I was a well-paid blockchain / web3 dev for years, but became disillusioned. \ stacker news ~bitcoin

I was a well-paid blockchain / web3 dev for years, but became disillusioned.

15.6k sats \ 5000 boost \ 108 comments \ @Michelson_Morley 20 Aug 2023 bitcoin

For context, I was the head of an NFT launch that was written about in Vogue magazine. I remember being asked one day by management for blurbs about what made our NFT special and realizing with total certainty that the answer was "nothing". we've been working for months on nothing.

Started feeling like a fraud. A total snake-oil salesman. Dropped out of the industry in the spring (what a bittersweet day) and started living on savings. Spent months trying to come to terms with my career, what felt like a waste of several years. Honestly felt like shit.

Building on Lightning these past few weeks has brought me back. This tech is seriously revolutionary. Apps where you can spend 1/6 of a PENNY and it just works instantly opens up entire genres of software.

Feels so good to know that those years weren't wasted. That there is even more potential in this field than I ever thought before. But mostly that I can work with crypto without ever having to look in the direction of Vitalik again <3

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442 sats \ 0 replies \ @supratic 20 Aug 2023

Welcome to Bitcoinia

250 sats \ 0 replies \ @nullama 20 Aug 2023

Yes, it's one of those things that when you see it you can't unsee it anymore.

Altcoins are such a waste of time.

200 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 20 Aug 2023

Realizing that time you spent on something you later regret wasn't for nothing -- that nearly anything can be redeemed -- is a priceless feeling. Glad you got a taste.

142 sats \ 17 replies \ @shyfire 20 Aug 2023

Vitalik... What's up with that guy. He's clearly smart. But eth is such a scam. Don't know what to make of it tbh.

464 sats \ 5 replies \ @Michelson_Morley OP 20 Aug 2023

I have nothing but respect for the man, he's certainly a smarter and better engineer than I am. With that said, I don't find him interesting at all. Reading the white paper for Ethereum and comparing it with Satoshis makes it incredibly clear that Vitalik cares about financial instrumentation rather than decentralized trustless economic systems. The switch to proof of stake made this pretty clear, of course.

Ethereum is just not usable for anything right now. I'm pretty extreme on this but I think it will be forgotten in a few years. It's just not fun to develop.

172 sats \ 0 replies \ @orthzar 20 Aug 2023

I'm pretty extreme on this but I think it will be forgotten in a few years.

I don't think that's an extreme prediction. If Ethereum isn't dead within a few years, then something will have gone horribly wrong. As long as governments don't intervene, Ethereum will crash-and-burn all on it's own.

24 sats \ 0 replies \ @inverselarp 22 Aug 2023

Ethereum is just not usable for anything right now.

Could you please elaborate on this? I am not eth user. Is it bad UIs or high fees or some other inherent issue?

121 sats \ 0 replies \ @shyfire 20 Aug 2023

Very useful hearing your perspective.

Also not sure if you saw this clip, but seems all the current L2s are pretty rekt https://twitter.com/nerdnationunbox/status/1690438518097514496

200 sats \ 0 replies \ @dieselbaby 21 Aug 2023

Respectfully, I have to disagree. I don't see Ethereum going anywhere. There's just too much money and too many different industries/platforms built on top of Ethereum base layer alone...then you take into account all of the many other layer 2s, roll-ups, zk-rollups, even the other EVM-compatible layer 1 blockchains which all can interact and interface with Ethereum, which is basically being used now & in the future (as it's slow transaction throughput and high transaction cost, comparatively to other chains/layer 2s) as a kind of "security layer" which is used for the ultimate root consensus. Which is effectively how the layer 2s for example work, things can be confirmed on the layer 2 but then it gets sent back and actually confirmed by the sequencers on ethereum itself, which, at least they say, enhances the security of the whole operation.

I'm certainly someone who is quite disillusioned myself with the idea of "crypto" and has been converted into the idea of being a "bitcoin maximalist" (lmao), it's what I started in (bitcoin, many years ago....for use on a ahem certain website...Free Ross btw) and it's fitting that this is where I've wound up.

So much of the rest of "crypto" (I hate that term btw) is like a big ponzi game where people are trying to get ahead of one another and see who can sell each other their bags first. A really incestuous breeding ground for shitcoins galore, rug pulls, all manner of scams, and so on.

