Pretty much.
What’s an NFT, you ask? Oh sweet summer child. Join me for a stroll through the garden of crypto idiocy while I try to explain this new and exciting form of money laundering.
What is an NFT?
An NFT, short for Non-Fungible Token, refers to a unique cryptographic token with its ownership and provenance verified by a blockchain. This makes them loosely equivalent to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Indeed, many (most?) NFTs are managed by the Ethereum blockchain. However, there is a key difference between an NFT and a Bitcoin, and it’s right there in the name: they’re non-fungible. One NFT does not equal one NFT. It’s tied to a specific digital file. Files like this $3,600 Gucci ghost:
One obvious problem with NFTs, which I just illustrated, is that the file in question is… a digital file. I can copy it. I just did. Christie’s just auctioned off a .jpg for $69,000,000. Here it is (warning: very large file). Now you too can own a copy. I just saved you millions of dollars–you’re welcome.
Wait, then what are people buying?
A certificate of ownership. In other words, nothing that couldn’t be a row on a spreadsheet. While blockchains have some advantages for storing certain kinds of data, those don’t really apply here. A blockchain is intended to facilitate agreements between people who cannot trust each other. They do this by incentivizing users to verify each other’s transactions. The incentive? If you pick the right random number while you’re doing this, you get a tranche of the currency. Or, to put it flippantly,
imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin
— urbit expert (@Theophite) August 16, 2018
As the tweet alludes to, these computations are very resource intensive. It’s perhaps less bad than it once was, as more and more “miners” move to renewable energy sources, but it’s still pretty wasteful. NFTs piggyback on this system, but not for any good reason, informationally speaking. A password-protected spreadsheet that Christie’s owns would be just as trustworthy. But that wouldn’t be very cool, now would it?
Wait, this is only a thing because they’re cool?
Welcome to the world of cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies are cool, they’re hip, they’re allegedly untraceable (they’re not). And, just like their physical counterparts, crypto-backed art pieces are fantastic for money laundering. I don’t have a link for that, since the exposés are presumably still being written, but it’s not very hard to write one in your head for now. In the modern world, art is good for many things, including washing your dirty cash. This is known.
Where the hell did these things come from??
CryptoKitties. You read that right. In 2017, a Canadian studio introduced a new kind of virtual pet that was stored on a blockchain. Much like their contemporary descendants, CryptoKitties soon went full tulip, and the rest is history.
What’s next for NFTs?
I don’t know, but there’s one thing you can take to the bank: it will be even stupider. Some have joked that cryptocurrencies are a solution to the Fermi paradox; that they are a great filter that prevents intelligent life from becoming spaceborn; that life invents cryptocurrency and then destroys its planet “mining” the stuff.
May this remain in the land of jokes!
Open thread, I suppose.
Roger Moore
The whole point of NFTs is to generate artificial scarcity for goods that are inherently easily duplicated. That they have chosen to do so in a way that is stupid and wasteful is just icing on the cake.
Cameron
Thanks for the explanation. I don’t think I’m going to be jumping into that world anytime soon.
PenandKey
Oh goody, someone with as much respect for this hare brained idiocy as I have. You’re good people.
It’s like someone deliberately went out of their way to find the dumbest way they could imagine to separate rubes from their money and then took it two steps past that and then asked Billy Madison to give a presentation on the topic.
West of the Rockies
Sometimes I get the hermit’s desire to live in the woods and take a break from humanity. This ugly little Gucci “coin” is ludicrous. It looks like the random doodling of a bored high school sophomore in algebra class.
Jerzy Russian
It sounds stupid now, and I am sure if I understood what is going on, it would sound even stupider then.
encephalopath
NFTs — A tulip bubble of imaginary friends.
Benw
Who wants to join me developing CryptoJackals!
MattF
FYI, a new book by Dan Davies on financial frauds. Davies is an actual expert in finance and has made a number of well-known postings over the years on various subjects. He writes well and the book is amusing and informative.
Phylllis
There is something to be said for burying your fiat money in a glass jar in the backyard.
Another Scott
I’m reminded of an old TV show about Marc Polo and one of the stories was about him going to China and coming back with paper money – and people in Italy laughed and laughed.
A recent PetaPixel article gives a counterpoint:
How much of it is “love” of his work, and how much of it is tulip bulbs? I guess he’ll find out.
Will NFT, or something like it, actually stick around long enough to be useful? Dunno. The fact that governments rightly keep monopoly controls on their currencies will probably limit the overall appeal of these things, but maybe it’ll be great in certain niches.
Or maybe not.
Cheers,
Scott.
bjacques
Well, shoot. Time to break out “Imaginary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds” again, and finish “Money For Nothing”, dangit!
That link to the file is just a link to the article in The Verge. I’d like to download a free copy. Some of the images are derivative, some are funny, some both.
SFBayAreaGal
@Another Scott: Was he paid in cash or NFTs?
DaBunny
Not sure “I can make you a copy for free” is that convincing. Here, I just bought you all the Rembrandt’s Night Watch. (also a big download) Suck it Amsterdam Museum!
But of course not really. They still have a singular treasure. The fact that there are copies of it (shared by them!) is irrelevant.
Of course my personal “collection” houses the only instance of the drawing my grandaughter made for us, which would go for slightly less than The Night Watch or Beeple’s latest. Being singular does not necessarily mean valuable…at least not in the sense of being collectable. Mostly, collectable means there’s a sucker ready to pay for it, be it a Rembrandt, a tulip, or an NFT.
Humanities Prof
OH-8 Rep Warren Davidson is big into blockchain/bitcoin stuff. It’s about the only thing he does.
Major Major Major Major
@bjacques: Fixed, thanks!
Technically there are only free copies. No such thing as one you pay for. What’s being traded is something that points to the artifact, not the artifact itself.
@Another Scott: Sure, I’m not trying to say that people aren’t paying artists for this crap.
Roger Moore
@Another Scott:
The whole point of NFTs is to expand crypto beyond attempts to replace government-backed currency. Instead of duplicating the function of currency with all kinds of new and ridiculous problems, NFTs are trying to create a different kind of digital asset that’s more like a physical artwork.
MattF
@bjacques: Extraordinary popular delusions… I kept a copy of that book on a shelf at work. And, for some reason, the currency crank in the office next door never tried to get into an argument with me.
Major Major Major Major
@DaBunny: You linked me to a picture of a painting, not a painting. (The map is not the territory.) The sixty-nine million dollar jpeg is a jpeg, available as an identical jpeg to any and all. (The map is the territory.)
Ascap_scab
I’m not really sure how crypto is any different from central bank currencies. Both can be stolen, counterfeited, lost, and devalued. Call them tokens or euros or greenbacks, their worth is arbitrary based of the BELIEF of their value.
Stuff has value. Land has value. Bits of paper or just computer bits only has perceived value based on a common belief of value.
I don’t trust any of it! That’s why I only invest in Beanie Babies!
LeftCoastYankee
It struck me in flipping through the Wikipedia links, that “colonization” being evidence of more advanced civilizations might be an incorrect assumption.
Also, so much advancement in technology is driven by “can we do this cool thing”, and then try and figure out how it’s useful and/or money-making. It’s sort of the inverse of actual problem-solving.
Roger Moore
@DaBunny:
This is not the same! The copy of a physical artwork in a museum is actually different from a digital copy, even a super fancy digital copy. But a digital copy of a digital artwork can be bit for bit identical to the original. NFTs are an attempt to make one specific copy unique, but digital items just don’t work that way.
Another Scott
@SFBayAreaGal: Bitski is an NFT marketplace. The article says:
I don’t think it says how he was paid for these particular items (one can infer that it was $ as that is how the story lists the prices, but I dunno).
HTH!
Cheers,
Scott.
bjacques
@Another Scott: Oh, man, I finally watched Marco The Magnificent (1965), available on YouTube. Horst Bucholz (!) in the title role. I saw it in grade school history class about 45 years ago, heavily redacted evidently. I remembered the big glass bell scene (Negativland referred to it in “Escape From Noise”) but not that Akim Tamiroff played Hasan i Sabah, The Old Man Of The Mountain, as a campy James Bond villain.
