JPG File Sells for $69 Million, as ‘NFT Mania’ Gathers Pace

[Ghost_MH]

2 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

This is merely *one* way NFTs work. Look at what Nike is doing with their NFT schema for validating the authenticity and ownership of shoes. I’m not skipping anything, you’re just incorrect.

 

We're talking about the sale of the NFT art scene here. NFTs are just a use of the Ethereum blockchain to work as a non-centralized database that can be used to store any data you'd like. Tracking the ownership of things is one very common use. However, none of the NFT artwork sales I've seen so far actually track the ownership of the digital item being "sold". Instead, they're tracking ownership of the link to the digital item.

 

Can the buyer rehost the image elsewhere? No. What happens if the seller just takes the image offline? Oops. Oh well. If the seller did that, can the buyer then bring it back online some other way? No. How do we know that's the case? The entire reason we're even talking about this again is because Evil Ape sold a bunch of NFT artwork for millions and then just took their website offline, leaving all these buyers with 404 NFTs that lead nowhere.

[Guest]

20 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

We're talking about the sale of the NFT art scene here. NFTs are just a use of the Ethereum blockchain to work as a non-centralized database that can be used to store any data you'd like. Tracking the ownership of things is one very common use. However, none of the NFT artwork sales I've seen so far actually track the ownership of the digital item being "sold". Instead, they're tracking ownership of the link to the digital item.

 

Can the buyer rehost the image elsewhere? No. What happens if the seller just takes the image offline? Oops. Oh well. If the seller did that, can the buyer then bring it back online some other way? No. How do we know that's the case? The entire reason we're even talking about this again is because Evil Ape sold a bunch of NFT artwork for millions and then just took their website offline, leaving all these buyers with 404 NFTs that lead nowhere.

The NBA trading cards are not based on a simple link, but confer an actual license to use the digital assets in public non commercial ways. Which is actually how many bits of physical media work, like home video and audio products. You own a thing (a tape, a disc, whatever), but what you are actually paying for is the ownership of a license to use whatever the underlying work is.

[Kal-El814]

A digital ledger with increasing maintenance costs and questionable recovery methods makes little sense for physical goods. For sneakers, it’s just a high tech way for Nike to make sure they wet their beak when used sneakers get sold. It’s wholly unnecessary and exists solely to trigger collector brain mentality that’s part of that culture anyway. Yes, short supply, brand appeal, etc., are already a significant part of that, but I think adding additional layers of expensive, digital abstraction is worth calling out for being the cash grab that it unquestionably is.

[Ghost_MH]

26 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

The NBA trading cards are not based on a simple link, but confer an actual license to use the digital assets in public non commercial ways. Which is actually how many bits of physical media work, like home video and audio products. You own a thing (a tape, a disc, whatever), but what you are actually paying for is the ownership of a license to use whatever the underlying work is.

 

Yes, that's a valid, albeit horrifically energy intensive, way to track ownership of little bits of data. These NFT artwork sales are a whole different type of problem that just doesn't make sense.

[legend]

 

8 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

Yes, that's a valid, albeit horrifically energy intensive, way to track ownership of little bits of data. These NFT artwork sales are a whole different type of problem that just doesn't make sense.

 

 

Agreed. If you also just want to track "ownership" such that you can confer other legal befits to proven owners, I feel like it's worth mentioning that you don't need a whole energy inefficient blockchain system. Even ignoring conventional methods of ownership that have existed since forever, on the digital spectrum you can handle this with just digital signatures and timestamp authorities which have existed since the early days of the internet and which much of the internet already builds off of for secure systems.

 

 

[DarkStar189]

On 10/5/2021 at 11:57 PM, Ricofoley said:

I'm just floored by every one of these new sets I see because the art somehow looks shittier with every new one that crops up.

I'm in the camp that believes these ridiculous prices are just cover for money laundering. The art is getting shittier because anything can be art, why bother putting any effort into it?

[LazyPiranha]

I can’t speak for everyone else, but I’m not making the argument that NFT’s have no practical function at all, just that they’re a needlessly convoluted and resource heavy way of solving a relatively minor problem.  The amount of computational power, electricity, and infrastructure necessary to prove ownership of a collectible pair of sneakers is moronic, like carving a receipt for a dozen donuts into the surface of the moon.  Besides even in this instance it ultimately “proves” nothing.  If someone buys those fancy NFT shoes, then sells me the actual shoes with a paper receipt but NOT the NFT, what do you think the police and courts are going to do when they claim to be the actual owner of the shoes?  Besides it does nothing to establish real authenticity of shoes, you can buy NFT shoes, then sell a repro along with the NFT, there’s no way to meaningfully connect the physical good to the non-physical token.  
 