Case in point: the latest scam du jour that has been getting a lot of attention on twitter is this utterly disgusting website called friend.tech -- it's a site where the already wealthy, popular influencers on "crypto twitter" are making money and dumping on their followers, as people buy "shares" of their account on the site. In return they get access to a gated chat room (that doesn't work 75% of the time, so I'm told) where they chat directly with the person whose shares they own. It's like the NFT craze combined with shitcoining in it's most hyper-ponzified, insanely degenerate form. It's fucking disgusting in my opinion, it's another means of creating a marketplace for something that should not exist: the commodification and financialization of (fake) friendships. There's all kinds of insider trading and scammery going on within these groups as well, these clowns are openly admitting it on twitter spaces. I fucking loathe the government and the SEC, but I have to say if some of these fucks wind up getting in trouble for trading securities or whatever for this shit, I won't be losing any sleep or shedding any tears over it.

Alright, </rant over>

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @falsefaucet 20 Aug 2023

idk man.

what is better motivation to create a groundbreaking and world-changing project than being mad Blizzard nerfed your warlock in WoW.

100 sats \ 7 replies \ @energycurrency 20 Aug 2023

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21 sats \ 1 reply \ @dieselbaby 21 Aug 2023

lmao, you have to be joking, right? You can say that you're not a fan of ethereum for whatever reason -- there are more than a few very valid ones, for sure -- but one thing you cannot say and expect anyone to take you seriously, is that Vitalik Buterin is not smart. He's quite brilliant, actually.

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @energycurrency 21 Aug 2023

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100 sats \ 3 replies \ @shyfire 20 Aug 2023

Are you implying he doesn't write his own content on his blog?

Have you ever written anything this intellectual:

https://vitalik.ca/general/2023/01/20/stealth.html

If you have, please link me to it.

10 sats \ 2 replies \ @energycurrency 20 Aug 2023

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @shyfire 20 Aug 2023

Plenty of smart people into CP. I guess plenty of smart people not into BTC and plenty of smart people into shitcoins. Not sure what makes that btc only lightbulb go off for people, weird to me that not everyone converges on it

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nemo 20 Aug 2023

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nemo 20 Aug 2023

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43 sats \ 0 replies \ @kristapsk 20 Aug 2023

It would not surprise me if he is just forced to keep this thing going, there is definitely a lot rich and dangerous people who have invested a lot of money in ETH.

122 sats \ 1 reply \ @SpaceHodler 20 Aug 2023

Perhaps it's a case of "If you have said A, you must also say B". He went down a route and may have realized it wasn't the best route, but there is no turning back. So he's working on something he doesn't quite believe in, and he may have to rationalize to defend it even in front of himself.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @shyfire 20 Aug 2023

Hmm yeah that makes sense

133 sats \ 0 replies \ @2bithits 20 Aug 2023

Good for you! It takes a lot to admit these things

121 sats \ 2 replies \ @TheBTCManual 20 Aug 2023

Do you think a lot of developers feel like you or are more devs just drinking the koolaid of the marketing and managment circlejerk?

50 sats \ 1 reply \ @Michelson_Morley OP 20 Aug 2023

I don't know. No one I know liked the move to Proof of Stake (felt like a betrayal to those of us who know the genius of PoW) so we were bearish. In my friendgroup and among my colleges though, I was definitely the first to decide "This is baloney, NFTs are scams, i'm never making one again". Most people just want to keep their job I think. I'm a bit childish but id rather starve than hate myself and act like im smiling, at work. Yegh

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nemo 20 Aug 2023

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110 sats \ 0 replies \ @wikparclones 20 Aug 2023

Ya... You should make more apps on #Lightning and #nostr protocol 🙏🏼

111 sats \ 0 replies \ @btcthinker 20 Aug 2023

Even on Bitcoin there is NFT too, fraud and asset grabbing are everywhere. Everyone gets to choose who they are, and it looks like you're getting better.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @inverselarp 20 Aug 2023

Very interesting move. I know few that went opposite direction. They’ve got frustrated by lack of flexibility of base layer and lacking primitives on L2. Missing token incentives is imho another big reason. I dont agree with most of their reasons just saying that it is quite easy to fall for alternative L1s perks.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @stackeraw 20 Aug 2023

Well come to bitcoin. Motto: Bitcoin not crypto. got it? ;}

100 sats \ 9 replies \ @energycurrency 20 Aug 2023

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100 sats \ 8 replies \ @Michelson_Morley OP 20 Aug 2023

No, but I have now— thanks for the links.