Brachiator
Will we get paid in NFTs in the future?
Otherwise, I guess this is kinda interesting, but I have not been paying attention.
Roger Moore
@Ascap_scab:
Land has value, but what is ownership of land? With many kinds of physical objects, I can pick them up and take them with me wherever I go. I have physical possession of the object. But you can’t do that with land. You only own land because there’s a document in a government archive saying you’re the owner. Land ownership is just as fictitious as fiat currency.
danielx
Add this to the list of items I’m evidently too old to get, along with twenty year old Instagram influencers making six figures a year, the Kardashians…I could go on for a while.
And get off my lawn!
Major Major Major Major
@Brachiator: Thanks for reading anyway!
I figured people might be seeing the term and wondering what’s going on, also, I wanted to vent.
BruceFromOhio
Fleecing the rubes as quickly as possible for as much as possible before the jig is up.
My favorite bitcoin episode was heard recently on Marketplace. Kai Ryssdal was interviewing a reporter from another publication who has been covering bitcoin for several years. She was very enthusiastic about how it stood to change how money and currency is valued and used. She cited several examples of person-to-person transactions (which sounded to me like Paypal or Venmo). The kicker was when Ky asked straight out, how do I use this to buy a bag of chips at the corner store? The enthusiasm was still there, but the response was … lacking. He tried to ask it a different way, but the lady simply could not answer of how we get from “gee wow look i’m a jillionaire” to actually paying for something other than a ransom to decrypt my malware-encrypted files.
MattF
Hmm. Well, to toss a technical turd into this particular fan… what about lossy JPEG compression? The JPEG standard allows an option for lossless compression, but that’s usually ignored— so it’s probably safe to assume that there are lots of ‘missing’ bits in the file, compared to the originals. Does that affect the value? You think?
WhatsMyNym
@danielx: Social Media is paid for with advertising. The more eyeballs you bring in, the more the company will pay you.
BruceFromOhio
@Roger Moore:
While I agree that such things are a contrivance, I can line “my” land with fences, build bunkers and towers studded with armaments. My “fiction” is suddenly very real to anyone tempted to visit.
And it would look damned peculiar to my neighbors.
Major Major Major Major
@BruceFromOhio: What makes crypto interesting (compared to e.g. Venmo) is that there’s no central authority. There’s no Venmo. P2P transactions “just happen” via the distributed network of miners. This has its own problems of course, like it being hard to spend (although there are bitcoin vending machines and stuff in some places, and I’ve seen stores say they accept BTC). It’s a (highly volatile) digital asset with some pretty interesting attributes, but it’s also partly a ponzi scheme, etc.
Big-boy financial companies have been looking into distributed ledgers for transfer settlements and stuff for years now.
Brachiator
@bjacques:
He didn’t have much of a career. I remember him from The Magnificent Seven and some comedy about East/West Germany, I think.
WhatsMyNym
@Major Major Major Major: Do the buyers get the rights to the work or are they just buying a certified copy?
Major Major Major Major
@MattF: But what I linked to is exactly what was purchased, down to the SHA.
@WhatsMyNym: Certified copy. Artist retains copyright.
John Revolta
Non-sequential hundreds hid up in the fake ceiling were good enough for my Pop and by God they’re oh ah yeah just kidding of course! Hahahahahaha
Cameron
@Roger Moore: I’ve been a Georgist for about 40 years, so I mos def hear you. I would love to see LVT implemented here in Florida – the sales tax is the main revenue source, and that’s not only the most regressive tax around but it also doesn’t do too well when the economy tanks.
JaneE
It reminds me of the buy one square foot of the moon and get your certificate of ownership scams that we used to see. At least you did get a certificate, often including the coordinates of “your” piece of the moon. Pet rocks, Tamaguchi pets, and the like only cost a few bucks, not something that could be used to launder money, and were just as useful as NFTs. Probably more.
More proof that some people have too much money for their own good, and the good of everyone else on the planet.
Feathers
@BruceFromOhio: There is a vending machine that takes bitcoin at the MIT Media Lab. Or there was pre-pandemic. No idea if it is still there.
Brachiator
@Major Major Major Major:
Techno-libertarians keep hoping that crypto currency will let them unplug from the state and live in a government-free Nirvana.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
I still don’t get the point of NFTs. Who the hell would spend $69 million on a .jpeg? Money laundering? Anybody can copy it and hence, it’s not valuable if it’s not rare. I could take a screenshot of it if it was copy-protected. Of course, rarity isn’t the only factor, but it’s a big one
John Revolta
@Roger Moore: Like with a dollar bill, you’ve also got the full force of the issuing Government to back you up if somebody tries to take your land or use it without your sayso. Who’s gonna back you up if you try to stop them copying your jpeg?
Baud
John Cole could make bank selling NFTs of BJ to gullible Juicers.
ETA: I see Benw shares my vision.
Brachiator
@Major Major Major Major:
No, no. The topic and thread is great. And it is something in the news.
There is stuff that I just scan to get a basic sense of what is going on and sometimes come back to later.
But I always appreciate a clear explanation of this kind of thing.
Fair Economist
@Benw:
Why not? DoggieCoin (DogeCoin or Dog-Ecoin) was started as a joke and now has serious traders.
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Yep, money laundering. The linked article about crypto privacy laws specifically talks about how privacy failures endangers the ability of users to use it for “adult services”.
Baud
@John Revolta:
The jPigs.
Brachiator
O/T but tech related. From BBC News
Steve in the ATL
@Brachiator:
*literally* anything that follows that intro is something that will never come to pass
@Baud: en fuego
trollhattan
How many of them could Jeff Bezos own? {Am presuming some number between infinity and 1, but what do I know?}
Cheryl Rofer
Thanks, M^4!
Apparently this is damaging the art markets too, but I barely understand what people are doing here, and the art markets are weird anyway.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Brachiator: One, Two, Three, with Jimmy Cagney, which Billy Wilder made the year (1961) after The Apartment.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): It’s an authentic jpg.
Doc Sardonic
@Brachiator: Starting to think ole Elon is starting to slide in to Howard Hughes’ territory. One of my late uncles used to say that genius and insanity are a hairs breadth apart, and I ain’t going to go insane because I’m not a genius(he was), but he never went insane.
bluehill
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Some people find value in owning the “original.” Kind of like having a poster of a painting vs. owning the original painting or why some rookie sports cards are more valuable than other rookie cards of the same player.
I think “value” is obviously based on perception of scarcity, but another driver is how much money people have. Right now, there is a lot of excess liquidity in the world and we are seeing inflation across all kinds of “assets.” When central banks start tightening, I would not be surprised to see sharp corrections, particularly in NFTs where there is little or no price history.
lofgren
I guess I get why having your money stored somehow that isn’t dependent on a specific government is a good idea for people who have multigenerational fortunes and/or are contributing to the collapse of this country. But I’m not sure that I understand why bitcoin/crypto is the solution.
Is the idea here that if the dollar loses all its value because American turns into an even more toxic post apocalyptic nightmare, Elon Musk’s fortunate retains its value because it is measured in bitcoin instead of dollars?
John Revolta
@Baud: Well I walked right into that one……….
RSA
I haven’t read enough about NFTs to understand them, so correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that one is paying to “own” a specific bit string? I put “own” in scare quotes because ownership doesn’t convey any advantage that I can see, other than (a) others’ acknowledgement of the ownership and (b) the ability to sell it further.
Gravenstone
Someone is missing the “__L_G” in the title…
PJ
@Roger Moore: All ownership and property is man-made – it works only insofar as it is recognized by society. In our society, if you can’t get the law to enforce your property rights, you are left to self-help (violence) to do so, and anyone else can do the same to you.
different-church-lady
Every goddamned day I feel like I’m wasting my life, and other people do this shit?
