oh boy have I got some more news for you! the latest fad (Chia) is staking your hard disk space, so expect SSDs to follow the lead shortly and rise in price as much as GPUs if not more..

tragically, it's exactly this phobia of discussing anything related to sensitive matters that may HUWT FEEWINGS in private settings that compounds this situation where people en masse just can't (or wouldn't) have a reasonable conversation about these same sensitive matters anywhere else as well. as someone said somewhere, "we Americans don't debate, we CHANT". so people now see almost existential threat in others holding incompatible views - the "everyone who disagrees with me is literally Hitler" syndrome. talk about developing emotional intelligence..

this. we've already had a virtual world craze back in 2005. please, not again.

so that readers still have no idea what exactly "minting cash digitally" and "digital currency" means. (the article itself is conveniently paywalled.)

it seems it is more than just a payment system (which, according to the summary, is "just a way to move money electronically").
it also seems it is not a cryptocurrency.

is it a setup where citizens (and possibly non-citizens) can open an account directly with the Chinese Central Bank and use payment systems to pay each other and businesses directly? then that's not a currency, just a form of currency issuance.

then what is it?

I just frame this development as proof that even with (or especially with) the highly dubious and speculative nature of the current setup, there is genuine interest, so the opportunity is clearly there. and if there is demand, sooner or later a properly implemented service will emerge and win this market - which would also mark the first time cryptocurrencies would actually have real value.

sure, current implementation of NFTs is lacking in multiple regards. but at the very least, with digital assets you could ostensibly "own" their hash that is long enough so it cannot be brute-forced - and then anyone who has a copy of the file somewhere could verify that it indeed "belongs" to whoever "owns" the NFT. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in future albums and artwork would be sold along with an NFT tied to a "legal number", which is calculated based on a "master tape" kind of bit image - AND which would also convey obligations on the part of the IP owners to issue similar NFTs to the holders in case the of format changes or simple edits - basically anything that would be legally considered "same piece of artwork", you would still "own" it. it's actually not that hard to implement even today, just that no labels still care enough, but if there's money in it, why wouldn't they?

in other words, none of the justified criticisms of the current NFT business invalidate the whole idea - I just see multiple people standing on the ground, pointing at the Wrights brothers' invention, and saying things like "there's no way this would fly more than 200 ft" or "what practical use could it possibly have".

I agree, this downside is a consequence of the current, very naïve, implementation of NFTs, where the art object itself is not a part of the smart contract, but rather just the URL is. it technically could, however that would require to store it as part of the chain, which obviously wouldn't scale within a single chain, so other architecture should be applied in this case. there is a much better implementation in NBA TopShot:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90...

I expect someone like Christie's to sign with them or get their own team to develop a similar product, which would clearly have a shot at being the de facto standard of digital ownership of artwork-related NFTs. so this problem is not inherent to the technology, just to its current implementation.

are you describing issues with approach and technology or issues with existing applications of said technology? I am mostly with you with regards to existing blockchains, but I view them as proof of concept and research/insight material for possible applications rather than models or "future winners". if there is a "killer app" for blockchain, it would flourish either on one of the existing chains or on a new one that has the right tech. speaking of which Facebook truly took off in 2007 when they made it easy for web developers to display their creations as part of the Facebook canvas; in a similar fashion, once the tech matures so that multiple dapp developers are able to try their hand at it (which is what I am personally doing in my spare time), someone may figure out that killer application. or maybe no one will! but we won't know for sure until we have tried, and for now only a couple projects, none which is called Ethereum, is anywhere close to developer-friendliness.

as for Proof of Stake, IMO the very fact that it mimics reality where the rich get richer make blockchains that utilize it more likely to see acceptance and eventual adoption by the said rich. you could turn and walk away in disgust, or you could accept it by not subscribing to the Just World Fallacy and try to bring some value by utilizing the tech, or you could, I dunno, instead go the Marxist way and call for the revolution to fight the unfairness instead? we can all make our picks.

well sure, it will not live forever in the same sense as our internet will not live forever and slashdot will not live forever and these comments we're typing or GPT-3'ing or what have you will also not live forever. but if it's "good enough" to last a meaningful period of time and bring value to people during said meaningful time, some smart and some unscrupulous people can make money on it. it's not like this hasn't happened before; I made a decent chunk of cash designing and operating a Facebook game which hasn't been a clone of any existing game, and many of my players I keep in touch with are grateful to me for their experiences over ten years ago, even while social games (the way we understood them back then) turned out to be a dead end.