RGB looks like a bust. I was interested to find the technical details but there aren't any (just empty pages in the docs). Their idea also sounds strange, they call them "smart contracts" but they're not executed in any distributed way. They're just scripts that make a call to some given blockchain. I don't see the point. And it doesn't seem like the RGB devs understand it either, given what they wrote under "What is RGB" on reddit: When someone asked "It's not a sidechain right?"

"That's right, it's not a sidechain, it's a DAG".

Aha.. RGB is .. a graph. this explains everything.. then they write

I'm not sure that either of these examples are close to explaining how RGB works tbh. It's a completely new paradigm.

No I don't put much stock in this project.

As for DLCs: Bit more interesting I guess. I'm wary though, because all they're doing is regular multisigs plus external oracles, but with a name like Discreeete Log Contraaact its like they're marketing it as some form of incredible mathematical discovery that enables smart contracts in a totally new way! When in reality they're using oracles, which is less cool sounding to me.

1 sat \ 7 replies \ @energycurrency 21 Aug 2023

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121 sats \ 5 replies \ @Michelson_Morley OP 21 Aug 2023

You misunderstood me— i didn't mean "there's no point because execution isn't on-chain", I was saying that it's silly to call something a smart contract when you're talking about a script that is independent and external to any crypto currency.

The entire problem I'm having here is that RGB doesn't specify anything real about their project. The core parts of their technical docs are just blank. I was very intrigued by their pitch so this disappointed me! I'm not trying to be semantically pedantic about the smart contract thing—I literally don't get what they're doing because they don't say it.

The thing you just linked I also don't see the point of. For real, he just says the most obvious statement in the world ("ethereum is dumb becozz all computation has to be run on every node, thats inefficient!!", mind blowing commentary), but ironically he writes 6 paragraphs just repeating that same point without any further commentary. Pretty funny!

Let me know when RGB can say how their system is gonna work, I'm always interested in new ideas. Just tired of sloppy pipedream crypto.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @energycurrency 21 Aug 2023

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0 sats \ 3 replies \ @energycurrency 21 Aug 2023

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21 sats \ 2 replies \ @Michelson_Morley OP 21 Aug 2023

I'm only interested in the technology. Sorry if I seem cynical about this, but there's just so much incentive for people in this space to use crypto-jargon babble to try to appear innovative. So when I see RGB writing about

a novel “post-blockchain” smart contract system, using the concept of client-side-validation ... exceeding abilities of all existing blockchain-based smart contracts while not compromising on security or decentralization ... uses specially-designed functional registry-based RISC virtual machine ...

then it's clear to me that I'm being sold something. Their "blackpaper" is dense with this jargon without ever describing the details of what is so new about their project. They claim that their tech enables smart contracts that don't need to process all current transactions while still being able to prevent double spending. But the details of how are just left to the imagination. I really might be just to stupid to get it, sure. But you know, if it looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck...

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @energycurrency 21 Aug 2023

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150 sats \ 0 replies \ @nemo 21 Aug 2023

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60 sats \ 0 replies \ @dieselbaby 21 Aug 2023

Interesting reading, that thread.

Bram Cohen is brilliant, I was one of the first alpha testers on bittorrent when he released it with an announcement on the SomethingAwful forums way way long ago, interesting to see what he's been working on the last little while (Chia).

100 sats \ 40 replies \ @quark 20 Aug 2023

There will be good and bad NFTs as everything in life. Don't feel bad. You always gain experience and the most important thing is your inner voice telling you what is the best to do. We can all change and evolve.

21 sats \ 38 replies \ @rkfg 20 Aug 2023

There will never be any good NFTs. They're 100% scam by definition, number hashes are not scarce and they can't be worth anything.

11 sats \ 8 replies \ @Michelson_Morley OP 20 Aug 2023

That's a bit black and white. First of all, what do you think makes a thing "worth" something? Scarcity? I have a very exclusive fart coming up, should I go to the market..