John Revolta
@Brachiator:
Wonder if the Technoking has got any ideas about this
Tesla factory had more than 400 COVID-19 cases after Elon Musk’s defiant reopening: report
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/tesla-factory-reported-more-than-400-covid-19-cases-after-elon-musks-defiant-reopening-report-11615756883
Technocrat
Typically, when I see an idea I think is ridiculous, I try to seek out the strongest, most knowledgeable advocate and get their take. This is one blurb I found about NFTs
Dude, I’m stoked
PJ
@BruceFromOhio: And someone else can go in with armored vehicles and destroy your defenses, and, voila, what was “your land” is now “their land.”
This is one reason why we have laws, a totally man-made code of conduct to protect man-made notions about who can use (and prevent others from using) what. If we did not have property, our legal codes would be a lot slimmer.
different-church-lady
I just realized: someone paid 69 million dollars for metadata.
Major Major Major Major
@RSA: that’s basically right.
Major Major Major Major
@Technocrat: like most things crypto, it’s not so much the idea that’s dumb, but rather its most vocal proponents.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@lofgren:
Sure, unless the value of his bitcoin wildly fluctuates* in relation to other assets(Dollars, gold…).
*Which bitcoin does on a regular basis.
PJ
@Cheryl Rofer:
To the extent the art market is driven by money-laundering, I can see the NFT market cutting into their business (no need to worry about storing and protecting a physical asset.)
different-church-lady
@Brachiator:
Can hardly wait to see Jen Psaki’s reaction when someone asks her what Biden thinks of it.
TaMara (HFG)
Oh, Jesus, now my head hurts….
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Brachiator:
Related, I sent an “ask” to somebody on Tumblr who criticized Space X’s “Starship”. This was the post the ask was responding to:
I sent an ask in response:
This was her response:
Fucking yikes. Turns out they’re communist. And completely delusional. Like, wtf are the rest of the 330 million odd people in the US supposed to go? I guess stay? And then socialist nirvana would happen?
And hell, it’s not like somebody else (like I don’t know, China) wouldn’t just fill the power vacuum /s
Totally fucking crazy
leeleeFL
OT- my landlord wants me to use Venmo to pay the rent. I am not impressed by what I have read about it. Any opinions?
Ksmiami
@Roger Moore: like trading turds….American love a good bubble to invest in however…
citizen dave
I like this topic and post because it validates that I’m in the right internet community. I also either “don’t get” or think NFTs are stupid. Was reading over the weekend about how the band Kings of Leon were releasing their new album ONLY as an NFT, resulting in lots of confused fans and the band not even talking about NFTs in interviews.
I once bought Van Morrison’s Veedon Fleece album on Google (some deal like $2). For years, every time I logged into Google Music, and/or wanted to hear Veedon Fleece, it was there. Then last year google killed Google Music. I think I got to download or transfer my “property” and it is around here somewhere…
I’m a luddite, still have my cds and vinyl, a few cassettes. And loads of digital files
In the electricity world some economists created Financial Transmission Rights, followed by Auction Revenue Rights don’t you know. Almost imaginary things, but keep a lot of people employed.
Major Major Major Major
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): stop spending all this time with tankies lol
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Technocrat: And who enforces the ability to get the payment of this “cash flow”?
PJ
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I can see the value of bitcoin as a means of transfer when there is no direct route available (say, you get paid in renminbi in China but can’t convert it directly to dollars, so you change it into bitcoin, and the bitcoin into dollars), but otherwise it just seems useful for black market and money-laundering purposes.
Major Major Major Major
@leeleeFL: venmo is great! Paid rent with it for a year. Now we use Zelle.
different-church-lady
@Major Major Major Major: I worked a Bitcoin seminar about five years back. Not a single person there talked about it as a replacement for any other currency, nor as an investment instrument. They were all focused on safe international transactions for people who might not be able to afford other methods of money transfer. Complete disconnect from the buzz.
And have you noticed that ever since that Uber test vehicle killed that woman nobody wants to talk about self-driving cars anymore?
(ETA: @PJ: “I can see the value of bitcoin as a means of transfer when there is no direct route available.” That’s the exact kind of thing all the presenters were all focused on.)
Major Major Major Major
@different-church-lady: yes this is one of the most important things you can do with a blockchain! So much of the rest is just frippery
Roger Moore
@Major Major Major Major:
Bitcoin specifically has a bunch of problems. The two big ones are that the system is tuned to allow a new block to be added only about once every 10 minutes and that the block size is limited. The time limit means there’s always a lot of latency in the system, so you can’t expect transactions to complete in a reasonable time frame for ordinary retail transactions. The combination of the time limit and the block size limit is even worse, because it sharply limits the total scale of the system. Bitcoin is designed to be able to handle at most a handful of transactions per second through the whole system, which makes it inherently incapable of working as a system for the whole world. It’s mind boggling to me that these fundamental problems haven’t caused Bitcoin to blow up already.
Miss Bianca
OK, I’ve read this post and the comments and I *still* either don’t understand the topic, or just don’t give enough of a shit to try to understand it. I think I’m officially An Old.
Fortunately, I live at the top of a mountain with only wildland scrub and trees around me and no near neighbors with children, so at least I am spared the indignity of a *literal* “you kids get off my lawn with your hippity-hop music!!” moment.
Steve in the ATL
@BruceFromOhio: dude, your HOA is going to fine the shit out of you for building those!
Brachiator
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Interesting post. Two things.
I think that Russia is a major nuisance, but not a long term threat to the US or the West. Russia is ultimately dominated by short-sighted oligarchs who cripple the Russian state. This was even true to a large extent in the days of the Soviet Union.
China may well eclipse the US economically. But their prosperity is dependent on a stable world and global trade, not conquest.
And there is this little recent news tidbit. The US is still the number one arms exporter.
The other thing. Just because something begins as a military project does not mean that its best or most important future use will be connected to military uses.
Ken
I’m still waiting for the Big Reveal, when it turns out that “Satoshi Nakamoto” (the mysterious inventor of the Bitcoin system) is actually a group of programmers at the NSA, and they know exactly who’s been involved in every bitcoin transaction since day one.
RSA
@different-church-lady:
I think it’s also partly because of how hard a problem it is (Level 4 and Level 5 autonomy) and manufacturers are still bumping into problems. Problems that weren’t hard to predict, but still.
bluehill
@Major Major Major Major: If you’re able to do that, why stop there? If crypto takes hold, which I think it will, there will be probably be a lot of use cases arising that no one envisioned at the beginning, NFTs being one example.
trollhattan
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Could they, say, park one in a consulate compound in Benghazi, Libya?
Asking for a friend.
Just because somebody can get N tonnes of stuff to some random place a few hours sooner than current methods doesn’t make it some kind of killer strategic master stroke [“Does it, Mister Bond?”]. At a gazillion bucks/pound it would need to be some very special stuff, considering you’re also donating a reusable rocket to some third-world warlord or such.
ETA Guessing they would be laughably easy to blow up while landing in enemy territory, using simple weapons. Sure not “stealthy.”
Cameron
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Started out OK with the end-of-a-unipolar-world thing. I’m down with that. But the rest was kinda what I would expect to hear from somebody who followed that statement by jumping onto a table and breaking out their Woody Woodpecker imitation.
Villago Delenda Est
I have not read through the whole thread, but get this: Time-Warner, through it’s subsidiary, DC Comics, has told artists who create comics in no uncertain terms that they cannot engage in NFT sales of works they created but are copyrighted by DC, that is, images of Superman, Batman, etc. that the artists may have penciled, or inked, or colored, or whatever, because Time-Warner wants to wet their beaks, basically.
Corporate scum.
Ken
Offhand I’d have to say something else is keeping it afloat. Now what might that be….
Benw
@Baud: @Fair Economist: here’s the CryptoJackal elevator pitch. Each commenter who buys in becomes an NFT, verified by blockchain, and goes on the trading market. Buyers don’t own the actual commenter – that would be weird and dumb! – they own the non-corporeal entity of the commenter’s presence on BJ! The commenter gets back a percentage of all trades on their entity. Are you telling me that people wouldn’t pay up to own the verified concept of Subaru Dianne? Especially right after a particularly pithy comment?