The same goes for any proof of sale.  Take your title issue for example.  An NFT for a title to property doesn’t actually include any of the relevant documentation, it’s presumably a link to a different database that actually has that information on file.  The NFT itself does practically nothing by itself it just serves as an arrow to a document with the actual meaningful information about lot number, owner, etc.   if the NFT contains no real information and relies entirely on an outside database, then the token is only as good an reliable as the database is.  If you still need the database and security of that database to prove anything, then what purpose does the NFT even serve?  How does an NFT deal with potential future complications with property, if I have an NFT for title to 100 acres which I then parcel out into subdivisions, what happens then?  I have an NFT for a title to something that no longer exists and the NFT itself cannot be changed or destroyed.  So it just sits there forever as a part of an ever expanding resource hog utterly meaningless.

[Ghost_MH]

18 minutes ago, DarkStar189 said:

I'm in the camp that believes these ridiculous prices are just cover for money laundering. The art is getting shittier because anything can be art, why bother putting any effort into it?

 

That's likely part of it, but there's also some of it that's being treated like Monopoly money. That is, nueveau riche on crypto like bitcoin that bought into things like ethereum or lite coin early on when they were with fractions of a cent and have zero value for the money because it's all made up funny money, anyway.

[LazyPiranha]

Yeah it’s functionally the Zillow problem but with nothing instead of houses.  If I own 100 of product X, and I buy one more product X at a million dollars, if I raised the price of a single product X by $20,000 I just doubled my money for nothing.

[legend]

Saying blockchain solves any meaningful problem is a lot of like saying Halo invented first person shooters. Except it's worse because Halo was still actually a good game.

[Ghost_MH]

1 minute ago, legend said:

Saying blockchain solves any meaningful problem is a lot of like saying Halo invented first person shooters. Except it's worse because Halo was still actually a good game.

 

Blockchains are the future of databases. Massive Oracle or SQL-deriviative databases will all likely be replaced by blockchains in the future. They're infinitely scalable, faster, require less management, and are self correcting. They're everything you want in a massive database. The way these cryptocurrencies use them, however, is ridiculous. The way many banks are currently using blockchains to track internal transfers makes all the sense in the world. When the blockchain in question is a proof of stake blockchain that only extends to server and computer nodes connected over a limited intranet, it's not just fine, it's a great solution.

[legend]

10 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

Blockchains are the future of databases. Massive Oracle or SQL-deriviative databases will all likely be replaced by blockchains in the future. They're infinitely scalable, faster, require less management, and are self correcting. They're everything you want in a massive database. The way these cryptocurrencies use them, however, is ridiculous. The way many banks are currently using blockchains to track internal transfers makes all the sense in the world. When the blockchain in question is a proof of stake blockchain that only extends to server and computer nodes connected over a limited intranet, it's not just fine, it's a great solution.

 

I deeply doubt that. The entire point of blockchain is to mange the situation when you can't trust any agency for anything, not even one to date and sign anonymized content. For an in-house system that lack of any trust is even more bizarre. Standard cryptographic methods and distributed computing covers it just fine.

 

This is why I made the "Halo invented FPS" analogy: the actual useful pieces of technology behind block chain have existed forever, while the new parts solve a non-issue.

[Ghost_MH]

5 minutes ago, legend said:

I deeply doubt that. The entire point of blockchain is to mange the situation when you can't trust a single agency, not even one to date and sign annoymized content. For an in-house system that lack of any trust is even more bizarre. Standard cryptographic methods and distributed computing covers it just fine.

 

This is why I made the "Halo invented FPS" analogy: the actual useful pieces of technology behind block chain have existed forever, while the new parts solve a non-issue.

 

The lack of trust is to lower management costs since you can lose nodes and error check against faulty ones when you're trying to maintain a database cluster that spans the globe. It's pointless for small businesses, but a large business could and do easily benefit from a wide area database-like blockchain that is self-correcting and built to run in sync across multiple nodes. Right now, if you're a large company, you host multiple database clusters at larger data centers. Smaller offices then have to connect over the Internet to those databases located, possibly, on the other side of the US. (I meant to say Internet there because nobody uses MPLS anymore and if you work for company that does, ask them why they like pissing away money.)