Things are worth what people pay for them. Simple as that. Saying number hashes are not scarce also makes no sense in this context. In a smart contract — which cannot be modified after creation— if I write "upon payment, write payee down in list as Owner, IFF number of owners is less than 10000", then that is a scarce amount of ordinals, there can never be "owner #10001".

Finally, let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. NFTs have a lot of use cases besides "trying to fool speculators to buy this new updated monkey picture".

That said, im in no rush to bring them to bitcoin (or to use Ordinals). Yuck :)

0 sats \ 7 replies \ @rkfg 22 Aug 2023

The dividend use case still doesn't justify NFTs. It depends on you paying other people, if you don't explicitly pay they don't get anything. So why pollute the chain with these contracts? Keep a regular Postgres database of people who bought your shares and spread the money among them, it worked for decades before and it still does. The value proposition isn't the scarcity of the shares themselves but the dividends that you promise to pay. I don't see why 1 share out of 10000 would still be valuable if you stop paying for whatever reason. Even if you burn 9990 shares and leave just 10, each one of them would be just as valuable as before (i.e., it would be not) despite the supply shrinking by 1000 times. No payments, no value.

There might be an argument that with blockchain they can trade without touching your database, in a decentralized fashion. It doesn't really hold because there are no real benefits (as I said above, the value comes from you paying them, not being able to trade the tokens) and the big downside is that it's much more expensive to store this data on a global database, because no one else cares about these shares except those 10000 people who bought them, but everyone has to store this data forever.

You can resort to assets like RGB or Taro if you absolutely need it for whatever reason, but in reality 1 local database per company is much better for the task because these payments fully depend on that one company (and as such the value is inherently centralized) and nobody else is interested in storing them. If, or rather when, the company disappears and these shares become worthless it's much better to drop the database and forget it ever happened, rather than download this sad story of a dead company every time you setup a new node and do an IBD. It doesn't apply to the regular bitcoin transactions because you absolutely need to verify all money to make sure you get paid with real bitcoin and not something conjured out of thin air or doublespent. So no other option but download and verify everything, you don't know in advance which UTXO will be used to pay you.

Other than that, see my other reply above. There are no real useful use cases, only scam, spam, and delusions.

21 sats \ 6 replies \ @Michelson_Morley OP 5 Sep 2023

Apologies for this 2 week late reply, I was confused by what you wrote, confused by "the dividend use case" rebuttal, which seemed like a complete non-sequitur to my own text (which didn't specify any use cases at all, only saying "they exist").

But I reread your comment now and see that maybe the dividend-confusion arose because I wrote

Things are worth what people pay for them.

So I want to clarify this, I didn't mean anything like "NFTs have value only when their contracts include payments to the owners [or shareholders, as you call them]".

I meant the sentence completely literally: In the context of pricing, there is no such thing as intrinsic value. If I am willing to pay 5000 BTC for an NFT, then that NFT is worth 5000 BTC. The value of a thing, the price it "should" have, is exactly equal to what a free market sells it for. (this btw is the Austrian view of value).

But as I wrote in my original post, I don't believe the NFTs I made were worth what they were sold for, I valued them at ZERO DOLLARS. So I think we have agreement in this, at least :)

I've looked through your discussion with @dieselbaby and @notgeld as well. It doesn't look to me like you are arguing in bad faith (that's why I'm replying and trying to steel-man your case as best I can), so I'm not going to repeat their arguments (which I agree with completely).

I'm trying to understand why you are dead set against NFTs as a concept. What I'm thinking is, you don't like bitcoin Ordinals. Is that the root of it? They certainly pollute the bitcoin blockchain currently (increasing fees, and reducing the pseudonymity of the currency), I'm no fan. I think the bitcoin community will solve the problem though. It was good that the flaw was discovered.

I don't think you are against NFTs in general. For real. I mean, are you against receipts? Diplomas? These are tokens (i.e. "indications / signs that represent other things"). You can take your name off your diploma if you want to make it fungible. A physical US dollar bill is an NFT, since it has a unique serial number. But put it in a bank account and it becomes fungible. Just a number in a postgres database (or in this particular case, almost certainly it lands in a file on a mainframe running COBOL).