Major Major Major Major
@bluehill: Sure, I mean, a blockchain is just a kind of database. But like many things crypto NFTs were theorized long, long ago.
bluehill
@Villago Delenda Est: This kind of illustrates the pros and cons of NFTs at least for existing creative works. As a creator, you want to capture more of the value from your work. As a copyright owner, you want to protect the value of work that you paid for.
Ken
I first learned about NFTs from cracked.com last week, in an article on a guy who’s selling fungible tokens. He sells them for exactly 25 cents, with a pledge that not only are they completely fungible, but their value will not decline; they will always be worth exactly 25 cents.
As you may have guessed, the tokens are little metal disks, stamped with a picture of George Washington on one side, and one of several images on the other — most commonly an eagle, but there are also some special-edition tokens for US states, territories, national parks, etc.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Brachiator:
For now. But you can’t say they don’t have imperialist tendencies. And frankly, practically every major world power in history has engaged in some form of military adventurism. I expect the PRC will be no different.
The rest of your post is fair enough. And those arms sales shares can always change. Also, China may depend on a stable world order, but “a stable world order” doesn’t necessarily have to be free or fair
Brachiator
@Miss Bianca:
Does the Tooth Fairy give out NFTs?
Even us olds may need to know one day.
citizen dave
I often see the argument that there are “use cases” that will happen that no one ever thought of. And I do buy that, it’s the very nature of innovations. Science marches on. People often point to how breaking up the AT&T phone monopoly brought us the world of cellphones, etc.
On the other hand, in my world I’ve heard people using the phone analogy for electricity for 20+ years–the “killer app”; oh, google and amazon are coming, etc. Sometimes I think a commodity is a commodity is a commodity. The “killer app” for electricity is probably when and if richer people can go off-grid with their own systems; and/or neighborhood microgrid systems, etc.
Anyhoo, maybe money is also a commodity. Think about how long it has been around and used. Google tells me that “As the most popular global currency, the U.S. dollar serves as the official currency for over ten countries and is used alongside and integrated with the economies of over twenty territories and nations daily.”
Let me know when bitcoin does this.
different-church-lady
@Benw: I’m going to be priced out of this joint, aren’t I?
BruceFromOhio
@Baud:
This is the name of my next punk accordion chick band.
Steve in the ATL
@trollhattan: before you get too judgmental, remember that several posters here and one front pager are third-world warlords.
Villago Delenda Est
@Doc Sardonic: Agreed. What Musk needs to do now is buy a hotel/casino in Vegas, move into the penthouse, and grow his nails really long while worrying about germs.
Steve in the ATL
@different-church-lady: Omnes, BillinGlendaleCA, and my own account will be dirt cheap. Ruckus will have negative value, like oil last year!
leeleeFL
@Major Major Major Major: Thanks, 4M! Makes my decision easier!
PJ
@Villago Delenda Est: DC/Warner/ATT owns the copyright to those characters, and the artists who work for them have signed away any copyright they may have in the work they do with those characters. I don’t know if DC allows the artists to sell the actual pages they draw or ink, but, if they do, that’s either at DC’s discretion or something that has been contractually worked out. To call DC “scum” for this is ridiculous, unless you just disagree with notions of copyright and property generally, which is a different issue (suffice to say, the artists you are offended about would not be getting paid if there were no copyright.)
Kent
When you can get 30-year mortgages denominated in bitcoin, or buy 10-year bonds denominated in bitcoin, or even negotiate annual salary contracts denominated in bitcoin, then we will know it is a real currency. As of right now, no bank on the planet could possibly write a 30-year mortgage denominated in bitcoin. What will the value of bitcoin be in 30 years? Anyone have the slightest idea? I doubt any company would even agree to a 1-year salary contract in bitcoin. Do they really know what that monthly bitcoin salary would equate to 11 months from now? Not a chance.
Brachiator
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Right now, I am just not worried about China.
The US probably had a greater GDP than Britain somewhere around 1876. But arguably the US did not replace Britain (and the rest of Europe) as the dominant military power until after 1945.
Do you want the world to be free and fair, or do you just want the US to be Top Dog?
The US under another Trump would be a mighty fucked up world power.
Also, no power can stay on top forever. The sun eventually set on the British Empire.
Also, who becomes the next Top Dog might surprise you. The Greeks and Persians did not see the Romans coming.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Sigh, leave it to pack of math nerds to yet again miss the point of art.
PJ
@Ken:
With those catchy designs on either side, I predict that these fungible NFTs may one day replace regular currency.
Villago Delenda Est
@Kent: Hell, to join up with the Bitcoin Society, or whatever its called, they don’t accept Bitcoin. Only dollars.
different-church-lady
@citizen dave:
Which in turn brought us the world absent of the ability to have a functional voice call.
BruceFromOhio
@PJ:
Yes, exactly. The convention of ownership (titles, deeds of sale, exchange of currency) is reliant on that Big Book Of Laws to prevent me from setting up shop (or invading with tanks and guns) on my neighbor’s acres. My point was to try and illustrate the fiction of fiat currency is a different kind of story. My fiat currency is only as good as the belief other people place in it and their willingness to accept it in exchange; my land (whether held by force, subterfuge or happenstance) is real, tangible. And hopefully arable.
Steve in the ATL
@different-church-lady: did you not read the whole thread? Voice calls have been replaced by blockchain. Or something like that–I’, old too.
Ken
Someone who thinks they could sell it for $70 million?
jl
@citizen dave:
” the U.S. dollar serves as the official currency for over ten countries and is used alongside and integrated with the economies of over twenty territories and nations daily. ”
And most of those dollars are entries in a file too, which seems to me is yet one more reason crypto currencies will never be a reserve currency. Bazzillions of dollar transactions happen every minute around the world for everything from ordinary currency transactions needed for purchases of goods across national boundaries, to bond fund transactions and central back operations. Bitcoin transactions were too slow and cumbersome to use for entry tickets to a bitcoin convention a year or two ago.
The resource intensity of producing bitcoin will get worse, maybe exponentially. I read that bitcoin is designed to have a maximum supply that will be reached asymptotically. So two things, it is a currency that has unavoidable deflation built into it, so a very inflexible supply. Each bitcoin is designed to become more valuable over time, so more and more work to get less real value out of the currency for ordinary daily transactions, more waste.
The bitcoin proponents say weird things that make no sense. For example someone said on twitter that as supply of bitcoin becomes fixed, then changes in demand can’t, logically, produce any fluctuations in value.
I remember reading about an SF bitcoin commune of young techies who were trying to run their economic lives using bitcoin and in constant mess because it took so long for transactions to clear, and they only ate red meat. Which is in line with their other thinking.
Benw
@different-church-lady: come on, believe in yourself! I’m sure lots of people would want to own your non-corporeal entity
Roger Moore
@Doc Sardonic:
IMO this is bullshit. There are plenty of genuine geniuses out there who are perfectly normal, and plenty of people with serious mental health problems who are nowhere close to being geniuses. What it really boils down to is that part of inequality in our society is that we’re willing to tolerate a lot more from wealthy and/or successful people than we are from anyone else. An ordinary wage earner who acted like Elon Musk or Howard Hughes would never be tolerated.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
So do I have this straight; some programing dorks got this fancy new software that spews out random graphic patterns and they are calling it “fine art” because “shut up, that’s why” and much money is being passed back and forth (mostly from drug dealers), and anyone with actual artistic talent need not apply?
Boy Howdy, talk about Jason Polluck’s wet dream.
Ken
@PJ: I hope not before I’ve seen my first Harriet Tubman $20 bill.
kh
@Benw:
“the CryptoJackal elevator pitch”
just trying to grok whether this is actually a comment by a human who signs off as Benw, or a recombinant ai of Charles Stross/William Gibson . . .