 

What blockchain does here is decentralized the entire thing. Now, instead of stuffing it all in the cloud or some self-managed data center in like Colorado, you can set up small decentralized nodes in each individual office. That lessens the need to reach out over the Internet for database queries and allows sites to continue working, even if in read only mode, in the event of some outage elsewhere. Now you can be someone with hundreds of thousands of employees and the database with millions and billions of entries can go from using tons of AWS compute or an entire cabinet of clustered servers to a bunch of commodity servers that can be replaced by anyone that knows how to plug a TV in.

[legend]

42 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

The lack of trust is to lower management costs since you can lose nodes and error check against faulty ones when you're trying to maintain a database cluster that spans the globe. It's pointless for small businesses, but a large business could and do easily benefit from a wide area database-like blockchain that is self-correcting and built to run in sync across multiple nodes. Right now, if you're a large company, you host multiple database clusters at larger data centers. Smaller offices then have to connect over the Internet to those databases located, possibly, on the other side of the US. (I meant to say Internet there because nobody uses MPLS anymore and if you work for company that does, ask them why they like pissing away money.)

 

What blockchain does here is decentralized the entire thing. Now, instead of stuffing it all in the cloud or some self-managed data center in like Colorado, you can set up small decentralized nodes in each individual office. That lessens the need to reach out over the Internet for database queries and allows sites to continue working, even if in read only mode, in the event of some outage elsewhere. Now you can be someone with hundreds of thousands of employees and the database with millions and billions of entries can go from using tons of AWS compute or an entire cabinet of clustered servers to a bunch of commodity servers that can be replaced by anyone that knows how to plug a TV in.

 

The lack of trust in any system for any reason in no way lowers the costs; it rather creates much larger costs to maintain through various proposed consensus mechanisms (proof of work being the original) and has lots of hidden issues like buy from many active parties on a scale large enough that 50% attacks aren't possible. If you can do that with your own systems, you can still do that without blockchain.

 

I'm not sure why you're touting distributed systems over the world as a feature of blockchain. What was new about "blockchain" was not distributed systems. Nor was it peer-to-peer. Nor was it digital signatures. Nor was it content integrity verification by hashing. What was new in "Blockchain" was solving a very specific problem about how to operate mostly securely without having any trusted systems for time stamping changes to a "ledger" of activities. And in solving that, it also introduces a mountain of other headaches.

 

The moment you say "Here are some trusted distributed systems that only have to timestamp anonymized data" (which is safe technology that has existed for a long time) you no longer need "the blockchain" you just need standard cryptography and distributed computing tools, and consequently the only way to justify the use of blockchain is if that lack of trust for *anything* by *anyone* is an actual issue, which it never is in reality. In fact, the real issues in security you face regard an entirely different problem than timestamping updates, problems that are perhaps even worse in blockchain systems in practice, and at least no better in the best uses.

 

If you don't believe me about the narrowness of what blockchain solved, Wikipedia says as much rather plainly:

Blockchain - Wikipedia

EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG

Quote

The first blockchain was conceptualized by a person (or group of people) known as Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. Nakamoto improved the design in an important way using a Hashcash-like method to timestamp blocks without requiring them to be signed by a trusted party and introducing a difficulty parameter to stabilize rate with which blocks are added to the chain.[4]

 

 

 

I don't know how much you've deep dived on blockchain but I do encourage the technically minded to do so. "Blockchain" is far too often attributed as *the* solution to a set of things when the reality is all its unique complexity is to solve a very narrow issue that is never a real issue in practice.

 

Personally, I did do a deeper dive on it earlier this year because I have been thinking through new systems for scientific publishing since journals and conferences are buckling (at least they are for AI/ML literature). I asked myself whether this would actually be a use for blockchain and spent time understanding it well enough that I would know the direction I would go to implement and apply it, and I made sure I understood enough of it to know what problems it was really solving. Once you do that, you realize how much hype around it is merely about technology that already existed and that the actual contribution of it solves a non-issue and only introduces headaches in the process of doing so.

[Ghost_MH]

6 minutes ago, legend said:

 

The lack of trust in any system for any reason in no way lowers the costs; it rather creates much larger costs to maintain through various proposed consensus mechanisms and has lots of hidden issues like buy from many active parties on a scale large enough that 50% attacks aren't possible. If you can do that with your own systems, you can still do that without blockchain.