I'm a technology enthusiast, not a scammer. I do think blockchain and dapps do open up some interesting opportunities, and the crypto hype is unfortunately getting in the way, unlike other exciting new technologies like machine learning and AR, which cannot be marketed to laypeople efficiently. the hype will die down, and the tech and applications will stay. I don't care about current blockchains much, they can come and go - after all, the underlying tech and thought has already moved way beyond Bitcoin's PoW and Ethereum's gas economy; but if there is ever a blockchain killer app, which DeFi still ain't, that would mean it's here to stay.

so there're two somewhat related and different aspects of an NFT as we use this term today: digital scarcity and legal rights.

one is not unlike a collectible version of a music album. say, a band you love and follow releases a new album. many people will buy only the hit track for $0.99 or somesuch; fewer fans will buy the entire album for $10-20. now in order to take care for the customer surplus, there will likely be a cassette / vinyl version, costing somewhere like $100-$300 and possibly a few personally signed by the band members with custom booklets and thanks to you personally for a few grand.

yet what you are paying for is, essentially, feeling of gratitude and involvement at best and bragging rights at worst - as the actual music that everyone is getting is basically the same lossless file. so the brilliant find with NFTS is: how about we auction ONE copy (or sometimes a few copies) of this music's digital representation and mark it so that the owner has bragging rights of owning THE file? you could make a point that proof of ownership of a "unique copy" is nowhere near the same league as physical possession of the item that has value, but first, if some people are willing to pay for that, who are we to tell them otherwise? and second, if we assume that at some point KYC laws evolve into a coherent legal framework where you would be able to make ownership of cryptowallet of a token holding account public (not unlike blue checkmarks in social networks), and engineers agree on standards, it would be easy to make physical items that access the internet and display ownership which ostensibly can be used for bragging. I can't fully understand what goes on in the heads of UHNWs so I don't know what kind of proof they exactly need - something you hang on the wall? but surely there will be ways to satisfy that.

legal rights are an entirely different beast, as ability to exercise transactions and confer legal rights based on smart contracts is largely a new thing. it is highly likely that from a legal perspective the person who bought the Dorsey tweet didn't actually "buy" it in any conventional sense of the word - they probably "bought" just a transferrable digital certificate saying something warm and fuzzy about connecting the holder with the tweet, along with few implied expectations - for example, that Dorsey doesn't issue another similar certificate later. and there is nothing preventing him doing so, at the very least he can pick a different platform to mint the same digital representation of tweet on - just like there is nothing preventing the band from issuing another "one of a kind" collectible if there is nothing physical that is actually "one of a kind" involved in it (like proverbial drumsticks used in a certain gig). yet again - if some people see value, and are paying for this, it's not THAT important whether we view their perception as being substantiated or not. we just need to see if this hype sustains after it dies down.

all in all, blockchain is a new set of technologies which is nowhere near maturity, despite all the hype. the jury for cryptos themselves is largely still out, as there is still no "killer dapp". NFTs have a shot but it's way too early to call.

the entire point of the blockchain is that it doesn't "poof out of existence for no reason at all", as the transaction showing you as the owner has been stored on the blockchain, so as long as there are nodes supporting this blockchain, theoretically it will live there forever. in this regard NFTs as not unlike internet domain names; some of them are worth millions and others next to nothing, and each of them is only worth anything because we assume that there will "always" be people who plug their computers into what is called the Internet today - and not, for example, some "fork" with its own DNS servers and governance rules, or even some other network that isn't compatible with today's internet. the key difference is that while Ethereum blockchain is the de facto standard for issuing tokens, at present no one said it will "win" in the end the same way technologies the modern Internet rests upon "won" and the current "instance" of the Internet also "won". you could say blockchain technology is still where networking technologies have been in the early 80s in this regard.

ok I understand now. but bandcamp has been around for like what now, ten years or so. which means to me, given its fairly obscure status, that this demand is not anywhere close to what would force the industry to become more artist-friendly. if you agree with this, then you would probably have to agree that lack of negotiating leverage from the creators is a sign of objective supply/demand situation rather than a genuine cornered market oligopoly problem.

are you trying to say there is demand (from listeners) for an off-major-platform music discovery service, which for some reason has gone unnoticed by everyone in the music business?

I dunno.. maybe because we signed a contract, under which I do some work that both we and my boss knew would have value for the company? is that a good answer?

music is a publisher's market and not a creator's market because musicians are essentially a commodity to the former, even though they technically aren't. again, if it wasn't, listeners wouldn't have been satisfied with what they got from labels and would have sought their music elsewhere. bandcamp is a great source of new music for myself and I have been supporting new bands there for quite some time, and soundcloud has also been around for a while. I wish there were more people like myself, I really do, but that simply isn't happening, and RIAAs and youtubes of this world are not at fault for that.

why exactly this isn't happening is a bit of a separate question; my line of thinking is that music used to be a form of communication which has been largely replaced by videos, so it became a niche'y thing - in other words, music simply doesn't play the same role for people today as it did in the 60s or 70s, and it's especially true now that there's a much lower entry barrier to create music. maybe this will change with time, but until then, we will still have oligopolies and majority of paying listeners who is OK with them. ultimately, I think there's laws supply and demand at work.

it really sounds like "I create, so I deserve to be paid". well guess what? you actually don't.

reality is, most people who pay for music don't NEED to hear you; they are doing just fine listening to whatever overproduced kind of stuff music industry provides them with these days. if they weren't, they would have gone somewhere else! but apparently sellaband is so much way behind youtube in playback counts, relatively few people are doing that. I have very little sympathy both with RIAA crowd and label crowds but it just seems they are doing their job just fine.

there are only so many hours in a day; there are only so many songs one is going to listen to in your lifetime, or any given year. as an artist, you just gotta accept the fact that it's highly likely that there is somebody that's doing a better job than you are, or because they are featured / promoted on existing platforms with discovery. I take zero pleasure in saying this, but life is unfair; deal with it.