PJ
@BruceFromOhio: I don’t think we’re disagreeing. My point was that, while “land” has a use outside of property, or a storage of economic value (as does gold), just as “your” fiat currency has value only insofar as someone else is willing to accept it in exchange, “your” land has value only insofar as someone is willing to accept it as “your” land – the “value” aspect of both is dependent on societal acceptance and enforcement.
Roger Moore
@lofgren:
The main thing bitcoin is a solution to at this point is evading the government. It’s used for all kinds of illegal transactions: purchasing contraband, laundering money, evading capital controls, and the like.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
A GPD the British got by looting India and China,….
I think it’s a reasonable argument that the PRC is more like China, pre Opium War.
Another Scott
ObOpenThread – STATNews has a good run-down on what’s going on with the AZ vaccine.
We need every effective vaccine we can get. Here’s hoping the US data are good.
Cheers,
Scott.
BruceFromOhio
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Is it possible she was responding to the email she received just before your message, and sent it to you in error?
jl
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: The world of collectables, from fine art to old cereal boxes is weird. What is the point of physically owning an electronic art piece that sits in an installation in a museum when you can see it on a big wide high fidelity screen just as well. I remember reading that some of these dang kids these days do not enjoy physical art in museums that much anymore because they find the physical details of the artwork, such as brush strokes, distracting and weird.
We’ve been stepping into more weirdness in art for years. First the issue of almost identical copies by the artist versus the original, then almost identical copies by the artists studio, to print, then electronic reproductions. NFT seems a logical next step.
jonas
I can see the logic of an NFT for authenticating certain digital works or images as something coming directly from the hands — er, computer mouse? — of an artist or developer, as opposed to just someone who downloaded it. The reason the copy of the Mona Lisa in your living room will never be mistaken for Leonardo’s original is because Leonardo’s original is hanging in the Louvre. But that’s not true for a digital image.
On the other hand, any old piece of crap can be made into a NFT and it appears that everyone is paying whatever for them because 1. there are too many idiots out there with too much money to waste, and 2. it’s like a few years ago when a company on the NASDAQ could just add the word “blockchain” to their name (“Blockchain Tires and Muffler”) and get a 20% goose to their stock price — it’s trendy.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Steve in the ATL:
Still smarting over the whole Black Van thing?
Benw
@kh: aw that’s so nice!
anon
@Kent: along those lines, when will banks give you a loan secured by bitcoin? You can do that with real estate, stocks, cars/boats, paintings, etc.
Doc Sardonic
@Villago Delenda Est: I dunno. Since he has been getting rid of his houses lately, I’m thinking a beat up, prototype white Tesla van will show up by a lake or river somewhere with free puppies, kittens or candy spray painted on the side door.
Steve in the ATL
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
God, BernieBros are so tiresome….
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
So one question might be, is bitcoin working effectively as intended?
Criminal markets are as real and organized as legal markets, and need their own rules and currencies.
jl
I think block chain will eventually have a lot of use in tracing lettuce and chickens back to individual farms in salmonella outbreaks. So will live in glory along with poultry sexing and debeaking, and testing the protein level of alfalfa. Bitcoin enthusiasts will surely dig that fate. They can go into food processing logistics, an exciting and happening field.
Steve in the ATL
@?BillinGlendaleCA: if only I’d known what “Armenian restaurant” was code for!
jl
@Brachiator: Bitcoin will become increasing slow and cumbersome for real time transactions. I’ll look forward to the future online tutorials to build kills with unmarked bills. Me, being a currency normie, might be interested out of idle curiosity. But, then, the covid shutdowns and restrictions will be over soon, so I’ll probably have better things to do with my time.
Major Major Major Major
@Villago Delenda Est: Can these people sell paper drawings of the same characters? They don’t have the copyright so a prohibition doesn’t seem unreasonable.
Steve in the ATL
@jl:
I once encountered a job posting at a chicken farm entitled “bungholer.” I briefly wished I had chosen divorce law or criminal defense over labor law….
BruceFromOhio
@leeleeFL:
Venmo is useful in that it allows person-to-person transaction of money for very low fees. It costs me nothing to send $xxx.00 to another individual, provided we are both members. If I’m a landlord (or any business), any time I can cut bank fees or credit card overhead out of a transaction is money in my pocket. The catch is moving money out of Venmo into a bank account – you can do it quickly for a fee (% of transaction, or ‘haircut’) or do it slowly for no fee.
When I set up my Paypal and Venmo accounts, I also set up a standalone no-frills checking account tied to these apps, and ONLY these apps. There is no overdraft protection, no linking to another account, and it’s used solely for these apps. My rationale is that if my phone gets stolen or the accounts broken into, the most any thieves can get is the minimum balance of the checking account. It’s a little more work on my part, but I’ve found that it firewalls the rest of my banking from theft or abuse. And it works well for the limited use. If your landlord is the sole purpose for looking into this, I counsel not using it and keep sending a personal check.
Ken
When they can immediately sell that loan to an investment firm, that in turn will bundle it with thousands of others, break it into tranches, and sell it to retirement funds.
Why yes, I am assuming that the financial industry learned absolutely nothing from 2007. And?
jl
@Benw: I’m in for a 10000th interest in naked mopping pratfalls while stepping in pet poop. I’ll pass on forgetting pants, since who amongst us has not had that happen. No premium for uniqueness.
jl
@Steve in the ATL: Glad I don’t know enough about poultry farms to know what that is.
Brachiator
@jl:
There are some paintings I only know from reproductions in art books. And until recent improvements in digital reproduction, there were some physical details that I never noticed.
But I can understand how finally seeing an original work might be jarring compared to previously seen reproductions. Crazy world.
And even seeing some restored paintings can be a different experience from what has been known before.
BruceFromOhio
@RSA:
I see what you did there.
jl
@Brachiator: I also wonder what it the difference between an NFT and an investment consortium owing an artwork or a collectable. Maybe there is some nuance on blockchain currencies and NFTs that I don’t understand.
And the issue is not just for filthy rich farts. There is a non-profit community collective in SF Bay that is buying up local historical items that are being auctioned off from all the historical local businesses that have gone broke due to the endless (and it turns out ineffective and poorly designed) SF Bay covid shutdowns.
The collective wants to keep the historical stuff available to the public. I first heard about it this morning and probably will make a contribution. That sounds pretty NFT-y to me.
Steve in the ATL
that was certainly true for Monkey Jesus!
BruceFromOhio
@jl:
This would make a hilarious running gag on a sitcom. “What are those crazy ‘Coiners up to this time?”
?BillinGlendaleCA
@jl: Sometimes, ignorance is bliss.
Major Major Major Major
@jl:
I mean it sounds like they’re purchasing physical objects? Like a museum? Whereas an NFT is a digital object that points at another digital object.
RobertB
I thought that what NFT gives you is the transaction ledger associated with an artifact (picture, video, audio, etc), not the item itself. If I want the ‘original’ item from the artist, this is a way to do it. The blockchain can show a history that looks like, “Banksy => Sotheby’s => RobertB” that won’t be in a duplicate, with a history that is hard to forge. It lets me have an original of something that is trivially easy to copy.
I’m not sure if I buy this, but it sort of makes sense if I think of it that way. More sense than bitcoin as a medium of exchange does.
Roger Moore
@PJ:
The big difference is that physical assets have use value, while fiat currency (and cryptocurrency) have only socially constructed value. That is to say that land (forgetting for a moment about ownership) can be used as a place to build buildings or grow crops, houses can be lived in, cars can be driven, phones can be used to call someone, etc. That gives those things utility, and their utility gives them value. Fiat currency has value only in that a government somewhere says it has value. That value is also real- you can be thrown in prison for failure to pay taxes, which can only be done with the government’s fiat currency of choice- but it’s purely a social construct. If the government said tomorrow it would stop accepting dollars, their value would immediately disappear.
The Pale Scot
@bjacques:
Right click download file worked for me. 319 MB.
