David, I am 100% with you. It is human greed that will kill us all. It's not the artists who are greedy, either: it's the people with far more money, who refuse to pay what a thing is worth, but always want a bargain. That's how they got rich in the first place, isn't it?
I've been trying to tell a friend about the damage her bitcoin speculation is doing. "But I'm only dealing in small amounts: I'm not actually mining. its the only way I can make money".
Let's bring in Universal Basic Income to help our artists.. Let's raise the highest tax rate to 60%.
And while were at it, let's insist that all our Internet accessible devices have an app built in, that tells us how much carbon our activites have used each day. Most of us squander out of ignorance, not malice.
PS. I agree with you about children, but 45 to 20 years ago, when as an adult I was choosing not to have them, I was frequently subject to unpleasant attacks about my choice, by far and away the most ironic one being that my choice was selfish!
Hi David, I'm a big fan of all your work going right back to Nightline. Glad you're jumping into the murky world of distributed ledger technology of which cryptocurrency and NFTs are one use case.
I operate the largest cryptocurrency exchanges by volume in NZ. So that makes me both an expert on the topic, and, of course, biased. I'll try not to put you and everyone else to sleep so I'll bullet point:
-Bitcoin and Ethereum both use energy-intensive methods of verifying transactions that were designed before they were popular.
-There are many other blockchains designed to solve this problem by using a fraction of the electricity, but they haven't had the same update as Bitcoin or Ethereum
-It only used to cost a few cents to process Ethereum transactions but ETH has become a victim of its own success, running at or near 100% capacity for the last couple of years.
-Changes are being made right now to ETH to change the way transactions are processed to a less energy-intensive mode, increase capacity, and bring costs down. Cryptocurrencies evolve through time in response to needs and voting by users.
-Many of the reports on energy usage by crypto-only tell half the truth. Crypto mining follows the lowest-cost energy around the world, usually where there is unused generating capacity. That's why almost no commercial crypto mining happens in NZ because we have higher electricity prices.
Lastly, the main driver of surging cryptocurrency prices is the exact same thing causing asset bubbles all over the work including housing in NZ and equities everywhere. Sustained low-interest rates and unprecedented levels of monetary and fiscal stimulus. Money is flooding markets and there are few places to earn interest, so there's more money chasing fewer assets and everything skyrockets.
People have been screaming "Proof of Stake is coming to Ethereum" for, literally, years. In fact I think in late 2018 the Ethereum Foundation were saying they'd be on the new platform by the end of 2019, whereas the very first step in that process didn't actually happen until the end of 2020, and there's no clear dates or roadmap for actually shifting the platform as a whole to PoS.
In short, I'll believe it when I see it. And in the meantime, Bitcoin - the most widely used by a long way - has no plans to change, and continues to increase the hash complexity and energy consumption as it's designed to do.
As for the arguments of environmental impact - most seem to be based on a study by a cryptocurrency asset management company. Whereas other studies find (unsurprisingly) a much less rosy picture. Most recently, for example, the University of Cambridge found that only 39% of cryptomining energy was from renewable sources (an improvement from 28% the year before, at least).
However, over the same period the actual energy use of the Bitcoin network alone increased by 80% to 128TWh (New Zealand's electricity entire consumption for a year is about 40TWh).
And even with some portion of crypto energy being from renewable sources, that ignores the fact that electricity generation is generally is zero-sum - it all has to be used. So excess energy demands are created, exceeding possible renewable supply and leading to increased fossil fuel generation that wouldn't necessarily be required were it not for the demand generated by that crypto activity.
I actually agree with you on all points. Personally, I'm blockchain agnostic. I'm not a Bitcoin or Ethereum maximalist and I ignore all the idiot Twitter mobs who say "my crypto is better than your crypto" and follow blindly.
If markets were rational neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum wouldn't be in the privileged positions they find themselves in. You could say, they're no longer fit for purpose. But despite what economists believe markets than involve humans a never rational, at least not in the short to medium term.
The rest of the world isn't like New Zealand. Dirty energy is still the norm overseas so of course, coal is going to get burned to process transactions, along with those $0.70 plastic bubble wands we buy for our kids from Kmart to throw away.
