All: please keep threads like this from degenerating into the same-old-flamewar we've already had hundreds of times at this point. It has become super tedious. Also, tedious threads inevitably turn nasty (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
If you have something genuinely new or curious to say, great. Otherwise please move on.
I see that CSVCHAIN is "held in cold storage on this USB drive" a 1 GB thumb drive. This seems to imply an upper bound on the number of NFTs on CSVCHAIN. How, I wonder, does the creator of this project expect to scale CSVCHAIN beyond this limit?
Additionally, can we secure guarantees that the project owner is safely ejecting the USB drive in question?
I don't know how many times I need to repeat this FACT on this site, but socks are NOT immutable. How many holes do you have in your 7 year old socks? I'd wager a LOT. How many mismatched socks do you have in your drawer? I'd wager, AGAIN, a LOT.
The only way to make this truly secure, is to have 2 USB thumb drives, plugged into a different side of the machine (god hope you have a machine with USB ports on both sides). Then, saw the machine in half, right down the middle. I'll find the crypto paper where I read about that.
One of the most fascinating things I learned as a kid is that you can cut a Planaria flatworm in half, and each half regenerates the missing half. So now you have two Planaria.
If this works for the CSVCHAIN PC, you could have exponentially increasing compute power and storage!
Regarding the socks, a good trick is to use two drawers. One drawer has only matched pairs of socks. Unmatched single socks go in the second drawer, and some of them will eventually find a matching sock.
I plan to write an article on this. I will call it Socks and the Singles Drawer.
Socks are in fact immutable infrastructure. When your EC2 instance crashes, you shut it down and provision a new one. When your socks get holes, you throw them out and buy new ones. This isn't 2010 anymore, you really think people debug their servers and mend their socks?
The threads built on NFT-w (natural fibre textile, wool) don't have these issues and can be spun up in a more eco-friendly way. All these garment-haters that talk about how cotton requires huge amounts of land and water don't seem to understand that we have already solved these issues by using a BAT (basic ALPACA token), and those of us who bought BAT early will be riding this kid all the way to new zeeland!
EDIT: the downvoters are just people who don't know how a POW (proof of wool) exchange works, or are in denial about how we can scale it by using clumps to have localized, bidirectional hair-pulls. It can scale from dual-crimps all the way up to a felt.
Only up to a certain age. Once you pass 50 or take up hiking, you start buying serious pet socks. Merino wool triple layer moisture wicking tough heel socks? Shut up and take my money, REI!
Has anybody ever thought of something like a real world NFT? Imagine if you took a bunch of dried plant pigments and mixed them with oil and smeared them onto a canvas. Because it is physical it couldn't be duplicated or double-spent and it has a simple materials-based minting cost. I don't think anybody has done this before and there is probably a large market for buying and selling something like this. These are early days.
This is not a good metaphor for NFTs. The content of any NFT can be perfectly duplicated by anyone. The only part of an NFT that matters is the signature. A better analogy would be musicians signing CDs / vinyls, sports players signing player cards / equipment, etc.
People buying NFTs created by nobodies are simply getting scammed. The physical metaphor here would be like paying a random amateur sports player to sign some equipment.
Anyone can make an NFT and stuff the same random number(s) into it that the contract received from the VRF. The difference is in who made thr NFT. Most people wouldn't find an NFT interesting if it's just a random number, made by a random person. An NFT which was produced by a smart contract might be exactly the same, but it is more interesting because some (usually centralized) game or service uses that random number to represent something else. That game or service is only interested in NFTs created by their smart contract.
The problems with this 'witless' proposal is that we have no way of auditing the supply, and politicians will betray the trust of the users by debasing it. Also, we have no trust anchor with the 'official witless key', which presumably should be considered compromised in the above commit.
It also seems to depend on the file hosting services of a large software company for distribution of its public keys.
The problem with these straw man arguments is they often miss the entire point of the technology, and folks read them and walk away without understand exactly the problems the parodied technology solves.
This does have some humorous points, but generally leaves the reader with a confused and incorrect view of how both the USD and cryptocurrencies work.
Still tho, what is the point of this page?
Is it trying to say 'you dont need a blockchain?' or 'this is a deliberately bad solution that is solved by a blockchain'?
Next you will want a building in which to keep these objects, which will of course need heating and lighting (need I even start to compute the power cost…) and will take up real estate that could otherwise be used for apartments where people could literally LIVE!
You’ve also failed to account for right clickers (so named for the click of a camera shutter, normally triggered by a button to the right of the camera) who can simply take a picture of your object and trade it as they like… This will surely reduce the value of any one of your works to zero!
