am not claiming that these tools had been designed this way on purpose. Maybe, maybe not, I don’t know. But that’s what their design lends itself very well to.
Sure, and there are interesting projects in this scene. Nano Coin is one of them. Why? Because it explicitly acknowledges and tries to address the problems with almost all other cryptocurrency-ish projects out there.
And this is the conversation we should have had in this thread. But when somebody just knee-jerks, foams at their mouth, and keeps calling people names because they can’t get over the fact that maybe their pet tech might have some problems that need to be recognized and addressed, it’s hard to have such a conversation. One can either ignore such a person, or extract some entertainment value from their aggro. 😜
Yeah, I never said I’m a nice person.
Those are fair points. But I’m used to seeing so much bad press against NFT from people who blindedly criticise it and assotiate it with any possible bad use of it… to the point that they think “NFT=bad”, and this kind of news paints that picture for anyone who doesn’t know better…
It would be like highlighting in the news every crime perpetrated by someone of color and then complain about “whataboutism” when someone says that white people also commit crimes.
I’m afraid that all this demonization will make it much much harder for any fair and honest project that we ever attempt in the future related to blockchain technology (such as the one you mentioned).
There is also an astonishing amount of shilling and pushing of NFTs. Media, sadly, often just prints ICO/NFT/etc projects’ press releases and helps hype them, instead of doing some delving. And coinbros exploit that, extracting cold hard cash from people who see themselves as “investors”, and who are in fact just participants in ponzi/pyramid schemes; crypto folk are even quite open about this sometimes:
And what I find particularly damning for the whole scene is that nobody from within the scene calls such crap out! FLOSS community is not perfect, for example, but bullshit gets called out. Projects that make exorbitant claims about security (snakeoil, etc), get called out. But crypto scene acts as if that’s bad for business. Can’t generate “bad press”, right? Because if one does, they and potentially the whole scene is NGMI, HFBP!
And frankly, I have not yet seen a single use of NFTs that is not either unnecessary (as in: whatever is being done could be done as well or better without NFTs), or outright scammy/snakeoily (most of the time). Not. One.
So this “NFT=bad” association is, sadly, well-deserved. And those negative stories are, I feel, necessary; they would not be necessary if crypto people dealt with scams and snakeoil themselves. But they don’t. 🤷♀️
I find that analogy really strained (especially in the context of all what I wrote above and the general scammyness of the whole crypto/NFT/web3 sphere) and difficult to engage with without touching on sensitive stuff related to xenophobia, racism, etc.
It probably will. But not calling out crypto/NFT/web3 scams just to preserve the few potentially useful and non-scammy projects would be effectively aiding and abeting the scammers. If people connected to the crypto community are worried about this kind of stuff, it’s high time they start calling scammers and snakeoil peddlers in that community out and otherwise dealing with it themselves, instead if pushing back against any and all criticism.
I think we have to differentiate the technical factors from the human ones. Calling out security vulnerabilities is not a problem, but when the cause is between the monitor and the chair then things get much more complicated.
Just not for the wrong reasons. It would be silly to say “internet” = “porn”, or “peer to peer” = “piracy”, so for the same reason, “NFT” = “fraud” is just as misdirected, imho.
I’ll agree to not continue with the simil about xenophobia since it’s true that it’s sensitive (though I do still think it does fit), but at least I hope you do accept these other broad generalizations that are mischaracterizing entire technologies that are very much different from that negative purpose someone might want to attribute to them due to how circunstancially “optimal” some specific instances might be for those purposes.
Saying “the association is well-deserved” already is admitting to the mischaracterization.
It would be great to find a solution for distributed domain names that was done well or better than what can be done with NFTs, it’s something that p2p distributed networks haven’t managed to solve without blockchain tech.
I’m all for calling any and all scams. Just as long as we separate the technology from the scam. My problem isn’t with this article, but with the reactions in the comments that seem to jump to conclusions and paint things with broad strokes, assuming NFT = fraud.
This is all human-made. One way or another, the cause is always between monitor and the chair. One of the reasons I find the crypto space so toxic and dangerous is their insistence on technosolutionism.
Your analogy falls apart due to how small the ratio of non-scammy uses of NFTs to scammy ones is. Internet is actually useful for other things than porn, peer-to-peer is actually useful for more things than unlicensed non-gatekeeped access to culture (“piracy” is stealing shit on the high seas). There might be useful ways to employ NFTs, but I have not seen them.