 

I'm not sure why you're touting distributes systems over the world as a feature of blockchain. What was new about "blockchain" was not distributed systems. Nor was it peer-to-peer. Nor was it digital signatures. Nor was it content integrity verification by hashing. What was new in "Blockchain" was solving a very specific problem about how to operate mostly securely without having any trusted systems for time stamping changes to a "ledger" of activities. And in solving that, it also introduces a mountain of other headaches.

 

The moment you say "Here are some trusted distributed trusted systems that only have to timestamp anonymized data" you no longer need "the blockchain" you just need standard cryptography and distributed computing tools, and consequently the only way to justify the use of blockchain is if that lack of trust for *anything* by *anyone* is an actual issue, which it never is in reality. In fact, the real issues in security you face regard an entirely different problem than timestamping updates, problems that are perhaps even worse in blockchain systems in practice, and at least no better in the best uses.

 

If you don't believe me about the narrowness of what blockchain solved, Wikipedia says as much rather plainly:

Blockchain - Wikipedia

EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG

 

 

 

I don't know how much you've deep dived on blockchain but I do encourage the technically minded to do so. "Blockchain" is far too often attributed as *the* solution to a set of things when the reality is all its complexity is to solve a very narrow issue that is never a real issue in practice.

 

Personally, I did do a deeper dive on it earlier this year because I have been thinking through new systems for scientific publishing since journals and conferences are buckling (at least they are for AI/ML literature). I asked myself whether this would actually be a use for blockchain and spent time understanding it well enough that I would know the direction I would go to implement and apply it, and I made sure I understood enough of it to know what problems it was really solving. Once you do that, you realize how much hype around it is merely about technology that already existed and that the actual contribution of it solves a non-issue and only introduces headaches in the process of doing so.

 

The reason you can't trust even your own nodes at offices you control is that you're no longer in real control of things one they leave your building. Also, you can't even fully trust yourself against breeches. The point of modern security isn't to stop breeches, but to mitigate damage. There was nothing Twitch could do to stop someone from breaking in, but there are a million things Twitch could have done to stop someone from stealing everything after the breech.

 

MPLS did resolve some timing issues to an extent since offices in that setup aren't actually connected to the internet, but it's prohibitably expensive, not very fast, and very much not mobile. It was a great solution at the time, but SD-WAN is eating its lunch while also bringing in problems when it comes to time sensitive applications...like a database that needs to be strictly kept in sync down to accurate timestamps. The solution right now is to just throw everything into AWS or Azure with it's "infinite" resources. The problem there is that if you've ever accessed large databases over the Internet, it kind of sucks, even when you have a great connection. This is doubly so if you have applications running on a VM in your local MDF or IDF that relies on this cloud-based database. It's even worse if that local VM is interacting with local hardware.

 

The issue here is that there is no drop in place, local solution for this need and the only thing on the horizon is something based on blockchain tech. What I'm talking about will NOT work the same way Bitcoin or Ethereum operates. It'll be it's own thing that borrows heavily from current blockchains in use at like Bank of America.

 

I should reiterate. None of this exists today. All I'm pretty sure of is that it'll look closer to current commerical, non-cryptocurrency blockchains than current widly used databases like NoSQL. Everything is moving toward mobile, commoditized solutions that cheap to put in place and inexpensive to move. MPLS installations often have setup times measured in months. SD-WAN installations can often be just a box you plug in between a router and a switch. Decentralized databases that build themselves without any human intervention and error check against themselves and others regardless of timezones or even servers who, for whatever reason, has an internal clock that isn't exactly in sync with GMT or may have been compromised. Yeah, I'll take all of that directly into my veins.

[legend]

 

24 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

The reason you can't trust even your own nodes at offices you control is that you're no longer in real control of things one they leave your building. Also, you can't even fully trust yourself against breeches. The point of modern security isn't to stop breeches, but to mitigate damage. There was nothing Twitch could do to stop someone from breaking in, but there are a million things Twitch could have done to stop someone from stealing everything after the breech.

 

I don't see how this has anything to do with the security of timestamp systems. Timestamp systems don't even know what the content they're signing is. So if you're worried about content being outside your system, that is a completely orthogonal issue that the blockchain does not answer in any way.