Where's the smart contract capability? Smart contracts are important in certain applications, which is why I store purchases in XML and do transformative contracts in XSLT. Version 2.0 of XSLT is Turing-Complete, with the added advantage that XSLT syntax is a specialized form of XML, so I only have to use one syntax for coins and contracts. I call mine Dotcom Bubble Chain.
It may or may not surprise you to find out that the U.S. Navy came ->this<- close to trying to standardize all data storage and data interchange on XML, in 2018, so that we could use XSLT and other XML technologies so that they could "Enable maximum use of commercial products built to this standard", "Improve cybersecurity at the data element layer by using the XML
Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) protocol", and "Enable compression of data using the XML EXI specification for efficient bandwidth usage over limited satellite communication channels".
That's quite a lag. Peak XML was probably 2000 if I recall correctly. That said, XSLT is pretty cool from a language standpoint. I wouldn't want to program in it all day anymore than I'd want to program all day in Brainfuck, but you have to admire the weirdness of it.
Nah, they've been at that since at least 2005, when I worked there, and I'm pretty sure it was in their guidelines for years at that point. My guess is that they still have that in their guidelines.
For the most part, when doing a procurement, you'd just check a box that the software supported XML in some form (and many vendors added some stupid XML feature, even if their software didn't have a need for it at all), and it would satisfy that requirement.
The Navy (and wider DoD) had also been pushing XML-based technologies earlier, of course, but that's less damning when it was happening when the entire IT industry was pushing those technologies.
I'm working on something even better. XMLambda (XMλ) implemented in Haskell, which is revolutionary and exciting such that I have investors throwing money bags of money over my backyard fence with a paper contracts attached (they don't trust other chains)
This is amazing. It might actually make it easier for me to explain what NFTs actually are if they're completely separated from a blockchain and the rest of the malarkey.
I'm a huge NFT enthusiast and collector. This project gets NFTs exactly right. It's frankly refreshing to see someone seemingly get it - most of the critiques are just so bad. It's just that: I don't see the problem at all. I'd encourage you all to buy NFTs on CSVChain, ideally from real artists committed to their craft.
This is roycoding, the creator of CSVchain. Thanks everyone for checking it out.
Just so you know, I currently have a bit of a backlog of requests to manually process.
This was all very unexpected. I made this recently and then today started getting messages that Matt Levine wrote about something similar in his newsletter today. I tweeted at him and he then tweeted about it to his large following. So here we are on HN!
If you've contacted me, I promise to message you back, but it might take a day or so.
I have one-upped TXTCHAIN with PAPERCHAIN. In order to ensure decentralization, I have a webcam pointed at my PAPERCHAIN paper ledger that is active at all times. Other PAPERCHAIN paper ledger node-people maintain the same setup, and they duplicate the changes I make to my PAPERCHAIN, and vice versa.
Longest latency in the game, invest before it’s too late.
I don't understand why people view the ability to copy something as a negative with NFTs. Everything can be copied. Even physical objects can be copied. Why does a museum buy a Van Gogh when they can just commission a replica, or easier yet, take a photo and print it on canvas?
> Why does a museum buy a Van Gogh when they can just commission a replica, or easier yet, take a photo and print it on canvas?
A photo of a Van Gogh is not a Van Gogh. But JPEG bytes that SHA-256 to 97db5f2753176670ae8b2d8a2aad44d8bb830aee768629488685f4fc1d7a75f1 will also have a copy hash to the same value. The copy is the original, in a way you can't do with a Van Gogh.
NFT fans try to fix this by making something other than the art itself 'non-fungible', but in the real world it's the art itself that is fungible (and where it's not, such as buying a CD, you don't see people freaking out about how valuable their Taylor Swift RED album #22,724,123 is so special and unique).
NFTs are interesting because they support smart contracts, use a cryptocurrency wallet system to manage value and ownership, can be minted in quantities > 1, support unlockable content, etc.
Amazing website! I think it also (inadvertently) paints a very clear value proposition as to why NFTs make more sense on a blockchain than on a central service.
Ah yes, where NFTs are stored on CVS receipts. Given the recent meter long receipts I've gotten from my local CVS, it's entirely possible they are already doing this.
Yes it does. It's curious since he's listed as the first owner on this, and just announced he was making an Excelchain (like CSVchain but with Excel -- the more technology the better I guess?)
Matt Levine is a great writer. I have little interest in finance but enjoy his newsletter immensely. Highly recommended.
My current way to explain to non techies is that it's like those "Name a star" sales:
* Artificial seeming scarcity out of something that's inherently abundant
* No actual ownership of actual thing
* Instead, a overly-detailed focus on mechanics of the process: We will send you a gilded certificate; we will put your entry into a leather bound book; this cook will be registered with United States Copyright Office; it will be added to Library of Congress, etc etc etc - giving seeming legitimacy to the endevour
The only thing that's missing, and it's a critical difference, is the complete lack of secondary market for named stars :D
True, its more like an artist assigned numbers to all their works and sold the right to put your name on a website next to that number. Maybe for some artists that means something like getting a shoutout on their Patreon but totally worthless in abstract.
