There must be a 5% margin of error
Only 95?
i can only presume the remaining 5% is owned by NFTs Georg, who lives on the blockchain and is an outlier who should not have been counted
Hey, just because 95% of them are worthless, doesn’t mean the other 5% aren’t too.
The news here is that, contrary to popular belief, 5% of NFTs actually still hold some value.
The real question would be: how many of those 5% can be sold for more than the initial asking price.
…but NFTs were never for the buyers, they were for the creators: even if they fall to 1/1000000th the initial value, a 2.5% cut on every sale is still more than 0.
If the values fall low enough relative to transaction fees then there won’t be any transactions at all for creators to collect royalties. Also values can drop to literally $0 if it isn’t even worth a buyer or sellers time to deal with the NFT (i.e. seller can’t find buyer at any price or doesn’t bother trying).
The other 5% are less than worthless
Crypto and NFTs are complete scams, change my mind.
It’s sad, I remember when bitcoin was new and the people interested were actually interested in breaking the state control of money. Now >99% of crypto people are just grifters and people trying to get rich quick.
I would argue 99.99% of crypto and nfts are complete scams. But Blockchain is a change in how we manage and distribute data, and can remove centralization of power from humans that we would otherwise need to trust for managing autonomous systems like the data in a banks public ledger.
It’s a common misconception that blockchain gives trust. If you control a majority of nodes in a Blockchain system you decide what the truth is.
This opens the door for illicit players to manipulate things their way.
Lack of trust doesn’t replace trust.
Central, provable/accountable, trust is needed for financial systems to work.
Everything else is “Wild West”.
It’s also a misconception that some illicit players can take over a large enough Blockchain system.
The cost to run a 51% PoS attack on Ethereum, as of today, is $20 Billion
(current staked total of $40 Billion)… that is, $20 Billion, if you already had them. Buying that much of Ethereum, with an available liquidity of $670 Million… is just impossible, there is not enough on the market, simple as that. If you tried really hard, you could maybe convince some HODLers to part with some of their hoard for a high enough price… unless they decided to stake and try to stop you. How high would you want to go to prevent that? $200 Billion? $200 Trillion…? Then after proving you can pull a 51% attack, the price would instantly crash down to $0. How much spare cash do you have to burn?
Let's do Bitcoin
Running a 51% PoW attack on Bitcoin, would mean either hijacking half of the current 400 Million TH/s hash rate, or adding your own 400 Million TH/s to the network. The most recent and cost effective mining hardware does about 250 TH/s for $8500 (plus power), so you’d only need 1.6 Million of those at a cost of above $13 Billion. Sounds easy, until you realize there are no 1.6 Million miners on sale. If you tried to buy those many, fat chance the manufacturer wouldn’t keep 50% of the production to themselves. Then comes the kicker: on a network without smart contracts, you can only double-spend your own coins, or block others from spending theirs… for how long would you be able to keep that 51% attack, before people realized what was going on and just kicked you out of the network?
Trust is trust in the inability of anyone to successfully attack a financial system.
Blockchains are absolutely provable/accountable to everyone everywhere at any time, which central systems are not.
Oh, don’t get me wrong - the technology behind them is something we should be embracing more than we currently are. Being able to publicly have transactions out in the open is great, and ensuring that both parties have to authenticate on both their ends helps a ton in preventing stuff like fraud.
I just think cryptocurrencies and NFTs are squandering the blockchain and the tech behind it. There are a couple of cryptocurrencies that make sense because they have something backing it (which I just personally prefer straight-up, even with fiat money), but it’s otherwise pretty much all crypto follows Bitcoin’s trend, which in turn is more akin to a stock where it just… sort of arbitrarily goes up and down. NFTs as we currently know them, on the other hand, are just a huge scam through and through lol.