 

24 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

MPLS did resolve some timing issues to an extent since offices in that setup aren't actually connected to the internet, but it's prohibitably expensive, not very fast, and very much not mobile. It was a great solution at the time, but SD-WAN is eating its lunch while also bringing in problems when it comes to time sensitive applications...like a database that needs to be strictly kept in sync down to accurate timestamps. The solution right now is to just throw everything into AWS or Azure with it's "infinite" resources. The problem there is that if you've ever accessed large databases over the Internet, it kind of sucks, even when you have a great connection. This is doubly so if you have applications running on a VM in your local MDF or IDF that relies on this cloud-based database. It's even worse if that local VM is interacting with local hardware.

 

Trusted timestamp systems are famously computationally cheap. They don't process much and the processing blockchain does is absolutely not cheaper. If transaction time is your concern, blockchain is most definitely not the answer. Specifically a trusted timestamp system performs a single hash of an anonymous digest with the time and sends it back. That's it.

 

Where data is stored is again an issue that distributed computing solves and is not related to what blockchain provides.

 

 

24 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

The issue here is that there is no drop in place, local solution for this need and the only thing on the horizon is something based on blockchain tech. What I'm talking about will NOT work the same way Bitcoin or Ethereum operates. It'll be it's own thing that borrows heavily from current blockchains in use at like Bank of America.

 

I should reiterate. None of this exists today. All I'm pretty sure of is that it'll look closer to current commerical, non-cryptocurrency blockchains than current widly used databases like NoSQL. Everything is moving toward mobile, commoditized solutions that cheap to put in place and inexpensive to move. MPLS installations often have setup times measured in months. SD-WAN installations can often be just a box you plug in between a router and a switch. Decentralized databases that build themselves without any human intervention and error check against themselves and others regardless of timezones or even servers who, for whatever reason, has an internal clock that isn't exactly in sync with GMT or may have been compromised. Yeah, I'll take all of that directly into my veins.

 

 

If you're saying what you have in mind is not what exists, I think there is a strong chance what you're attributing to blockchain are things it didn't invent. If by "blockchain" you mean distributed systems that use cryptographic signatures and content hashing to verify integrity,  that's not actually what "blockchain" was about. That's all existing effectively ancient technology, much of which already powers a lot of the internet. Blockchain regards and invented the very narrow mechanisms of timestamping when you don't want to trust any timestamp server nor even a collection of them. All of its uniqueness, benefit, and headaches regard that.

 

TBC, timezones are also a well solved problem (at least in the context of ordering of events) and is not something you have to worry about with a timestamp system.

 

[TwinIon]

If blockchains are ever implemented as a way to replace traditional database technologies, it's going to be in very specific, very limited scenarios. Even a private blockchain is going to be incredibly slow compared to a database, regardless of how that database is setup. If you need your data to be immutable, don't need to access it frequently or quickly, and probably want that data being stored to be transparent, maybe you'd pick a blockchain.

[Guest]

Thanks for all the reading to catch up on after this Astros game is over 

[Ghost_MH]

54 minutes ago, legend said:

 

 

I don't see how this has anything to do with the security of timestamp systems. Timestamp systems don't even know what the content they're signing is. So if you're worried about content being outside your system, that is a completely orthogonal issue that the blockchain does not answer in any way.

 

 

Trusted timestamp systems are famously computationally cheap. They don't process much and the processing blockchain does is absolutely not cheaper. If transaction time is your concern, blockchain is most definitely not the answer. Specifically a trusted timestamp system performs a single hash of an anonymous digest with the time and sends it back. That's it.

 

Where data is stored is again an issue that distributed computing solves and is not related to what blockchain provides.

 

 

 

 

If you're saying what you have in mind is not what exists, I think there is a strong chance what you're attributing to blockchain are things it didn't invent. If by "blockchain" you mean distributed systems that use cryptographic signatures and content hashing to verify integrity,  that's not actually what "blockchain" was about. That's all existing effectively ancient technology, much of which already powers a lot of the internet. Blockchain regards and invented the very narrow mechanisms of timestamping when you don't want to trust any timestamp server nor even a collection of them. All of its uniqueness, benefit, and headaches regard that.

 

TBC, timezones are also a well solved problem (at least in the context of ordering of events) and is not something you have to worry about with a timestamp system.

 

 

I now understand what you meant by your Halo comparison here. Yes, I get that a lot of this stuff existed before Bitcoin or the term blockchain was ever popularized. However, the entire set of ideas popularized by cryptocurrencies and private blockchains are from here on out going to be called blockchains whether it grinds your gears or not. Demon Souls didn't invent anything, but we still call them Souls-like because of the way it brought a lot of ideas together and was widely popularized with that one title.