Sure. But if we create a community of art collectors for whom this sort of shoutout does mean something, then these things start to have concrete value - because you can sell yours to someone else. This means artists now can earn money by selling such intangible works, which strikes me as unequivocally a good thing.
And there may be hundreds of similarly "unique" marriage certificates sold, and the person you're supposedly married to has never even heard of you, yet you're absolutely convinced she's in love with you forever.
Sure, but how am I different from million other guys on the street or Opensea.
Lets start at the beginning. You have analogy wrong ( which is a problem with analogies - they are open to interpretation ). The joke part says the following:
1. You have a wife.
2. She is not behaving like your wife.
3. You have a marriage certificate saying she is your wife
And NFTs follow the same pattern, because:
NFTs say they are your wife. They do not behave like your wife ( everyone can have them ). You have a digital certificate saying that NFT is your wife regardless.
**
As a guy on the street, I only see a value of selling fake wife certificate. I do not see value buying it.
Well, it seems you have your own analogy wrong ;-) [By the way, the “A marriage certificate that you bought from some random guy on the street and has no legal significance.” was not mine.]
Seriously though, implying that somebody having sex with multiple people makes them worthless is horrible. Also, if someone and their partner have incompatible expectations or boundaries then they should break up. What's forcing you to stay with your hypothetical wife? Seems like she'd be better off without you anyway.
The marriage certificate is what gets you various benefits, not the pretty stylizing on it (or the way the spouse looks) or the people that took a picture of it.
NFT collectors are valuing that authentication to various benefits first, and imagery second.
I get the impression people are not able to separate whats going on in the 1/1 market versus the collections marker. Just an allergy to the acronym NFT.
Quite the opposite. Marriage is a legal contract that, among other things, bestows certain rights and obligations. There is a reason 'adultery' is something that counts as marital misconduct.
> your wife is being drilled by everyone and you can't do anything about it
I interpret this as "someone owes you to not have sex with other people" (which is a common assumption in most marriages), not that someone owes you sex...
No it doesn't. You just made that up. Your comment implies you're just someone who likes to go looking for things to get outraged about. See, I can make up "implications" too.
My understanding is that this is not correct, it conflates all NFT transactions without nuance, if one buys intellectual property via NFT and can prove it (which is ostensibly NFT's raison d'etre) then I see no reason why they couldn't exercise their rights to it (i.e. sue for copyright infringement, ect)
No, it's a thorough gotcha for a shallow topic to which money has given the illusion of depth. If you need a centralized entity to enforce the rights associated with a decentralized system, the decentralized system is unnecessary. We've long had solutions for the purchase of digital assets on any platform you choose, with ownership and usage rights enforced by the state.
Exactly. This is my problem with all these things people claim blockchain technology will solve. People think it's magically going to solve all the problems created by the government. They think it's a work around to fix corruption.
No matter how hard you blockchain you're still under the law of the government. You still have to pay taxes in your country's currency. Your "decentralized" blockchain still relies on centralization. Your internet infrastructure is centralized and ran usually by the government. The power grid you depend on is centralized.
My point is your blockchain technology still relies on the government. China even outlawed Bitcoin mining. YOU ARE NOT GOING TO FIX POLITICAL PROBLEMS WITH BLOCKCHAIN.
There is one political problem that is solved by Bitcoin, in fact it is why it was created. That is the problem of Central Banks debasing the monetary supply.
They knew that when it was created that States would crush it like they had crushed other attempt. With Bitcoin, they could not. I don't think its safe to say its under the law. The law is to the side. Bitcoin exists in a numerical and computation universe that cares not for the laws of man.
> People think it's magically going to solve all the problems created by the government
No one other than extremists (which exist in all groups) believe this, using this as a reason to hate NFTs makes you appear unreasonable and not grounded in reality
> No one other than extremists (which exist in all groups) believe this
This is the main argument I hear. Tell me then, how else is it useful?
> using this as a reason to hate NFTs makes you appear unreasonable and not grounded in reality
It's a perfectly valid reason to hate NFTs among so many others. Instead of since centralized authority such as a government keeping track of who owns something it's a "decentralized" blockchain.
Your implicit claim is that NFTs offer nothing more than decentralization which is not true, as it's basis is a public tamper resistant ledger that is difficult to censor. How many systems like this exist already? How many are easier to use than NFTs? How many of your prospective customers are likely to know about or want to use this alternate system versus NFTs?