I still believe we're better having crypto than not. Especially in countries with high corruption and worthless sovereign currencies. The whole experiment started in (2009) in response to a largely corrupt system of self-serving investment bankers that triggered the first GFC, and the global financial system has been on life support ever since.
I don't know what crypto will be king when the dust settles. All I know is that it will be a mix of cryptocurrencies, tokenised traditional assets, and sovereign currencies all distributed ledgers, in one big melting-pot. The lines used to be black and white, now it's all grey.
> I still believe we're better having crypto than not.
I'm generally the opposite. I think whatever potential promise existed in cryptocurrency has been entirely destroyed by the (predictable?) nature of capitalism and internet culture.
Even the idea of a blockchain, apart from the currency aspects, is of far less utility that is often suggested. There are, arguably, some good use cases for a public immutable transaction ledger, but more often than not a better solution for most things people argue should be "put on the blockchain" would be a decently designed database.
I guess we'll see what shakes out in the world, but in sum I think cryptocurrency has been a net negative overall. And I'm not just saying that because I lost the US$5 worth of BTC I bought when I first read about it on Slashdot in late 2009 or early 2010.
Can I just chip in and say I am over the moon with how civil this discussion is, despite fundamental differences! If I sound like a condescending parent I don't mean to - I'm genuinely stoked.
I'll add to this that I got into crypto because I saw it as a binary, asymmetric outcome. This investment will either go to zero, or I'll become rich in the new world created by Bitcoin (lol). There's a similar binary happening right now with regards to crypto's energy consumption, and one that nobody really has a say in, given that pandora's box has been opened. Crypto will kill us all, and that new world I was hoping to be rich in will be even more dystopian than our current one -- or, for reasons you've alluded to, crypto will actually save the planet by bringing down cost curves for renewable energy.
I'll caveat that I actually have no idea what I'm talking about and tend to be overly optimistic about things like this, but imagine this scenario:
Crypto mining's incentive structure, we know, requires cheap energy, and as you mentioned, unused capacity is the first thing that comes to mind. Currently, 39% of mining is from renewable energy (https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/faculty-research/centres/alternative-finance/publications/3rd-global-cryptoasset-benchmarking-study/). That's not high enough! However, there is a virtuous cycle at play: The more you use renewables, the cheaper they get compared to fossil fuels. It's entirely possible in my mind that the "high" usage of energy by crypto could actually contribute to renewables maturing and scaling much faster.
The second point I'll make is that it's easy to point at NFTs and say they are a frivolous use of energy. I can't refute that. But for crypto in general, particularly Bitcoin, the folks who bemoan it's energy use only do so because they don't see or understand what Bitcoin is replacing. If Bitcoin succeeds at becoming global reserve currency (obsoleting central banking, which feeds what I call the capitalistic inequality doom loop), and if Bitcoin/Ethereum displace traditional banking and markets, how much energy have humans traditionally consumed to support those endeavors?
If you zoom out and look at the energy consumed by server farms, it's something like 20% of all energy now. But we don't question that as much because the ways it has touched our lives are more tangible (no drives to the video rental store, no fighting over who gets to dial into Prodigy on the single family computer, remote work via Zoom/Slack, etc).
Oh, for the record, I don't think NFTs are that great. They're new so they're a bit overhyped. There is a very specific use for them like in gaming but everyone is jumping on the gravy-train for the NFT halo effect.
Like if you had a listed company Toilet Paper Manufacturing and you changed the name to Ethereum Toilet Paper the price would probably pop by 50% and then drop again in a couple of weeks when people realise that you don't really need a blockchain to a token to manufacture toilet paper.
So I've been reading this book - SPQR by Mary Beard - which is a pretty comprehensive history of Rome recommended to me by a bunch of people at /r/history. It dates right back to 500BC or thereabouts and covers the following 1000 years. Probably naively, it's made me realise that humans were always shit people; more specifically, there's always been a sub-set of the human population hell bent on destruction for personal gain. There's plenty of positive things that came out of it - the early stages of democracy, currency, certain rights constructs - but pretty quickly, relatively speaking, that all eroded in the name of power hungry autocrats.