[legend]

22 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

I now understand what you meant by your Halo comparison here. Yes, I get that a lot of this stuff existed before Bitcoin or the term blockchain was ever popularized. However, the entire set of ideas popularized by cryptocurrencies and private blockchains are from here on out going to be called blockchains whether it grinds your gears or not. Demon Souls didn't invent anything, but we still call them Souls-like because of the way it brought a lot of ideas together and was widely popularized with that one title.

 

It's not just a naming issue for me. The problem I see is that when people do these distributed systems that they call blockchain, they are accurately adopting the whole of it, including this aspect of time stamping that has so many problems because people don't realize you can do distributed and safe systems *without* that piece.  

 

For example, NFTs for art are a dumb fucking system regardless for many reasons we've all enumerated here, but even dumber is to do what NFTs do you absolutely do not need this unique aspect that makes the blockchain the blockchain. The argument for it is even worse in this setting than it is for currency ledgers. Nevertheless, NFTs adopt it anyway because people seem to be under the delusion that blockchain invented all of it and its an all-or-nothing thing. (EDIT: I guess it's arguably equally dumb and I'm letting my disdain for assigning value to to links taint my view of it even further  but point is you don't have to adopt this property, yet here we are because people go with the all-or-nothing attitude)

 

I think it's critically important to educate more people making these decisions about what's actually going on so that they can take good ideas that the blockchain happens to also build on, without inheriting the counterproductive actually unique aspect of the blockchain.

 

On the other hand, educating a lot of these people won't help because they're grifters anyway  But I do think there are also honest people trying to adopt technology and doing it badly because they don't know better and it would be nice to help them!

[Ghost_MH]

39 minutes ago, legend said:

 

It's not just a naming issue for me. The problem I see is that when people do these distributed systems that they call blockchain, they are accurately adopting the whole of it, including this aspect of time stamping that has so many problems because people don't realize you can do distributed and safe systems *without* that piece.  

 

For example, NFTs for art are a dumb fucking system regardless for many reasons we've all enumerated here, but even dumber is to do what NFTs do you absolutely do not need this unique aspect that makes the blockchain the blockchain. The argument for it is even worse in this setting than it is for currency ledgers. Nevertheless, NFTs adopt it anyway because people seem to be under the delusion that blockchain invented all of it and its an all-or-nothing thing.

 

I think it's critically important to educate more people making these decisions about what's actually going on so that they can take good ideas that the blockchain happens to also build on, without inheriting the counterproductive actually unique aspect of the blockchain.

 

On the other hand, educating a lot of these people won't help because they're grifters anyway  But I do think there are also honest people trying to adopt technology and doing it badly because they don't know better and it would be nice to help them!

 

Like I said before, the industry is moving closer to commodity hardware. Stuff that's cheap to buy, easy to setup, and has low operational overhead. Managing massive databases suck. The hardware behind keeping them running and fast is also a pain. Failover clusters are currently the cheapest solution, but it requires dupes of the high powered servers and a lot of up front costs. Just dropping failover clusters into the cloud can also work, but for large databases that are compute intensive you're trading low capital expenses for high operational expenses. If there was an idea out there that existed and was designed to be a sort of decentralized databases thing that could run on commodity hardware because it only needed to handle local connections and could be distributed across a company's multiple sites...hell, maybe you don't even need the server nodes and just have like 90% of the thing run on local desktops and laptops.

 

None of this stuff exists today and I'm also not talking about blockchain as it refers to all the craziness of NFTs using Ethereum. I am, however, talking about a future built on the same ideas. It'll borrow from current ideas where it makes sense and make up some new ideas, also where it makes sense. It'll all still be called blockchain.

 

Either way, anything that requires proof of work like Bitcoin and Ethereum should be shot into the sun. I can nearly power my house for a day with the energy required to make one NFT. That's such wild bullshit it's almost impossible to describe it. Fucking Nike wasting electricity the electricity needed to charge a Model Y just to generate a digital receipt for some sneakers makes me want to punch my dog.

 

We as a species is being very stupid with all the blockchain foolishness going around. Don't get me wrong here. I'm just saying that the future of everything will be more decentralized than it is today and whatever databases look like twenty years from now will likely be closer to current blockchains than current databases like PostgreSQL.

