21 sats \ 6 replies \ @Michelson_Morley OP 5 Sep 2023 \ parent \ on: I was a well-paid blockchain / web3 dev for years, but became disillusioned. bitcoin
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
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)?
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?
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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?
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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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How can I make an argument for using NFTs on blockchain when I'm fully against it?
How indeed. It's a very good question which deserves respect. "How do I make my opponents argument, when I know it is wrong?".
Your opponent believes in his argument. By trying to do the above, you will find the only way to convince (or, in a better word, teach) your opponent what is wrong about his position. You have to first show that you can see from his perspective.
I'l try it again. I now read through your post that I just zapped to point out, looking for what your position on the topic is and how I can relate to it.
I see this: "NFTs don't need decentralization.". I think, yes an imagedump NFT can also be served on a single file server, you could even add the key/sig mechanisms.
There is no need for 1000000 more computers literally doing the exact same thing that server is doing. We already have our Images. Applying this generally, NFTs are an antagonistic bacteria on the organism of blockchains.
Is this true?
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You have to first show that you can see from his perspective.
I saw that perspective and I explained why that worldview is wrong. I don't understand why I should support a point of view that's mathematically invalid.
Is this true?
More or less. You can of course shrink it to just one hash (like it's done on ETH) and store the file itself separately, but even in this case all you own is the hash which isn't scarce and proving that it corresponds to the bytes created by a certain person requires external sources of truth. Therefore a hash isn't by itself sufficient to establish the true ownership and it shouldn't be on blockchain as well because it's just spam.
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Very good. Yes, standard practice is to "shrink" the images by hashing. Thus you obtain another token for your image, in fact a non-fungible token for your image, because the hash was a cryptographic one. This means that the hash is irreversible, ownership of the images hash-token is the same thing as just ownership of the image. There is no change in scarcity at this stage.
I think we may have found a critical point of confusion here, in speaking of hashing. When I (or the smart contract) hashes an image, we are scrambling the image with an asymmetric hashing. It's not a simple checksum, is what I mean.
So hashing the image can only be done with the owners public key, and the resulting hash is hers to unlock— she needs no external oracle, she has her private key.
Are we still in agreement?
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