“Squandering” is a great description of what they’ve been used for. The only implementations I’ve seen thus far that seem genuinely useful are FileCoin and a few decentralized computing attempts like ICP (not Ethereum). I could see a potential niche use-case for NFTs to decentrally coordinate ownership of abstract properties like domain names, but speculative monkey jpegs ain’t it chief.
Could you describe a case example how that applies in practice?
Because yeah I understand that when we all have our own copy of the data someone can’t falsify all our independent copies but is data being tampered like that even the problem?
It’s a problem when you’re dealing with decentralized systems (read: Byzantines general probelm). If there’s no central authority, how do you verify the person actually has the money and isn’t lying / double spending?
Bitcoin is an example. A wallet is unique data (private key) that is stored only the users storage. That private key proves ownership of funds owned by a wallet address / hash. A wallet address has funds if someone with valid funds sent money to it. A person initially gets that data by mining, which is like spending computational power to solve a puzzle, in which solving also processes a set of transactions at the same time. This is like the process of minting, except anyone is allowed to mint. It also helps identify who the miners/minters are, since utilizing energy gives a signature (It’s really hard to hide using a megawatt of energy with a thousand computers, for example)
A use case is it allows people in war torn countries to consolidate their wealth digitally. Gold, for example, could easily be confiscated at the border, or the refugees currency could only have value in their country. Lebanese people had their money squandered by the banks and the government, because they were the central authority. In a system managed by people, over a long enough period of time, a bad actor will gain some control of the system. This effect is worse the more control is centralized.
It also means you couldn’t sanction other countries the way the America is doing to Russia’s banking system right now. I’m indifferent about that argument but maybe you think those sanctions are good in which case would be a point against decentralized currencies.
I think more interesting ideas in blockchain involve decentralizing ID. A microchip in the heart can both act like a smart watch by monitoring health data and represent a unique identity in a decentralized system by using the biometric information like a fingerprint scanner. With a secure decentralized way to establish identity, you can decentralize voting, and remove politicians from the political system
I personally envision a future where we use blockchain technology to create a new direct democracy party in which every member has a unique identifier and the blockchain ledger system used to track polling data. Every individual member of the party would have one vote in each poll at ever level (federal, state, regional, etc) - for every single thing that gets a vote, and the elected politician representing that party would be required to vote based on the polling data.
Everyone would have access to a copy of the ledger to confirm their votes are counted accurately, and they can review polling data to confirm their elected politicians are voting based on polling data, and the representative would be replaced if they do not adhere to the results
Cryptocurrency has its uses as unregulated currency, though that makes it easy to scam people with it.
The biggest problem is people trying to peddle it as currency.
It isn’t currency, never will be. Much more alike to bonds.
It’s an investment object with a speculative value, and no tangible value. The only value it has is what the next guy is willing to pay for it.
While currency is deflationary by nature, crypto is entirely based on demand and supply, and sure, as long as people think it will be worth more tomorrow - sky’s the limit.
Like any pyramid scheme it pays out to get in early, and get out before it collapses.
Relying on crypto is high stakes gambling, and people being people is the only reason I can find for it not having collapsed totally already.
Where to start…
Like any pyramid scheme it pays out to get in early, and get out before it collapses.
That’s not how pyramid schemes work, the ones at the top never collapse, only the ones at the bottom end up holding the bags. GIF NFTs are pyramid schemes.
Ponzi schemes on the other hand, are the quintessential representation of fractional reserve: creditors get paid with new investors, until there is a bank run; you want to get out before that happens. USD is a Ponzi scheme, just like all currencies, including cryptos.
It’s an investment object with a speculative value, and no tangible value. The only value it has is what the next guy is willing to pay for it.
That’s a currency.
Relying on crypto is high stakes gambling
Let me introduce you to FOREX Futures and intraday HFT. There is also Crypto futures, but who’s counting.
Thats true, but you can still use it as a currency if you want to buy illegal drugs, or donations to organizations that accept it (with monero so its untraceable) and buying mullvad vpn. It’s not stable, but its an accepted way of transferring money that can be as private as cash.