Do you agree with that? That tokens which are non fungible are not inherently bad (even though they might be for specifically Bitcoin)?

1 sat \ 5 replies \ @rkfg 5 Sep 2023

I'm against all NFTs on blockchain because they simply don't work, same as shitcoins, same as PoS. You can say "but they do work" and it's only partially true, same as buying sand castles for candy wrappers works until a bully comes, stomps the castle and tears the wrappers. As I already said in that other branch, NFTs don't need decentralization. Feel free to store them in a database, replicate it between those interested in this shit and be happy. Polluting the decentralized timechain is a waste. Why should everyone store my receipt from a supermarket for eternity? For real, why? What's the reason? I bought some food, ate it, shat it, the receipt is now useless but it's still preserved in the most decentralized database for eternity. It's like shitting into that database directly.

Same about diplomas or anything you can come up with. This stuff only concerns a few people, I don't care about some Argentinian dude's diploma, for example, I will never meet him or employ him. Why should I waste my precious disk space and bandwidth on that? The dude dies, the diploma becomes useless and yet it's stored forever. Same about apartment ownership, the house is demolished, it's useless. The NFT hype goes down, the monkey is worthless.

Sats, on the opposite, will not become worthless because they're fungible. Any sat is as valuable as any else, so we need to verify all of them. Everyone is interested in every sat verification because we can freely exchange them and I can get those Argentinian dude's sats, sure I want to make sure they were created from the valid PoW and were not doublespent. See the difference now?

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @Michelson_Morley OP 5 Sep 2023

See the difference between what? I do not understand you at all, and it doesn't seem like you are interested in trying to understand me.

I did my best to steelman your case, to consider the best possible thing you could be arguing. It is more interesting to understand others than it is to build a wall around your own view and shoot anyone who approaches.

Can you make an argument for using non-fungible tokens on blockchains? I can (and have) provided arguments for why Ordinals are bad news, why NFTs can be scams.

If you cannot do this, then you are not learning anything by writing long texts. What is the point of conversation if your starting point is that you have nothing to hear?

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @rkfg 5 Sep 2023

The difference between sats that have a use case and fully deserve their history to be preserved forever and NFTs that don't have a working use case (outside of pump&dump/scam schemes) and will be forgotten in a few months or eventually become useless or unusable due to external events and conditions. This difference.

How can I make an argument for using NFTs on blockchain when I'm fully against it? I don't get it. I explained in details why I'm against it. There's not a single argument that can justify their usage in a decentralized environment. I'm not trying to learn an objectively wrong point of view (why would I do that? Or did you mean "teach"?), instead I'm explaining why NFTs and Bitcoin are fundamentally incompatible.

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60 sats \ 28 replies \ @dieselbaby 21 Aug 2023

I disagree. I had a "good NFT", I am a fan of the band Avenged Sevenfold, and in the lead-up to the release of their latest album which came out earlier this summer, they had a big alternate reality game event that ran in a bunch of locations across the west coast of the US and online, where people could solve a bunch of sophisticated puzzles and riddles to find clues, which I was able to do and locate another clue inside of a park in downtown LA. Because of this, some other fans of the band gifted me one of their (the band's) "Deathbat's Club" NFTs, as a sign of appreciation I suppose.

While I absolutely agree that the vast majority of NFTs are cash grab scams and hideously ugly at that, these ones are something pretty different. For example, the people who have one not only get things like priority access to cut the line at concerts, you're able to buy tickets before anyone else guaranteed, there's special merchandise, meet and greets with the band themselves, a whole lot of stuff that appeals to people who are fans of the band. It's basically just a way of them keeping track of a fan club, more or less, in a digital way and making sure that the benefits of being in the fan club remain rare and contained to only the number of people who hold one of those NFTs.

So yeah, there are absolutely situations out there where they are not "100% scam by definition", and this is far from the only such situation. You don't have to like it or want to take part in it whatsoever, but that does not mean that it is a scam.