I wonder how it would have taken my G4 iMac to open it
Another Scott
@anon: Not an answer to your (very good) question, but the GSA has 0.75 Bitcoin for auction starting today.
All the fine print is, er, interesting.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@West of the Rockies:
Isn’t that the point? Put no effort into it other than convincing someone(s), anyone(s) that this absolutely worthless not even a thing is worth a lot of their assets. Assets that could be as made up as the thing of no value. Someone has way, way too much time on their hands.
Ascap_scab
Will no one buy my Beanie Babies?
Steve in the ATL
Debatable to anyone who’s ever owned a Fiat!
Sebastian
@Brachiator:
Not much of a career? Ahem.
Bill Arnold
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
No, they are anti-American, and that anti-Americanism is fucking loathsome, and intellectually extremely lazy and incoherent.
Major Major Major Major
@Steve in the ATL: Fix It Again, Tony!
Brachiator
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
I wonder if that comparison with the past really works. Modern China is interesting. They are still in theory a communist country, but instead of abolishing billionaires, China has allowed them to exist and are trying to use them to help run the economy. I don’t think Marx saw this coming.
RobertB
@Ruckus: I might have to watch the documentary Made You Look. It’s about a forger in NYC that made fool-the-art-critic paintings that passed for Rothkos, Pollocks, etc. The article that pointed me to it (unfortunately behind a paywall) touches on ‘art as art’ vs its monetary worth.
bluehill
@Roger Moore: And fiat currency is even more abstracted now than 30 or 20 years ago because of how much stuff is done digitally. No more checks. I get income in digital form and pay all of my bills digitally.
And now, the pandemic has accelerated the use of digital currency for retail transactions. I have $100 in cash for the past year that I haven’t been able or wanted to use because I wanted to minimize contact with other people.
PJ
@Roger Moore:
Again, my point is that there is no use value if you can’t use something, and your ability to use something ultimately requires societal approval. If the law says the land (or whatever else has use value for you) is not yours, you probably aren’t going to get much use value out of it because someone else will be excluding you from using it. This is what I mean when I say that all property, whether it’s currency or anything else, requires societal acceptance to function as property.
Another Scott
Relatedly, Reuters:
Bubble, bubble toil and trouble…
Cheers,
Scott.
Steve in the ATL
@Brachiator: every communist country ever has been communist in theory only. Communism, like libertarianism and pure capitalism, work only in the abstract. They forgot to account for human nature.
BruceFromOhio
@Ascap_scab:
If you’ll accept Pet Rocks and Wesley Crusher bubblegum trading cards as payment, I am so in.
BruceFromOhio
@PJ:
I’m with you, though my HOA would likely prefer I take down the gun turrets.
Ken
@Roger Moore: I am proofing “Money and Trade Considered” by John Law, printed in 1750. I had not realized that even back in the days when money was gold and silver coin, governments still controlled the value of the coinage. They routinely required everyone to turn in their existing coins, to be re-minted into new coins with more or less metal content.
It was usually less, since that let the government keep the extra metal. It also let the government pay its debts more easily — the debt still called for say 10000 pounds, but the metal for those coins was only say 9000 pounds in the old coinage. Rather an interesting sidelight on fiat money.
Seanly
Bitcoin/NFT/etc – My favorite factoid was how crunching the numbers for cryptocurrencies would keep requiring more & more computer processing power and at it’s then current trajectory would require 100% of all available power resources in just a few years. This scam can’t die fast enough.
PJ
@BruceFromOhio: Stock your moat with alligators and the HOA will have a harder time getting to those gun turrets.
Ken
Can they can point to a clause in the agreement forbidding gun turrets? No? Well then.
RobertB
@Seanly: Bitcoin mining. https://twitter.com/theophite/status/1030225104234373121?lang=en
Benw
@jl:
There’s a $20 transaction fee for every 1/10000000 share. Fine print
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
The comparative value of any asset is arbitrary. A bar of gold has no intrinsic value.
Even in a barter economy, the rate of exchange is something that is arrived at through negotiation.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
I can understand how people wouldn’t care about the details of a painting, especially when dealing with a style that was aiming for extreme realism. They probably would have eliminated any evidence of brush strokes if they had known how. But there are other styles, like Abstract Expressionism, where the process details are considered to be an essential part of the artwork. A Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko painting just isn’t the same if you can’t see the physicality of the paint; that’s a big part of what they wanted you to see.
Obvious Russian Troll
Five years ago a significant percentage of these people were Ron Paul supporters railing against fiat money. I have a Ron-Paul-supporting, fiat-money-distrusting friend from my childhood I could ask about that, but we try not to talk politics.
I am almost certain he’s a supporter of the former guy, and I know his wife is Mexican.
BruceFromOhio
@Benw:
This transcends everything else written in this thread.
Roger Moore
@jl:
I think the goal is to let people “own” artworks that are purely digital and thus would be too easy to duplicate exactly.
Major Major Major Major
@Brachiator: at least gold has physical uses!
Martin
@jl: Conceptually it need not be, but it depends a lot on details of implementation. The basic idea here what Roger points out at 1) that it’s a way to create artificial scarcity. The issue is why would you do that?There are a few reasons.
1) NFTs right now seem to be focused on buying a unique asset that you can then turn around later to make a profit on. It’s just speculation, and the NFT is the mechanism to enable the ability to speculate. And that’s a pretty terrible reason for them to exist. We’ll call this the cultural negative case.
2) One downside to a traditional consortium are risks to ownership authority. This is why we have a title system. The most common presumption that you own your house is that you have a key to it and all of your shit is there, and nobody is challenging that. But you lose some of that authority if your house burns down. It’s more difficult to colloquially prove that’s your property. But legally, it’s in the title, stored in some off-yonder building, or digitally in some off-yonder database. If the title maintainer burns down you have a much bigger problem. That was witnessed in 2009 when mortgages were being sold with such pace that the title ownership couldn’t keep place. Do I owe Wells Fargo a million dollars? Can they produce the title to prove that I do? Turns out in a lot of cases they couldn’t. The best way of thinking of a blockchain is as a distributed title authority. The blockchain records that it’s your house, and those records can be copied by other agents – but they can’t edit it without the whole ledger getting out of sync with everyone elses ledger. Trying to falsify that transaction breaks everything, and is easily detected. But because the ledger is distributed – if someones database blows up, there’s zillions of copies, so your ownership authority isn’t at risk. This is why you go meet the neighbors when you move into a new place – they’re a kind of distributed title system – they know the old people moved out, you moved in, when they talk to other people who ask about the property they transfer that knowledge and everyone has a common agreement that is your house. I’ve been part of a group looking at using blockchain for educational records given the difficulty of forming a centralized registrar of them. The average student has to chase down about half a dozen transcripts, but the institutions inherently trust each other, so if we had a distributed ledger we wouldn’t need a centralized registrar. There no attempt to drive scarcity here, we just need to preserve the value of your credential – you passed calculus so you can earn a degree or take physics or whatever. We’ll call this the cultural neutral case.
3) The upside to artificial scarcity is that it is often the mechanism to incentivize the creation of new things. Musicians create new music to sell albums, they go on tour to sell access to a unique experience, etc. Some art is commissioned for the public good, but most isn’t. This is really the problem that music went through when the physical album went away, the digital one was so easy to copy that it lost value. Streaming came in to provide convenience and packaging (when you have access to all digital goods, the problem shifts from acquiring things to filtering them – and streaming services provide that) and is able to charge for that. Journalism has a somewhat similar problem. So NFTs could be a mechanism to incentivize the creation of new works by providing something unique to the patron. That’s really what Patreon is. If I give to a youtuber, I might get a shoutout in a video, or credits in a piece of software, etc. I may get some tangible thing – a shirt or a limited run of a physical good. So they become part of the constellation of ways to fund creative work. We’ll call this the cultural positive case.
