Technology
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There is also an astonishing amount of shilling and pushing of NFTs. Media, sadly, often just prints ICO/NFT/etc projects' press releases and helps hype them, instead of doing some delving. And coinbros exploit that, extracting cold hard cash from people who see themselves as "investors", and who are in fact just participants in ponzi/pyramid schemes; crypto folk are even quite open about this sometimes:
And what I find particularly damning for the whole scene is that nobody from within the scene calls such crap out! FLOSS community is not perfect, for example, but bullshit gets called out. Projects that make exorbitant claims about security (snakeoil, etc), get called out. But crypto scene acts as if that's bad for business. Can't generate "bad press", right? Because if one does, they and potentially the whole scene is NGMI, HFBP!
And frankly, I have not yet seen a single use of NFTs that is not either unnecessary (as in: whatever is being done could be done as well or better without NFTs), or outright scammy/snakeoily (most of the time). Not. One.
So this "NFT=bad" association is, sadly, well-deserved. And those negative stories are, I feel, necessary; they would not be necessary if crypto people dealt with scams and snakeoil themselves. But they don't. 🤷♀️
I find that analogy really strained (especially in the context of all what I wrote above and the general scammyness of the whole crypto/NFT/web3 sphere) and difficult to engage with without touching on sensitive stuff related to xenophobia, racism, etc.
It probably will. But not calling out crypto/NFT/web3 scams just to preserve the few potentially useful and non-scammy projects would be effectively aiding and abeting the scammers. If people connected to the crypto community are worried about this kind of stuff, it's high time they start calling scammers and snakeoil peddlers in that community out and otherwise dealing with it themselves, instead if pushing back against any and all criticism.
I think we have to differentiate the technical factors from the human ones. Calling out security vulnerabilities is not a problem, but when the cause is between the monitor and the chair then things get much more complicated.
Just not for the wrong reasons. It would be silly to say "internet" = "porn", or "peer to peer" = "piracy", so for the same reason, "NFT" = "fraud" is just as misdirected, imho.
I'll agree to not continue with the simil about xenophobia since it's true that it's sensitive (though I do still think it does fit), but at least I hope you do accept these other broad generalizations that are mischaracterizing entire technologies that are very much different from that negative purpose someone might want to attribute to them due to how circunstancially "optimal" some specific instances might be for those purposes.
Saying "the association is well-deserved" already is admitting to the mischaracterization.
It would be great to find a solution for distributed domain names that was done well or better than what can be done with NFTs, it's something that p2p distributed networks haven't managed to solve without blockchain tech.
I'm all for calling any and all scams. Just as long as we separate the technology from the scam. My problem isn't with this article, but with the reactions in the comments that seem to jump to conclusions and paint things with broad strokes, assuming NFT = fraud.
This is all human-made. One way or another, the cause is always between monitor and the chair. One of the reasons I find the crypto space so toxic and dangerous is their insistence on technosolutionism.
Your analogy falls apart due to how small the ratio of non-scammy uses of NFTs to scammy ones is. Internet is actually useful for other things than porn, peer-to-peer is actually useful for more things than unlicensed non-gatekeeped access to culture ("piracy" is stealing shit on the high seas). There might be useful ways to employ NFTs, but I have not seen them.
And again: the fact that NFT proponents focus on pushing back against any and all criticism instead of spending this energy on pushing back against scammers in the crypto sphere is very telling.
And they will not be able to solve it with blockchain tech.
The difficult problems in domain names are not related to figuring out who controls which name when, they are related to whether or not someone should be allowed to control a given name at a given time.
We're talking legal issues (trademarks, scams, malware watering holes, etc), disputes (should I be allowed to control the name associated with a different entity/person? sometimes I should, parody and criticism are important; sometimes I shouldn't, online harassment is a real thing). Neither of these can be written down in code, be it on blockchain or not.
These are ultimately human issues that need to be sorted out (often piecemeal, due to infinite complexity of human relations) by humans. As are other issues that blockchain-based boondoggles were proposed for, like: the "AbortionDAO" galaxy-brained idea linked before, or the "fix journalism with crypto" idea from a few years back, or the "fix climate with crypto" thing, or trying to pretend NFTs help artists (they don't).
There is a reason I keep saying that blockchain tech is a solution in search of a problem. But it's worse than that: what keeps happening, as with all the "great ideas" mentioned above, is that cryptobros decide "we will solve
<this complicated problem>with crypto", and ignore the nuances and complexities involved. This inevitably leads to people who have been involved in a given scene for years or decades going "oh for fuck's sake, just stop!", and now they have to spend their limited energy and resources not only on trying to fix the problem itself, but also on pushing back against clueless technosolutionists whose ideas actually make things worse.It's literally this XKCD, but with "crypto" instead of "algorithms". And with even less self-awareness (in the comic strip at least the "algo bro" admits in the end that the problem is perhaps a bit more complicated than he expected; haven't seen such behavior from cryptobros yet).
And the worst part is that this is assuming that the cryptobro in question honestly and genuinely wants to help solve a problem, instead of trying to cash out by associating their crypto scam with an important issue and using this to drive it "to the moon". Which seems to be the case quite often, too.
If the shoe fits...
Preciselly, you can't stop technosolutionism if you don't differentiate between the technical factors and the human ones.
Saying technical issues are all the same as human ones or in the same level (just because they are "human-made") is in fact technosolutionist.
The goal is to solve human issues by manipulating technology, not solving problems in the technology by manipulating humans. Manipulating humans is not in the same level as manipulating technology... I think that this should be pretty clear.
The issue is that if the nature of NFTs already makes such purchases "scammy" for you then, of course, most of it will be "scammy". But note that something feeling scammy to you is not the same as committing actual fraud. If someone is fully aware that they are buying something because they purposefully want to speculate with it in an extremely unstable market, then it's their own fault if the risk they took doesn't pay off. That's not the same thing as getting scammed.
Myself, I'm not one to invest in such risks, and in fact, right now my bank is charging me money just because I have the money stored in my account doing nothing, which it makes no sense that they'd charge me for that! I wish I could just have it all as cash stored in a vault at home and don't need banks, but sadly sending cash by post is not exactly secure (nor generally accepted). It's too bad there isn't a safe and government-backed cryptocurrency infrastructure in place. I would certainly find that useful.
Some have already used the blockchain for that purpose though. Gittorrent used the bitcoin blockchain before (I'm not up to date on what's the current state on that project, I hear it's no longer maintained and there are other alternatives). And there's also the ENS for .eth domain names which are distributed, or am I wrong?
But those are human issues, they should not be in the code itself, just like they aren't in the code of current DNS servers either. Instead, the tech should just be transparent and flexible enough to allow that kind of human control (again, humans are meant to manipulate the technology, not the other way around).
If anything, I'd imagine a public ledger in a blockchain with proper authorization using government issued signatures would make it easier to track and identify the owner and have legislation impart whatever sanction or punishment. Wouldn't it? (I'm not even sure if the current DNS system allows this, I believe you can get domain names with some level of anonymity if you really want to).
I think the problem here is getting to the sweet spot between privacy and identification, maybe with different levels for different purposes. If this was controlled by each government and there were some layers in place and measures that allowed some level of anonymity at the same time as allowed disclosure in circumstances that require it, this could be a tool very controlled and safe.
In particular, I think a public p2p ledger would be helpful to have traceability of public funds in a way that can be peer-reviewed without depending on the government "accidentally" losing a hard disk or destroying evidence "by mistake". Which is something I've seen happen more than once in my country whenever there's an internal investigation for corruption.