0 sats \ 27 replies \ @rkfg 22 Aug 2023

Those don't need to be NFTs, a simple database is more than enough. One can argue that NFT is "on blockchain" forever while any regular database might be gone but in reality it doesn't matter. Because for NFT to be valuable (and not just any other contract or tx output) you need to prove to other people (buyers, apparently) that it's real, and it's not possible without external sources of truth that reside outside the blockchain. Such sources might be blog posts, websites, twitter accounts, notary verified e-mails and so on, but the blockchain, any of them, can not attest the NFT all by itself.

So the only purposes of NFT are:

scamming other people
polluting the block space

That's it. Any other use case is fragile at best and a delusion at worst, only works until you can convince the others to buy it from you, otherwise it instantly loses any value and becomes just a random number. Which it is.

0 sats \ 26 replies \ @notgeld 22 Aug 2023

What do you say about people that see value in provision, i.e. confirmed ownership history?

0 sats \ 25 replies \ @rkfg 22 Aug 2023

Ownership of what? You can only prove that you "own" a hash. The history doesn't have any value without, again, an external source of truth that somehow connects the addresses/keys with real persons. Otherwise you can fabricate whatever history you want just sending between your own addresses, and that's how NFTs gained perceived value for the pump&dump scheme.

51 sats \ 20 replies \ @notgeld 22 Aug 2023

The simplest argument here is about bytes stored onchain. But it is not really an object which has value but the mere substance of it originality. All copies which may be put later onchain will be just copies that are younger and not original. Imagine that any sculpture occupies some space, now digital art occupies some specific time interval in the past.

Blockchain itself is the history and I do not talk about whatever external history you mean.

0 sats \ 19 replies \ @rkfg 23 Aug 2023

You can't prove that your bytes are the youngest in existence. There could be slightly different younger bytes. Change a pixel and it no longer matches, good luck digging through the blockchain looking for the earlier image (if it even exists at all). This way you can copy any NFT and without an external source of truth the buyer can't make sure your copy is fake. Scan the chain, find no matches, so it must be genuine, right? It's just spam and scam with no value except extracting sats from people believing in this shit, and they're left holding the bag. Oh, and new nodes need to waste bandwidth and storage on it too, even though it's most certainly isn't of any value to them.

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50 sats \ 3 replies \ @dieselbaby 23 Aug 2023

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how public/private key cryptography works if your comment above is any indication.

You can absolutely prove that you own a hash, it's deterministically generated as a result of the interaction between your key and the contract with which the token is from.

(edit: I jumped the gun a bit and misread your comment above as saying that you could not prove that you "own" a hash, so my bad...but my comment below still stands as it is accurate regardless. The external source of truth you speak of IS the blockchain. The same way that it works on bitcoin....just because you're sending NFTs which can contain any kind of arbitrary data within them doesn't make it any different than people sending sats to one another. Same goes for people inscribing ordinals on bitcoin, too. Fundamentally the same thing, at it's core.)

Also, you ignored the very real use case I gave earlier (because it doesn't suit your narrative that NFTs are all 100% scams, which is bullshit). Sure, you could use a database instead of having the fan club membership I spoke of function as NFTs. But in doing so, you'd miss out on the following features:

Token gating for access to their Discord server, a special website, ticketing purchases access (all of this with numerous levels of complexity beyond what you'd find in a standard database)
The ability for people to freely transact their membership pass (NFT) by listing it for sale or purchasing it on a secondary marketplace, at any time. If that right there doesn't align with the ethos of decentralization and self-ownership that many bitcoiners have embraced and constantly champion to others, I don't know what would...

Your comment about it being a "pump and dump scheme" is moot, as this is a world-famous band who have sold millions of albums, and plays sold-out arena tours all over the globe with bands like Metallica...they're certainly not hurting for cash and the value (though such a thing is subjective, of course) that the fans who hold said memberships is gained via a one-time payment.

You seem to want to be getting deep into the weeds and having some weird conversation about what denotes value or what constitutes ownership of something...there is absolutely nothing that is required to confirm that you own the membership pass (or any other NFT for that matter) aside from a computer with the right software and an internet connection.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @rkfg 23 Aug 2023

Explain to me why should I store this garbage for eternity to let other nodes perform IBD? These tokens only concern a small number of people, why should this information be globally available if it's completely worthless for 99.999% (add more nines to your taste) of people? It's not money, it can't work as money, why do you need a global consensus for some discord entry tokens that would go to zero in 100% of cases after discord inevitably shuts down? Why should we store dead information forever? I know about node pruning, point is if everyone prunes no one can do IBD + even with pruned nodes you still have to download the entire blockchain.