The thing about bonds is that presumably the entity that issues them makes computers or tractors or potato chips or insurance. Bitcoin is like the bad guys in Captain Planet: they build a factory that eats the rain forest and spits out pollution.
The problem with using it as either a gamble or an investment is that the person/people holding control over the currency are doing so with the intent to make money. More often than not your money is gone the instant you pay in if they decide to make it hard/impossible to cash out. This is what Logan Paul’s scam crypto ended up doing. Say what you will about the US dollar, their main incentive is to stay in power which backs up the legitimacy of the currency. They’re not just going to rugpull the dollar because it would run counter to that goal.
It’s fundamentally impossible for crypto to fulfil that role because everyone involved is just there to make a quick buck.
Probably a typo, but currency is *inflationary, cryptocurrency is *deflationary, that’s why it’s not for spending “now” (e.g. hodlbros)
It’s fiat, I won’t argue it was ever going to be a good currency with built-in deflation, but that’s what it was originally meant to be. It’s long since become too volatile to be anything but a speculative asset, though. It does seem curious to me what that says about the actual distinction between legitimate currencies, stock options, and pyramid scheme buy-ins.
Shitcoins and GIF NFTs are complete scams, nothing to argue there.
Also Papal Indulgences, stamp collections, carbon offsets, the USD… we can go on 🤷
If the price of rare stamps craters you can always just use the stamp to mail a letter to your friend. They are onysical items with actual scarcity and legit demand from collectors. Loads of people have collected stamps, coins, and baseball cards for decades and even centuries
This isn’t always true. People collect stamps with postmarks on them as well, that can’t be reused. Stamps without postmarks are generally worth more. But if a rare stamp only has examples with marks, it will still be worth a lot, but useless to post a letter with.
Rare stamps collections include stamps from countries that no longer exist, are no longer valid, or are only commemorative and were never valid in the first place. Same thing for coins and banknotes, some you can only use to look at them.
They’re items with scarcity… that is no always all that scarce, and there are a lot of scams going around. Some are fake, some are so good of a fake that are unique and valuable again… 🤷
(but… “use the stamp to mail a letter”? What century is this? 😉)
I take it you aren’t a fan of capitalism. I’m being facetious. Obviously I see what you’re pulling here.
many are yes, but not all. Bitcoin and Ethereum (among others) are legit, and there are a few NFT projects out there that actually try to do the right thing even if they’re not worth much at all. Many other NFTs are nothing but pictures that have no meaningful value except what you assign it to, but they never pretended to be anything else so that’s still not a scam in my book
Bitcoin is never going to be wisely used for it’s intended purpose. It’s been too sold as as investment that you buy and sell rather than a currency.
Bitcoin had a huge congestion problem in 2021, it’s been mostly solved now with major exchanges accepting Lightning Network.
For comparison:
- Bitcoin LN: $0.0001 fee, minimum $0.0003, arrives in under a second to a minute
- Bitcoin normal: around $1 fee, minimum around $0.04, arrives in 1 or 2 hours
- SEPA: 0€ fee, minimum 0.01€, takes between 10 seconds and 2 days
- SWIFT: charges up to $20-30 and 2-5% for currency exchanges, takes 1 to 5 days
In 2023, Bitcoin with LN support is comparable to EU transfers, way better than international transfers, and better for microtransanctions.
Its investment value has been overhyped, it’s too volatile for long term value storage, but that’s irrelevant for instant value transfers.
To me crypto has some genuine projects, although it is dominated by scammers and grifters. Nym, which is a mixnet project, with a token to incentivize people to host nodes, and Stasis Euro, a euro-backed stablecoin, look pretty legitimate. I believe there really are honest, well-intentioned crypto projects, though they are a minority and largely suffer from redundancy or poor implementation.
NFT’s are 100% a scam though.