It's pieces like yours here David that make me convinced that only are we *still* shit humans, our time is limited. Or rather, we're cementing that fact daily as quickly as we can in the name of greed. Chances are I'm long gone from this Earth by the time we suck this bitch dry but it's honestly destroying any last shred of hope for humanity that I had and is making me wonder more and more what the point of this all is. Without significant change that is quite simply not forthcoming without a radical shift, the greedy minority will doom whatever percentage of the population that cares or is at least neutral about it all.
Thankfully it's cat pictures keeping me going at this point. Thanks, as always, for your work; it's enlightening and always interesting.
So this "Our greed, our need to “own” things, and our inability to see the bigger picture." which also makes me despair, reminds me of that episode of How To with John Wilson, which touches on people who own original artworks (Van Goghs, Picassos, and so on) who keep the original safely locked away in storage because it's valuable, and pay for a perfect copy to be on show in their house. I *get* wanting the valuable one because people like to own things that may one day be used for their value, but really what we want (hopefully) is the beautiful picture which makes us happy when we see it in our house each day, and so why not just get a print from the museum and look at that?? I mean, if we break this down to what art is really for - the provision of pleasure through aesthetic appreciation, say.
I think all this exploitative and nonsense money-making for the sake of money-making is puke-making.
I'm just waiting for the creator of the bread falling over video, Random Kingdom*, to tokenise the video so I can buy it as a christmas gift for David.
ouch, my brain hurts....... :-O Being a slightly older generational, I guess it may well be outside of my frame of reference. I will persist, however, because, y'know - know thine enemy etc.
I had to sit through a keynote on blockchain at work a while back and have tried reading about it numerous times. I still don't have a notion what it all is.
Oh god is right. I'm conflicted too. Sad, because it's good to see artists get paid. What a horror it is. Given the value of one ETH buying NFTs is a reasonably wealthy persons game, the chances of it stopping are minimal. 29 years ago I was 20 years old, fervent green supporter. I harassed everyone. Back then in 1992 Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace were saying we had 10 years to turn this shit around. No-one cared. Not even a simple thing like recycling, lightbulbs and not using disposable/single use plastics. They found it inconvenient to change. More people are on board with the simple things these days, that's great, but very little changes where big money and investment is involved and the industries they invest in. We will die, every species, this planet, will die because some humans are obsessed with wealth. Humans suck.
A very active thread David... For better or worse you've opened pandora's box! There are many fantastic narratives to be found in the DLT/crypto world. Good, bad, and just plain weird.
This thread is out of hand! (in a good way, mostly!). It's kinda my dream to have this sort of smart discussion going on under posts. It's polite, and never descends into total chaos.
I don't mind dying while watching a good television show but ALL of us dying so a few cryptonerds can claim to own the OG copy of a Tweet is ridiculous.
The discussion in here is blowing my mind! Sometimes when I read about crypto I feel like I am slowly drifting into understanding it less and less, and becoming a little more unhinged along the way!
What worries me (and I might be totally off the mark because this is waaaay too technical for me!!) is that could NFTs become a way of committing cyber crime? For example if someone was to ever share intimate photos in a relationship could they be then sold as NFTs, either sold back to the owner for financial gain (for non celebrities) with the threat of sharing them elsewhere, or actually sold to buyers (more celebrity centred)? I might be totally wrong but it just seems like it could end up making life very difficult for some people!
It doesn't help much for blackmail in the way you describe, because ownership of an NFT doesn't convey exclusive access. Instead in almost all implementation it's entirely the opposite - every NFT created is forever accessible to the public, along with the history of all transactions and ownership.
But revenge porn as NFTs is almost certainly going to become an issue (if it isn't already). And, depending on the specific method of encapsulating the media token, it has the potential to create some really terrible situations as the entire point of a blockchain is that it's immutable - nothing can be removed. It's write only.
So the potential exists to add abusive material to a blockchain that *cannot* be deleted.
Beyond that, blockchain currencies and various securities connected to them are currently massively connected to crime, especially cybercrime. All ransomware payments, for example, are in cryptocurrencies - tens of millions of dollars a year. There is a whole massive criminal network of cryptocurrency laundering and handling underpinning a lot of the overall market.