The rest of your arguments follow, this information that virtually nobody is interested in, and which becomes more useless every passing month, should not be a part of the global consensus. On the opposite, transaction history becomes more valuable every block because it builds a chain that links the today's UTXO with the block it was mined in, proving that these sats are real and were not created out of nothing/doublespent.

You can store such useless information as any NFT, but it is simply spam, (and usually scam too). Anecdotal evidence that some famous people participated in a scam (whether willingly or accidentally) doesn't prove anything, because it's anecdotal. You can't validate a concept by saying that some well known people did it. It's completely irrelevant. Famous people bought monkeys for millions, now they're not worth crap, how's that not pump&dump? The fad passes quickly, fortunately. Those poor people who believed in the blockchain-future narrative are gonna get broke, not sure if they deserve it but I'm at least trying to warn the others.

absolutely nothing that is required to confirm that you own the membership pass (or any other NFT for that matter) aside from a computer with the right software and an internet connection.

False, you need something outside of the blockchain that confirms that this membership is genuine. Be it a hash, a date/block when it was minted, doesn't matter. Without that anyone can create a duplicate NFT, maybe even in the same block if they monitor the mempool closely, and who's gonna tell you which one of them is "genuine"? The answer is: both (because in fact there's no difference, random information isn't scarce) and neither (because both pretend to be something they're not).

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @rkfg 5 Sep 2023

The external oracle is needed not to confirm the ownership of the hash. It's needed to confirm that the original data (that is hashed) is the genuine first copy that the company or artist or anyone else created and that they did it first. As I explained before there are many tricks to create an NFT that's a copy of some earlier one but you can't verify it because it was slightly modified. For example, I want to sell you an NFT with a hash 9ebca060d1a1ef4544e33738f868c1fe1819737d50e9c43a95f3d2d4951cdda6. I show you an image that, indeed, hashes to this number. Since you assume you don't need any external oracles, you buy it and we part ways. Later you find out (from your friend) that the actual NFT you wanted to buy has a hash of 6d6e6a030355c851f7520e1a563ea3c75647a4f036ac18846fc27f2001cc7cc8 and it's one pixel different from what I sold you, it was also issued 1 block earlier. See the problem now?

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @sandagoriate 20 Aug 2023

LFG Bro! let's Build your freedom!

100 sats \ 5 replies \ @teodor 20 Aug 2023

"Apps where you can spend 1/6 of a PENNY and it just works instantly opens up entire genres of software." Can you name some of these? Would help a lot! Thanks!

31 sats \ 4 replies \ @Michelson_Morley OP 20 Aug 2023

Sure thing! There's this (toy) app that has the experiment of paying for scrolling: https://webln.twentyuno.net/scroll

Scrolling costs 5 sats per view, as you go. 5 sats ≈ 0.13 cents, in other words ~ 1/7.5 of a penny.

https://yalls.org/ is a bit more than 1/6 of a penny, it's 4 pennies on average to keep reading what someone has written.

This site we're on takes it up to 100 sats per bump but even that. The convenience of distributing real monetary value in these tiny sums can open up a market with participation the likes of which has never been seen. This is what reverses depressions! Spending patterns bring direct knowledge into our society as a whole.

I recommend the Hayek essay "THE USE OF KNOWLEDGE IN SOCIETY" for anyone interested in the prices=knowledge idea, it's freely available online.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @teodor 20 Aug 2023

Thank you very much!

50 sats \ 2 replies \ @teodor 20 Aug 2023

In the meantime I also found a very good sats resources here: www.stacksats.how/#stack-sats

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Michelson_Morley OP 21 Aug 2023

Fantastic, thank you. Been looking for something like this

60 sats \ 0 replies \ @teodor 21 Aug 2023

You're welcome!

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @SatsCats 20 Aug 2023

Thank you for your honesty and insight. It helps with my own demons, and your post has reassured me that it is never too late to pivot and come back to what got me interested in this in the first place.

100 sats \ 3 replies \ @orthwyrm 20 Aug 2023

Is there anything happening on alts that you consider interesting, which would be worthwhile building on Bitcoin?