Pretty sure NFTs are squarely in 1 right now. 3 is generally a democratic mechanism – they succeed by appealing to lots of people, not really by appealing to a single actor.
jl
@Benw: I’m slowly understanding the nuances, I hope. I meant I am in for a 10000th share of Cole’s electronic document (that is, the original bizarre BJ post) narrating his naked mopping pratfall.
As opposed to a 10,000th share of Cole’s physical reenactment of it at the Guggenheim museum. As opposed to the unique physical selfie record on the phone, as opposed to the original electronic record on the ISP server…
Oh, man, this is getting way too complicated.
Roger Moore
@PJ:
I would argue that property has use value regardless of societal approval. The best example of this are squatters, who get use value from land in the teeth of societal disapproval. The same thing is true of various kinds of thieves, since the whole point of thievery is to get use value from something in spite of it not being your legal property. The use value comes from actual possession. Societal approval just validates your possession.
jl
@Martin: OK, you’ve rekindled my interest. You have a seminar coming out? I want an NFT on that.
Brachiator
@Steve in the ATL:
Very true. But in the past, even China tried to suppress or get rid of the middle class. They are not even respecting theory anymore. Letting billionaires thrive, even on a short leash, is kinda wild.
ETA: I don’t think that libertarianism even works in the abstract. I never understood how these dopes could be rugged individualists and also live in a society.
Also, I guess, libertarians and Marxists both believe that human nature is irrelevant, or can be overcome.
Just Some Fuckhead
@jl: I’ll sign up for the seminar if he calls it “Magic Money and You”.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
They can still do that, as long as they go far enough into the outback, where ever that might be…. This not as easy as using say only greenbacks to pay for things or as easy as having bitcoin hidden away somewhere that is, what’s that word, safe. Paranoia is a weird thing, especially when it so affects your day to day life.
Roger Moore
@Ken:
You should read Tom Levenson’s Newton And The Counterfeiter, which touches on the issue of the great recoining. It’s especially fascinating if you’ve read Neil Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, since it gives the real history behind many of the things that Stephenson fictionalized.
John Revolta
Interesting……………..this might be what I’d call a “tell”.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
Gold has use value; you can do stuff with it. Even accepting that much of the use for gold is because people want to hoard it because they think it’s money, gold has real value because it can be used as a dense, easy to work, highly conductive, and corrosion resistant metal.
PJ
@Roger Moore: Sure, if you can ignore or break the law, but, for most, that doesn’t last for long – squatters get kicked out (or their squatting acquires legal status), thieves get busted. And sure, some people thrive during periods of lawlessness, taking what they want by force and defending it with force. Violence can always be a trump. But if you want to live a relatively peaceful life to use and enjoy things, you need societal acceptance/approval.
Major Major Major Major
@Martin: well put, though I’ll still argue you only need a blockchain (there are other decentralized databases) if you have a trust issue.
Steeplejack
@leeleeFL, @Major Major Major Major:
This is serendipitous. My landlord (in Georgia) just received my March rent check today (mailed on February 25 from Virginia). He knew that the delay was because of USPS problems, and I had already told him that we probably should move to some form of direct payment. I was thinking that I would have to cancel that check and get him the money right away, so why not make the arrangement permanent?
I did some research today, and in answer to one of my questions he said that he has a Bank of America account (as do I), so, based on that, I think Zelle is probably the way to go. Thanks for the (implied) recommendation, M^4.
Martin
@citizen dave:
I think you’ve touched on something here that gets missed by most people that use the term ‘killer app’.
In tech, the ‘killer app’ is a thing that changes where value exists in a market. In art, the ‘value’ was the possession of the work, or the right to distribute the work. The internet, the ability to make perfect copies, and the ability to do so for effectively no cost completely upends where the value in digital art lies. The ‘killer app’ is then something that shifts that value to a new place.
The thing that was innovative about the iPod wasn’t the physical hardware, but the ease of buying individual songs and putting them on your device. It went from a trip to the mall to a push of a button. Sales of the hardware didn’t take off until that service was created.
When we talk about ‘tech’, which oddly includes companies like Amazon, which are only tangentially tech, we’re really talking about the companies that are utilizing the internet to shift value, or are secondary to an existing value shift (Uber couldn’t exist without the iPhone).
A similar transition is taking place in the energy market. The internet is the first large scale mechanism for zero marginal cost goods – goods that you can sell which cost nothing to create another instance of. A $30K car might only have $20K in parts and labor in it, but it also needs a billion dollar factory to build it in. The $10K profit margin helps pay off the billion dollar factory. Sell only a few cars and that needs to be larger. Sell enough cars, and that can go increasingly toward zero. But when it gets really close to zero, a lot of rules of economics just break, and all new business models show up.
That’s happening in energy where solar and wind are effectively zero marginal cost goods. California on many days produces so much excess power that the spot market price goes to zero or slightly negative because the cost of turning it off to not break equipment becomes higher than paying someone to just take the power off your hands. This is going to fundamentally change big parts of the market.
It’s a little bit different from a commodity. Commodities are things that can be swapped out with nobody caring. Arrowhead water vs Poland Springs water. But the good carries value. It takes labor or materials to make another one. Zero marginal costs goods are different. They may not be interchangeable – Zeppelin is not fungible with Beyonce – but producing another copy of each costs nothing so we give you both, or give you access to both.
So I’m expecting there to be new markets that crop up on that zero cost of power during surplus times. In that situation, inefficient forms of energy conversion (like hydrogen electrolysis or desalination) become perfectly viable because it doesn’t matter how inefficient your system is if you have a surplus of inputs.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
That’s not a exchange or currency value, which even here is arbitrary, and separate from any “use value.”
Martin
@Major Major Major Major: Yeah, but ‘trust issue’ is effectively synonymous with ‘thing of value’. This is why most of wikipedia works great and a few parts of it are edit shitshows, because people’s reputation has great value. It can be really difficult in a heterogeneous environment like that to anticipate what will and won’t have value.
Plus, it’s hard to not have trust issues around data. I trust my colleagues to not fabricate data, but I don’t necessarily trust them to not get hacked or have bugs in their implementations.
Steeplejack
@Steve in the ATL:
She really restored it to its original magnificent beauty!
Ruckus
@RSA:
The thing I think that makes self driving cars unfeasible is the blame trail. At this point in time it always leads back to the developer/builder, they forgot something, missed a step, didn’t foresee the problem, or simply fucked up. The owner of the vehicle did what they were told to do, allow the vehicle to operate by itself. The vehicle fucked up, someone dies. With a human behind the wheel there is someone to blame. Sure the vehicle may actually be responsible, the steering mechanism broke, the driver could no longer control it. But there likely would be skid marks showing that. A self driving vehicle makes a bad decision, that becomes the programers at fault, just as making a bad decision, like alcohol use, as a human driver makes one at fault. That would increase the cost of any self driving car because of the insurance the company would have to purchase, likely beyond any value the self driving might add to the end user. It’s always a decision that someone makes incorrectly that ends up being the reason for an accident and that lands responsibility somewhere normally outside the builder. It’s like the picture I saw on twitter that someone had built a tow ball mount out of 2x4s. The material is just not up to any standards for this use. When that breaks, and it will, the builder is the responsible party.
Martin
@Just Some Fuckhead: Let’s just say my interest in blockchain is how to address certain classes of problems that are difficult to monetize or distribute costs of.
That other side of it is such a shitshow I don’t want any part of it. Though I will enjoy the spectacle when Bitcoin blows up.
Ruckus
@Martin:
How did the iPhone make Uber work? The internet communications? I had a cell phone that accessed the internet before the iPhone. It was called a Blackberry.
Ken
Wait until all our mentalities are transferred into the cloud, and anything — even our minds — can be replicated indefinitely.
Fair Economist
@Benw:
Love it! Add in a booster for active posting and watch BJ soar into the top 1,000 political blogs!
Martin
@Ruckus: A lot of the problem is that solving autonomy in the car is the most expensive way to solve it. Solving it in the road is much cheaper, but we haven’t worked out how to make that shift. The amount of work needed to teach a car to read a traffic light better than a human is substantial, but if the city had the intersection tell the car ‘you may turn left now’ that would eliminate that entire category of problem to solve.