Sorry, Dan, that's simply nor correct. Unless you work in a related anti-money laundering role then you don't know. And you forget money laundering & fraud have always been an issue, and it's actually getting better since the AML/CFT Act. 2009 and similar pieces of legislation around the world have come into force.
The money laundering risk for crypto, by volume, is about the same as credit cards. So by your assertion, we should also ban credit cards which would then push the flow of money elsewhere anyway.
Money flows like water, through the path of least resistance.
Most cryptocurrencies are only pseudonymous and can be easily traced using massive international databases of known wallet addresses (including the dark web) and then analysing it following it through the blockchain 50 transactions or more in minutes. You simply can't do that with traditional banking systems because they work in silos.
Regulators/Govts are far more concerned about trade-based money laundering and state on state cybercrime than they are crypto. Those trends change all the time, and back in the old days, illicit use of crypto was big proportionally, As legitimate uses have grown illicit use has been static and as such proportionally less.
Let me try and understand this. Jack Dorsey, who invented Twitter, is selling his first tweet for $2.5m? Forbes magazine estimates him to be worth $12.8bn. He's obviously a bright lad but the concept of "Enough" seems to be beyond him. The only thing he understands is "More". Plus he has a hugely inflated sense of his own importance to the human race. He needs help and a lot of it - medication, therapy and an education...
That's all terrible David, you're right!
In the meantime, check out my new exclusive NFT collection: Rare Farriers
https://opensea.io/collection/rare-farriers
You bastard
😂
David, I am 100% with you. It is human greed that will kill us all. It's not the artists who are greedy, either: it's the people with far more money, who refuse to pay what a thing is worth, but always want a bargain. That's how they got rich in the first place, isn't it?
I've been trying to tell a friend about the damage her bitcoin speculation is doing. "But I'm only dealing in small amounts: I'm not actually mining. its the only way I can make money".
Let's bring in Universal Basic Income to help our artists.. Let's raise the highest tax rate to 60%.
And while were at it, let's insist that all our Internet accessible devices have an app built in, that tells us how much carbon our activites have used each day. Most of us squander out of ignorance, not malice.
PS. I agree with you about children, but 45 to 20 years ago, when as an adult I was choosing not to have them, I was frequently subject to unpleasant attacks about my choice, by far and away the most ironic one being that my choice was selfish!
Hi David, I'm a big fan of all your work going right back to Nightline. Glad you're jumping into the murky world of distributed ledger technology of which cryptocurrency and NFTs are one use case.
I operate the largest cryptocurrency exchanges by volume in NZ. So that makes me both an expert on the topic, and, of course, biased. I'll try not to put you and everyone else to sleep so I'll bullet point:
-Bitcoin and Ethereum both use energy-intensive methods of verifying transactions that were designed before they were popular.
-There are many other blockchains designed to solve this problem by using a fraction of the electricity, but they haven't had the same update as Bitcoin or Ethereum
-It only used to cost a few cents to process Ethereum transactions but ETH has become a victim of its own success, running at or near 100% capacity for the last couple of years.
-Changes are being made right now to ETH to change the way transactions are processed to a less energy-intensive mode, increase capacity, and bring costs down. Cryptocurrencies evolve through time in response to needs and voting by users.
-Many of the reports on energy usage by crypto-only tell half the truth. Crypto mining follows the lowest-cost energy around the world, usually where there is unused generating capacity. That's why almost no commercial crypto mining happens in NZ because we have higher electricity prices.
Lastly, the main driver of surging cryptocurrency prices is the exact same thing causing asset bubbles all over the work including housing in NZ and equities everywhere. Sustained low-interest rates and unprecedented levels of monetary and fiscal stimulus. Money is flooding markets and there are few places to earn interest, so there's more money chasing fewer assets and everything skyrockets.
People have been screaming "Proof of Stake is coming to Ethereum" for, literally, years. In fact I think in late 2018 the Ethereum Foundation were saying they'd be on the new platform by the end of 2019, whereas the very first step in that process didn't actually happen until the end of 2020, and there's no clear dates or roadmap for actually shifting the platform as a whole to PoS.
In short, I'll believe it when I see it. And in the meantime, Bitcoin - the most widely used by a long way - has no plans to change, and continues to increase the hash complexity and energy consumption as it's designed to do.