31 sats \ 2 replies \ @Michelson_Morley OP 20 Aug 2023

Nothing on ethereum, I was notified they made some updates in their protocol so that contracts can now initiate buys, instead of just EOAs and......zzzzZZZZZzzzzz sorry i drifted off. :D

Only thing i keep up with is Monero, Got my eye on them. Currently they're working a lot with integration of the (TOR-like, but not the same) anonymous internet layer I2P. That can have some fun wild wests to roam when it gets ready. How about you?

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @shyfire 20 Aug 2023

Monero, nice btc layer 2

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nerd2ninja 21 Aug 2023

Can you go into further detail on this? I know Bitcoin only connects to IPs and not for addresses because for addresses are infinite and therefore a Sybil attack risk

At least, that's the thought process.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @0fje0 20 Aug 2023

Good to have you here.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @SpaceHodler 20 Aug 2023

Way to go man!

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @DiracDelta 20 Aug 2023

Congratulations on not being a sociopath 🫂

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @Artilekt 20 Aug 2023

who has the most at the end. simple as

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @birdeye21 20 Aug 2023

Welcome brotha 🫡

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @dieselbaby 21 Aug 2023

By the way, this is to the OP and any other devs out there -- I have an amazing idea for a website that would be a fantastic platform to integrate lightning into, and no one has built anything like it yet. It wouldn't be too difficult to pull off -- the basic gist of it is that it would essentially be a site with a video player and a running jukebox style playlist, where people would be able to add a URL like a youtube URL or a URL from a few other whitelisted type sites, into a form (after adding/connecting to their lightning wallet), and then depending on how long the video was and a few other factors, it would generate a LN invoice for them to pay in order to have the video added to the queue.

People could also pay to skip the queue and get their video played next for an additional fee, and there would also be a chat alongside the video player similar to a livestream on youtube or twitch, etc. This would basically be a lightning network version of an existing platform which was built on a layer 1 memecoin chain (which is an actual joke and is mostly dedicated towards literally helping people learn development, and charity, etc.) called banano, because it's the lowest fee thing that people could utilize for such a project...but lightning would work excellently for this use case. The site is called JungleTV.live in case anyone who is reading this is interested in checking it out, basically functions as I described...I have some ideas for additional features though that I would love to build and create a lightning version of this kind of app/site, if anyone is interested in doing so.

In the event that something along these lines sounds like it might be of interest to others, or if you'd want to chat and brainstorm on some cool LN we can build together, let me know, drop me a message on my profile page here and I'll get back to you ASAP. I am a pretty competent designer and would like to work on a team with others interested in making something cool for LN

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @calle 21 Aug 2023

Welcome. I hope you'll enjoy the development experience. Check out LNbits if you're working with Lightning, it makes life a lot easier: https://lnbits.com/

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @GlobalThreat 1 Feb

https://fightclub.profullstack.com -- we need some crypto talent

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @shyfire 21 Aug 2023

Can you think of a single thing that ETH did on the financial instrumentation side that was ported to Bitcoin or that should be ported to Bitcoin?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @maxBTC 21 Aug 2023

Welcome, so happy that you found your way here instead of doubling down! I’m certain NFT’s will have its use (on Bitcoin) and it’ll all make sense for you in time (like it already does).

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @mikhael28 21 Aug 2023

It is my sincere desire that fraudulent NFT cases will be, at some point, retroactively prosecuted. AI will help with this I’m sure. Lots of people were hurt, and the people responsible should pay.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Car 20 Aug 2023

Congrats👏👏👏

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @notgeld 20 Aug 2023

Yes.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @0260378aef 20 Aug 2023

NFTs being a fraud (or a 'scam' - don't like that word, overused) ... I mean that's not dependent on a particular cryptocurrency :) It's just a dumb idea that some people like for whatever reason. There's a ton of that rubbish on bitcoin (really, it started on bitcoin, way back in 2014).

I'm glad you feel that way about LN now and how it has developed. It's still not quite there if we want something with decent privacy and mass market usability, but it's a very practical, real technology. I use it every day.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @eggos 20 Aug 2023

Blockchains suck haha

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SaToSHiWoMaN 4 Mar outlawed

stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.