We underestimate the degree to which the built infrastructure is designed to cater to human operators. But also what’s being discovered by the places that are doing the work to examine the built infrastructure in that way is that cars are a shitty solution to most of these problems – especially if you are also receptive to issues of land usage and the environment. So some of the efforts to automate cars is actually resulting in eliminating cars.
In short, if autonomous cars is a goal, then build trains and walkable/bikable infrastructure. It’s cheaper, uses less energy, and benefits more people.
Martin
@Ruckus: Uber requires a few components:
Uber is a two-sided market – it needs to attract enough drivers to work, as well as enough riders. That requires threading a difficult usability needle with lots of conveniences and accountability on each side. Reviews are an important part of that, so the app needs to be robust enough to do that. All told, a platform that is free from internet interference, has a good enough display for all of that information, allows typing reviews, can communicate where both parties are in space, and has an app distribution system that is easy to do. You try installing apps on your pre-iPhone?
There were probably half a dozen or more bits and pieces that all had to come together to enable Uber. None were terribly inventive, but nobody packaged it up and turned it into a platform that didn’t have rent-seeking as part of the mission – largely because before iPhone, the carriers had a big say in the device and how it could be used. They might demand the GPS be disabled so it would have the right fit in their product tiers, etc. Apple told AT&T they could have a 5 year exclusive to the iPhone, but they got no say in the device or how it would be used. That fundamentally changed the role between the device and the carrier that has thankfully persisted.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
Even if you have smart infrastructure, you still need smart vehicles. For the foreseeable future, there will be plenty of dumb infrastructure and dumb vehicles, and the smart vehicle needs to be able to deal with it. There are also some kinds of hazards that are inherently not part of the road system, like wild animals and fallen trees, that would basically require you to put sensors and smarts into the infrastructure equivalent to what you’d need to put into the car.
I’m also worried about the possibility of malicious actors. An obvious example would be people electronically impersonating a vehicle that gets right of way, but the sky is the limit with this kind of thing. The whole smart road infrastructure needs to communicate to work, and that would create a much bigger attack surface than a single smart vehicle. You need to be incredibly paranoid, or the whole system is going to get taken over by hackers. Autonomous smart vehicles avoid most of these problems.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
This is an underrated part of what makes Uber and Lyft work. It’s hard to remember that back in the day, one of the key skills for a taxi driver was being able to navigate their city. London taxi drivers famously have to pass a test to prove they have “The Knowledge” of navigating London. That’s changed a lot with satellite navigation, since drivers can now get a decent route to anywhere without special skills or training.
Steeplejack
@Roger Moore:
This also reminds me that before Google Maps became ubiquitous each carrier had its own GPS/navigation app, and they sucked—at least the two that I used (Verizon and I forget the other one). The technology moves so fast that we quickly forget that it wasn’t “always” there.
. . . Just checked: Google Maps debuted in 2005.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
If thread is not totally dead, insects may be a problem as well.
Martin
@Roger Moore: The smart vehicles don’t need to be NEARLY as smart though.
Automated cars aren’t that hard to solve. We have loads of systems of such complexity that work just fine. Automated cars mixed with non-automated cars is much harder to solve.
You’re suggesting a complete centralization of autonomy. That’s not what I’m suggesting. Traffic lights are mechanisms to elicit collective behavior without requiring individual communication – but we still use individual communication. You make eye contact with the pedestrian to ensure they see you, and to assure them you see them. These systems of centralized and decentralized communication are needed, but are also extremely limited and inefficient currently.
But right now trying to solve all of the problems at the car level is destined to fail. You need to delegate the parts that are better solved centrally to that layer, those that are better solved locally but above the car level (intersection, street, neighborhood), and some at the car level – including mechanisms at the car level that validate what’s being said at the other levels. You don’t charge into an intersection just because the light is green – you make sure the intersection is clear, that cross traffic has stopped, etc.
You want to do both. So you need municipalities to buy into this, and that’s not really happening. It needs to.
Roger Moore
@Steeplejack:
I never even thought about using a carrier GPS app because I had a stand-alone GPS. My first stand-alone GPS was a TomTom, which we nicknamed Dum Dum. I distinctly remember getting the instructions, “At the end of the road turn left. Then at the end of the road turn right. Turn Left. Turn Right,” all on a long stretch of road with no turn-offs. I guess it was coded internally as several separate stretches of road, but it didn’t give one great confidence in the device.
I replaced it with a Garmin that was both smarter and was capable of telling the names of the roads. I just found it the other day digging through the console in my car. This car is old enough that there are actually paper maps in the map pocket, and the pocket on the back of the passenger’s seat is stretched out from where my Thomas Guide used to be. So it’s interesting to think that my car is older than practical GPS car navigation.
Lethe
Bitcoin & NFT. The new version of Pet Rocks and Beanie Babies. It’s all about making money off of who falls for it downstream and who is left holding the bag…
Oi, some never learn.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
I’m not suggesting a complete centralization of control. I’m suggesting that smart infrastructure doesn’t buy you much if A) cars need to function without it because it isn’t available everywhere and B) cars can’t trust it completely because you have to worry about hackers. Yes, it will make life easier when everything works well, but it won’t usher in the age of autonomous cars because it can’t be counted on.
The bigger point is that smart infrastructure needs to incorporate security as part of its basic design, because the consequences of bad security are so terrible. It’s a lot easier to design security into your protocols than to bolt it on later when you discover that it’s needed.
Part of this is a chicken and egg problem. Municipalities don’t want to spend a bunch of money on infrastructure for smart cars when the cars don’t exist yet, and companies working on smart cars don’t want to depend on smart infrastructure because it’s too rare to be useful. IMO, the work is going to have to come on the autonomous car front first, because autonomous cars are going to have to be able to function without depending on smart infrastructure for the foreseeable future.
Benw
@jl:
Nominated for rotating tag!
Starboard Tack
@Martin:
Is there a way to sell Bitcoin short?
Another Scott
@Roger Moore: I suspect city rules and new laws are going to decide the way (semi-) autonomous transportation develops. There are already rules on the books saying no IC engines in some European cities in 2035 (or whatever).
I suspect we’re going to see (semi-) autonomous bus lanes and micro-delivery truck lanes before we’re going to see Tesla Model XYZs driving grandma around pot-holed neighborhoods in Philly [h/t Atrios].
Eventually the real-world autonomous driving problem will be solved, but there are more important ones to address first!! ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Origuy
I’m in the market for a gaming laptop, and was considering an MSI model, until I learned that they are marketing to Bitcoin miners, who use powerful GPUs to do the computations. I decided to pass on them.
Steeplejack
@Roger Moore:
I have a Garmin DriveSmart 61 that I still use, mostly for longer trips. Got it in ’17 on deep discount. I have a relatively small cell phone (Samsung Galaxy S10e), and I like the Garmin’s big display for navigating the gnarly bits of the D.C.-Baltimore metroplex. (Six-lane downtown highway at 60 mph, heavy traffic, which one of these three exits coming up just ahead do I want?) It also has good databases in which to save stored routes and places of interest. (I regularly type in restaurants seen in the Post for possible later visits.) In some ways it’s better than Google Maps, in others it’s not as good. Trade-offs.
My car, the doughty Kia (2009), doesn’t have a dashboard screen, so that was another motivator to get the Garmin. When I travel and rent a car, I love using Google Maps with Android Auto and the car’s display screen.
I didn’t have a car when I had occasion to use the Verizon GPS app, but even as a passenger and infrequent user I could tell that it was wretched.
JAFD
@BruceFromOhio: I’ve basically done the same – one checking account which gets my SocSec direct deposits, I write paper checks to pay rent and cable, and use ATM card for withdrawals and debit. Second account for Paypal, other online transactions, cash withdrawals if not near first bank’s ATM.
MisterForkbeard
@Villago Delenda Est: He’s basically Mr. House from Fallout already, so this sounds about perfect.