As for the arguments of environmental impact - most seem to be based on a study by a cryptocurrency asset management company. Whereas other studies find (unsurprisingly) a much less rosy picture. Most recently, for example, the University of Cambridge found that only 39% of cryptomining energy was from renewable sources (an improvement from 28% the year before, at least).
However, over the same period the actual energy use of the Bitcoin network alone increased by 80% to 128TWh (New Zealand's electricity entire consumption for a year is about 40TWh).
And even with some portion of crypto energy being from renewable sources, that ignores the fact that electricity generation is generally is zero-sum - it all has to be used. So excess energy demands are created, exceeding possible renewable supply and leading to increased fossil fuel generation that wouldn't necessarily be required were it not for the demand generated by that crypto activity.
Hi Dylan,
I actually agree with you on all points. Personally, I'm blockchain agnostic. I'm not a Bitcoin or Ethereum maximalist and I ignore all the idiot Twitter mobs who say "my crypto is better than your crypto" and follow blindly.
If markets were rational neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum wouldn't be in the privileged positions they find themselves in. You could say, they're no longer fit for purpose. But despite what economists believe markets than involve humans a never rational, at least not in the short to medium term.
The rest of the world isn't like New Zealand. Dirty energy is still the norm overseas so of course, coal is going to get burned to process transactions, along with those $0.70 plastic bubble wands we buy for our kids from Kmart to throw away.
I still believe we're better having crypto than not. Especially in countries with high corruption and worthless sovereign currencies. The whole experiment started in (2009) in response to a largely corrupt system of self-serving investment bankers that triggered the first GFC, and the global financial system has been on life support ever since.
I don't know what crypto will be king when the dust settles. All I know is that it will be a mix of cryptocurrencies, tokenised traditional assets, and sovereign currencies all distributed ledgers, in one big melting-pot. The lines used to be black and white, now it's all grey.
> I still believe we're better having crypto than not.
I'm generally the opposite. I think whatever potential promise existed in cryptocurrency has been entirely destroyed by the (predictable?) nature of capitalism and internet culture.
Even the idea of a blockchain, apart from the currency aspects, is of far less utility that is often suggested. There are, arguably, some good use cases for a public immutable transaction ledger, but more often than not a better solution for most things people argue should be "put on the blockchain" would be a decently designed database.
I guess we'll see what shakes out in the world, but in sum I think cryptocurrency has been a net negative overall. And I'm not just saying that because I lost the US$5 worth of BTC I bought when I first read about it on Slashdot in late 2009 or early 2010.
Can I just chip in and say I am over the moon with how civil this discussion is, despite fundamental differences! If I sound like a condescending parent I don't mean to - I'm genuinely stoked.
Exactly. Blockchain largely seems to be just a really slow and inefficient distributed database.
I'll add to this that I got into crypto because I saw it as a binary, asymmetric outcome. This investment will either go to zero, or I'll become rich in the new world created by Bitcoin (lol). There's a similar binary happening right now with regards to crypto's energy consumption, and one that nobody really has a say in, given that pandora's box has been opened. Crypto will kill us all, and that new world I was hoping to be rich in will be even more dystopian than our current one -- or, for reasons you've alluded to, crypto will actually save the planet by bringing down cost curves for renewable energy.
I'll caveat that I actually have no idea what I'm talking about and tend to be overly optimistic about things like this, but imagine this scenario:
Crypto mining's incentive structure, we know, requires cheap energy, and as you mentioned, unused capacity is the first thing that comes to mind. Currently, 39% of mining is from renewable energy (https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/faculty-research/centres/alternative-finance/publications/3rd-global-cryptoasset-benchmarking-study/). That's not high enough! However, there is a virtuous cycle at play: The more you use renewables, the cheaper they get compared to fossil fuels. It's entirely possible in my mind that the "high" usage of energy by crypto could actually contribute to renewables maturing and scaling much faster.
The second point I'll make is that it's easy to point at NFTs and say they are a frivolous use of energy. I can't refute that. But for crypto in general, particularly Bitcoin, the folks who bemoan it's energy use only do so because they don't see or understand what Bitcoin is replacing. If Bitcoin succeeds at becoming global reserve currency (obsoleting central banking, which feeds what I call the capitalistic inequality doom loop), and if Bitcoin/Ethereum displace traditional banking and markets, how much energy have humans traditionally consumed to support those endeavors?