[legend]

12 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

Like I said before, the industry is moving closer to commodity hardware. Stuff that's cheap to buy, easy to setup, and has low operational overhead. Managing massive databases suck. The hardware behind keeping them running and fast is also a pain. Failover clusters are currently the cheapest solution, but it requires dupes of the high powered servers and a lot of up front costs. Just dropping failover clusters into the cloud can also work, but for large databases that are compute intensive you're trading low capital expenses for high operational expenses. If there was an idea out there that existed and was designed to be a sort of decentralized databases thing that could run on commodity hardware because it only needed to handle local connections and could be distributed across a company's multiple sites...hell, maybe you don't even need the server nodes and just have like 90% of the thing run on local desktops and laptops.

 

None of this stuff exists today and I'm also not talking about blockchain as it refers to all the craziness of NFTs using Ethereum. I am, however, talking about a future built on the same ideas. It'll borrow from current ideas where it makes sense and make up some new ideas, also where it makes sense. It'll all still be called blockchain.

 

Either way, anything that requires proof of work like Bitcoin and Ethereum should be shot into the sun. I can nearly power my house for a day with the energy required to make one NFT. That's such wild bullshit it's almost impossible to describe it. Fucking Nike wasting electricity the electricity needed to charge a Model Y just to generate a digital receipt for some sneakers makes me want to punch my dog.

 

We as a species is being very stupid with all the blockchain foolishness going around. Don't get me wrong here. I'm just saying that the future of everything will be more decentralized than it is today and whatever databases look like twenty years from now will likely be closer to current blockchains than current databases like PostgreSQL.

 

 

I have absolutely zero doubt that there will be a further growth of distributed compute and data storage technology. And for efficient usable systems, none of that will rely on the blockchains timestamp mechanism that defines it and separates it from any other system before it  I look forward to the day when tech bros stop championing using that exact mechanism merely because of the hype around blockchain.

[Keyser_Soze]

Tom Brady is in on the grift now

 

 

[Ghost_MH]

5 hours ago, Keyser_Soze said:

Tom Brady is in on the grift now

 

 

 

He's been on the grift for months. Autograph is his company and he's looped in all the greatest athletes out there plus Derek Jeter.

 

Autograph: The new era of collecting

AUTOGRAPH.IO

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Autograph is an NFT platform that brings together the most iconic brands and legendary names in sports, entertainment and culture to create unique digital collections and experiences.

 

[thewhyteboar]

Tom Brady has been a grifter for awhile. His health company is nothing but snake oil, and he has previously claimed that drinking water will prevent sun burns and shit like that.

[Kal-El814]

Tom Brady is a fucking moron and this has been obvious for ages.

[Ghost_MH]

6 minutes ago, Kal-El814 said:

Tom Brady is a fucking moron and this has been obvious for ages.

 

This is correct. I'm pretty sure I said earlier in this thread that while I do love him on the field, I could very much do without him off it.

[Kal-El814]

Just now, Ghost_MH said:

This is correct. I'm pretty sure I said earlier in this thread that while I do love him on the field, I could very much do without him off it.

 

He’s the GOAT, there’s no fucking with that at all.

[Ghost_MH]

Oh noes!

The NFT Bay is the galaxy's most resilient NFT BitTorrent site!

THENFTBAY.ORG

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You wouldn't steal a JPEG (or would you...)

 

[Keyser_Soze]

 

[Kal-El814]

@Commissar SFLUFAN

 

I’m dead. 
 

 

[Air_Delivery]

Tolkien estate blocks JRR Token crypto-currency

WWW.BBC.COM

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Lawyers representing the estate said the product, launched in August, infringed the author's trademark.

 

[Xbob42]

Ha! You can't sue the blockchain! Let's see JRR's proof of ownership NFT!

[CitizenVectron]

7 hours ago, Xbob42 said:

Ha! You can't sue the blockchain! Let's see JRR's proof of ownership NFT!

 

Lol this made me think of those "free person of the land" people from the Ron Paul days. 

 

"Tolkien doesn't own his own last name because he doesn't have an immutable chain of custody going back hundreds of years!"

[Anathema-]

On 11/27/2021 at 11:09 AM, CitizenVectron said:

"Tolkien doesn't own his own last name because he doesn't have an immutable chain of custody going back hundreds of years!"

 

Not only that, somehow Aragon was able to have Andruil reforged. Tolkien clearly knew nothing about data integrity.