And again: the fact that NFT proponents focus on pushing back against any and all criticism instead of spending this energy on pushing back against scammers in the crypto sphere is very telling.
And they will not be able to solve it with blockchain tech.
The difficult problems in domain names are not related to figuring out who controls which name when, they are related to whether or not someone should be allowed to control a given name at a given time.
We’re talking legal issues (trademarks, scams, malware watering holes, etc), disputes (should I be allowed to control the name associated with a different entity/person? sometimes I should, parody and criticism are important; sometimes I shouldn’t, online harassment is a real thing). Neither of these can be written down in code, be it on blockchain or not.
These are ultimately human issues that need to be sorted out (often piecemeal, due to infinite complexity of human relations) by humans. As are other issues that blockchain-based boondoggles were proposed for, like: the “AbortionDAO” galaxy-brained idea linked before, or the “fix journalism with crypto” idea from a few years back, or the “fix climate with crypto” thing, or trying to pretend NFTs help artists (they don’t).
There is a reason I keep saying that blockchain tech is a solution in search of a problem. But it’s worse than that: what keeps happening, as with all the “great ideas” mentioned above, is that cryptobros decide “we will solve
<this complicated problem>with crypto”, and ignore the nuances and complexities involved. This inevitably leads to people who have been involved in a given scene for years or decades going “oh for fuck’s sake, just stop!”, and now they have to spend their limited energy and resources not only on trying to fix the problem itself, but also on pushing back against clueless technosolutionists whose ideas actually make things worse.It’s literally this XKCD, but with “crypto” instead of “algorithms”. And with even less self-awareness (in the comic strip at least the “algo bro” admits in the end that the problem is perhaps a bit more complicated than he expected; haven’t seen such behavior from cryptobros yet).
And the worst part is that this is assuming that the cryptobro in question honestly and genuinely wants to help solve a problem, instead of trying to cash out by associating their crypto scam with an important issue and using this to drive it “to the moon”. Which seems to be the case quite often, too.
If the shoe fits…
Ah, I see. Idk why they saying that, why defend crypto/NFTs? They are extremely predatory, and I can tell that from just looking in from the outside. have a nice day
Saying “apples are horrible” does not defend oranges. Two things can be bad at the same time. This is not a competition.
very true! The dude also has quite the shit comment history, what a load of garbage.
There is some entertainment value to this, though. Does brighten the day, in a weird way. 😄
Go fuck yourself you dumb communist removed
How… eloquent
Go to China and live in the countryside to experience your egalitarian and efficient utopia
Post an alternative if you can trash something it must mean you know of something better
I already linked you to a book that points towards some alternatives, but you refused to consider it. 🤷♀️
What alternative does the book suggest? All the reviews only note them suggesting debt relief for the world’s poorest countries and that we’re all imperfect communists because we act out of altruism sometimes and how that proves communism works
I guess you’ll have to read the book to find out. Really not inclined to do a book review for someone who’s throwing f-bombs at people he disagrees with.
But here’s a hint: perhaps the problem is not the specific technical implementation of a financial system, but the power structures that financial system promotes and enshrines.
Yeah so anarchist communes but don’t we have enough information on preindustrial societies that have existed/that still exist to show that they aren’t as egalitarian as claimed and they aren’t free as of violence either to know that’s completely stupid and violence is in the nature of man and not any particular system which is why no matter how free the market is , people will still be exploited
Wow, you either read books very fast and understand very little from them, or you just pull crap out of your arse without even bothering at all to dive into the source material.
I wonder which one is it. 🤔
The synopsis and reviews of the source material just talk about it exploring the history of money and giving evidence to point out to it’s origin as credit. All reviews of the book whether good/bad mention the end of the book recommending debt relief and it’s talks about everyday communism in none are any concrete alternatives mentioned. So regarding your critique of capitalism and the author’s background as an anarchist it serves to reason that any alternative system to capitalism that would be promoted must be anarchism so what pray tell did I pull out of my arse even jacobin doesn’t really find it that enlightening https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/08/debt-the-first-500-pages/
I guess we’ll never know until you read the book. 😄
But here’s another hint: perhaps debt relief can be implemented without an “anarchism”. You might also want to explore the author’s definition of “everyday communism”, and how it doesn’t have much to do with a communist state.
But I am not going to hold my breath here.