If you zoom out and look at the energy consumed by server farms, it's something like 20% of all energy now. But we don't question that as much because the ways it has touched our lives are more tangible (no drives to the video rental store, no fighting over who gets to dial into Prodigy on the single family computer, remote work via Zoom/Slack, etc).
Oh, for the record, I don't think NFTs are that great. They're new so they're a bit overhyped. There is a very specific use for them like in gaming but everyone is jumping on the gravy-train for the NFT halo effect.
Like if you had a listed company Toilet Paper Manufacturing and you changed the name to Ethereum Toilet Paper the price would probably pop by 50% and then drop again in a couple of weeks when people realise that you don't really need a blockchain to a token to manufacture toilet paper.
It's just melting my brain just reading this. What a horror show we are!
yup....I need to have a nap now.
So I've been reading this book - SPQR by Mary Beard - which is a pretty comprehensive history of Rome recommended to me by a bunch of people at /r/history. It dates right back to 500BC or thereabouts and covers the following 1000 years. Probably naively, it's made me realise that humans were always shit people; more specifically, there's always been a sub-set of the human population hell bent on destruction for personal gain. There's plenty of positive things that came out of it - the early stages of democracy, currency, certain rights constructs - but pretty quickly, relatively speaking, that all eroded in the name of power hungry autocrats.
It's pieces like yours here David that make me convinced that only are we *still* shit humans, our time is limited. Or rather, we're cementing that fact daily as quickly as we can in the name of greed. Chances are I'm long gone from this Earth by the time we suck this bitch dry but it's honestly destroying any last shred of hope for humanity that I had and is making me wonder more and more what the point of this all is. Without significant change that is quite simply not forthcoming without a radical shift, the greedy minority will doom whatever percentage of the population that cares or is at least neutral about it all.
Thankfully it's cat pictures keeping me going at this point. Thanks, as always, for your work; it's enlightening and always interesting.
Hey Waldo. I’ll have to pick up that book. And hate to say it, but I tend to agree with you.
So this "Our greed, our need to “own” things, and our inability to see the bigger picture." which also makes me despair, reminds me of that episode of How To with John Wilson, which touches on people who own original artworks (Van Goghs, Picassos, and so on) who keep the original safely locked away in storage because it's valuable, and pay for a perfect copy to be on show in their house. I *get* wanting the valuable one because people like to own things that may one day be used for their value, but really what we want (hopefully) is the beautiful picture which makes us happy when we see it in our house each day, and so why not just get a print from the museum and look at that?? I mean, if we break this down to what art is really for - the provision of pleasure through aesthetic appreciation, say.
I think all this exploitative and nonsense money-making for the sake of money-making is puke-making.
I'm just waiting for the creator of the bread falling over video, Random Kingdom*, to tokenise the video so I can buy it as a christmas gift for David.
*Check out their other smash hit video: "Banana Falling Over!" https://youtu.be/FbkCynrzVhE
ouch, my brain hurts....... :-O Being a slightly older generational, I guess it may well be outside of my frame of reference. I will persist, however, because, y'know - know thine enemy etc.
I had to sit through a keynote on blockchain at work a while back and have tried reading about it numerous times. I still don't have a notion what it all is.
Yep... All a big scam - https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beeple-art-buyer-and-his-nft-defi-scheme/
Oh that only made it all worse.
If I could snap my fingers and make the concept of cryptocurrency vanish from our collective memories, I would do it without hesitation.
OOOOOF
Oh god is right. I'm conflicted too. Sad, because it's good to see artists get paid. What a horror it is. Given the value of one ETH buying NFTs is a reasonably wealthy persons game, the chances of it stopping are minimal. 29 years ago I was 20 years old, fervent green supporter. I harassed everyone. Back then in 1992 Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace were saying we had 10 years to turn this shit around. No-one cared. Not even a simple thing like recycling, lightbulbs and not using disposable/single use plastics. They found it inconvenient to change. More people are on board with the simple things these days, that's great, but very little changes where big money and investment is involved and the industries they invest in. We will die, every species, this planet, will die because some humans are obsessed with wealth. Humans suck.