To claim it has no benefits other than decentralization seems odd to me
Edit: I can't respond past this point as I'm being throttled
The only novel benefit, as you say, is "decentralized trust".
The blockchain portion of the NFT in most cases is simple a pointer to the asset and the owner, with the actual asset being off-chain managed by a single entity that can do whatever they please with it.
Why does the ownership need to be decentralized if ultimately, the asset is mutable?
What problem is solved via a public tamper resistant ledger outside of the hypothetical? I routinely make purchases outside of a public tamper resistant ledger without issue.
I’d argue that what you’ve stated is just the mechanism by which decentralisation is achieved (you haven’t identified any additional benefits).
Still, legally speaking, who is exactly enforcing it? Opensea? MPAA? I get that is going to be a fun question to answer since you can technically sue for anything ( but its not a guarantee that a judge will throw it out if he/she sees something sufficiently in the 'wasting my time' category ).
> Can the NFT be cryptographically verified to be authentic?
No. Authenticity of the data is not part of the concept.
What would that even mean in the context of non-physical contracts? You can buy an experience as an NFT (i.e. dinner with a C-list celeb) and the NFT serves as nothing more than a receipt saying you purchased that experience. Doesn't have to be unique (several people could by the same), doesn't include any specific metadata relating to the buyer.
What kind of "cryptographic authenticity" would even apply in such case?
It gets worse with digital assets if all you get is an IPFS URI. The actual data can be removed or altered at any point without the NFT itself being affected in way. Unless the asset itself is stored in the blockchain (which is practically impossible for anything beyond thumbnail-sized images) there's nothing to validate on the BC besides the token itself.
You don’t have to worry about it if you solve real problems.
The cryptocurrency backlash is coming after a decade of salespeople showing up to make breathless pitches about a fantasy world where you need to pay up front for results they think they might be able to deliver if you give them enough money, but no guarantees.
(Remember the guy who mocked Dropbox? He existed but very clearly did not speak for even a majority of people here.)
Also, if you truly believe in a technology and its future, doesn't "everyone hating it" just widen the inefficiency gap for some folks to make a bunch of money on a technology they are certain will be valuable one day?
I'm not criticizing this particular submisssion but rather the fact that there is now *every* single day a thread where people hate on crypto.
What is the benefit for the community if a place which used to be about acquiring knowledge now spends their time on hating the same thing over and over again every day?
I agree, it is. However, that's the collective choice that's been made, and it's very clear it's been made. So I accept that.
I'll post on crypto threads when I feel I have something to contribute, but I won't allow myself to be drug into the muck.
There's other venues for good discussion on crypto topics, so you're not really losing anything. And the large majority here doesn't feel they're losing anything. It works out.
This is the kind of joke for people that think they are clever but don't really understand the situation. Its kind an ignorant position, reminds me of a 'brb downloading RAM' joke. Or sending someone a plastic Bitcoin. or Faxing dollar bills.
Someone made a web site, ok. Guess we don't need fancy Blogging platforms now.
You don't even need a cryptographic signature if it goes to court. It helps, but not specifically required. Also, a court has no power to overturn a blockchain transaction - unless they have a bunch of miners and energy to rewrite the chain.
Some other differences include append only nature of blockchains. I don't know the ledger has not been modified or reordered or had entries removed. Also if the author doesn't like you, he could ignore your transactions or even drop the entry from the CSV. With say, Ethereum, you would be able to know all these things up front.
The point of this joke site is to say "look NFTs are just a set of records", while missing the whole point of
trustless, censorship resistant, append only, peer to peer ledgers
The thing is, we saw these jokes about Bitcoin 10+ years ago. Its easy to point fun at things that one doesn't really understand. I imagine lots of people see this joke and go "Ha! See! You dont need a blockchain" while missing the point entirely.
This is a key point of discussion. You and OP probably have very different definitions of value; you can be 100% right from your perspective and 100% wrong from theirs. And if that's the case, you need to unify your definitions of value before you can discuss the merits of anything built on top of that definition. Or just agree to disagree.
Frankly I find it hard to do, when depending on who you’re talking to, the intended utility is not even definitive (e.g. a currency vs a “store of value”). Maybe this points at something larger.
The site certainly helps make the case for a blockchain.
"Send an email to kick off this manual process with lots of waiting for another human to do a thing, and once he has your money, he may or may not do what he said he would, and if he does, hope he types in your information correctly, and if he does, hope that the one copy of the ledger hosted on some guy's computer doesn't go down, and if it doesn't, hope you don't have to sell because the marketplace is charging 10% rent on transactions and you have no alternatives..."
If you have something genuinely new or curious to say, great. Otherwise please move on.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html