A very active thread David... For better or worse you've opened pandora's box! There are many fantastic narratives to be found in the DLT/crypto world. Good, bad, and just plain weird.
This thread is out of hand! (in a good way, mostly!). It's kinda my dream to have this sort of smart discussion going on under posts. It's polite, and never descends into total chaos.
This all makes me want to sculpt in 3d and overthrow the rectangular interface.
When I read things like this I always think of the lyrics from Roger Waters' Amused to Death track...
"And when they found our shadows
Grouped around the TV sets
They ran down every lead
They repeated every test
They checked out all the data on their lists
And then the alien anthropologists
Admitted they were still perplexed
But on eliminating every other reason
For our sad demise
They logged the only explanation left
This species has amused itself to death
No tears to cry no feelings left
This species has amused itself to death"
Seems we are, and always were well on our way to something like this.
I don't mind dying while watching a good television show but ALL of us dying so a few cryptonerds can claim to own the OG copy of a Tweet is ridiculous.
The discussion in here is blowing my mind! Sometimes when I read about crypto I feel like I am slowly drifting into understanding it less and less, and becoming a little more unhinged along the way!
Understanding cryptocurrency is like trying to remember a dream - the harder you try the more distant and confusing it becomes.
What worries me (and I might be totally off the mark because this is waaaay too technical for me!!) is that could NFTs become a way of committing cyber crime? For example if someone was to ever share intimate photos in a relationship could they be then sold as NFTs, either sold back to the owner for financial gain (for non celebrities) with the threat of sharing them elsewhere, or actually sold to buyers (more celebrity centred)? I might be totally wrong but it just seems like it could end up making life very difficult for some people!
It doesn't help much for blackmail in the way you describe, because ownership of an NFT doesn't convey exclusive access. Instead in almost all implementation it's entirely the opposite - every NFT created is forever accessible to the public, along with the history of all transactions and ownership.
But revenge porn as NFTs is almost certainly going to become an issue (if it isn't already). And, depending on the specific method of encapsulating the media token, it has the potential to create some really terrible situations as the entire point of a blockchain is that it's immutable - nothing can be removed. It's write only.
So the potential exists to add abusive material to a blockchain that *cannot* be deleted.
Beyond that, blockchain currencies and various securities connected to them are currently massively connected to crime, especially cybercrime. All ransomware payments, for example, are in cryptocurrencies - tens of millions of dollars a year. There is a whole massive criminal network of cryptocurrency laundering and handling underpinning a lot of the overall market.
Exactly. To misquote Monty Python: "Apart from the ransomware and drug sales, what has cryptocurrency ever done for us?"
Ransomware has been around for some time. Crypto just replaced Western Union as the preferred method of payment.
Um, make drugs legal
Sorry, Dan, that's simply nor correct. Unless you work in a related anti-money laundering role then you don't know. And you forget money laundering & fraud have always been an issue, and it's actually getting better since the AML/CFT Act. 2009 and similar pieces of legislation around the world have come into force.
The money laundering risk for crypto, by volume, is about the same as credit cards. So by your assertion, we should also ban credit cards which would then push the flow of money elsewhere anyway.
Money flows like water, through the path of least resistance.
Most cryptocurrencies are only pseudonymous and can be easily traced using massive international databases of known wallet addresses (including the dark web) and then analysing it following it through the blockchain 50 transactions or more in minutes. You simply can't do that with traditional banking systems because they work in silos.
Regulators/Govts are far more concerned about trade-based money laundering and state on state cybercrime than they are crypto. Those trends change all the time, and back in the old days, illicit use of crypto was big proportionally, As legitimate uses have grown illicit use has been static and as such proportionally less.
Let me try and understand this. Jack Dorsey, who invented Twitter, is selling his first tweet for $2.5m? Forbes magazine estimates him to be worth $12.8bn. He's obviously a bright lad but the concept of "Enough" seems to be beyond him. The only thing he understands is "More". Plus he has a hugely inflated sense of his own importance to the human race. He needs help and a lot of it - medication, therapy and an education...
Apparently he's going to donate it to charity. Still..