€2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP(twitter.com)
twitter.com
€2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP
https://twitter.com/garybrannan/status/1482866885989478411
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In the last ten years there has been a significant change in mainstream content from information (what) to personalities (who). A major driver has been the adoption of social media by the mainstream: Uncle Bob pawing his cell phone while on the toilet. Both closed circle SM (checking on your friends and acquaintances) and public facing SM (checking the influencers) have created a whole new, uncontrolled feeding ground to some old vices: Jaleousy and greed. Watching other people's lives and see them spending money and enjoying fineries in an (supposedly) unedited, reality-like format makes a lot of people feel that it must all be real and they should be living that live themselves. Whether it's about wealth, ideologies or any other aspect of lifestyle: Suddenly it's right there, dangled in front of them. This, coupled with the ease of packing in actionable links and buttons, creates a whole new dynamic where people get lured in by shiny things (crypto/NFS/MLM etc) only to get duped. It's a really old phenomenon, though.
> Whether it's about wealth, ideologies or any other aspect of lifestyle: Suddenly it's right there, dangled in front of them.
And for what it's worth, what is considered "luxury" has become more and more accessible/affordable or is not a status symbol any more: 7-series BMW models can be leased for ~800€ a month, luxury watches have fallen out of fashion, expensive clothing items can be rented or you just go for the trend of "fast fashion", even extremely expensive cell phones like Samsung's Galaxy Fold series can be had with a contract for under 100€ a month.
And if you're just looking for something to prop up your Instagram profile, everything you need sans cosmetic products can be rented for cheap - no need to actually buy all that stuff.
And for what it's worth, what is considered "luxury" has become more and more accessible/affordable or is not a status symbol any more: 7-series BMW models can be leased for ~800€ a month, luxury watches have fallen out of fashion, expensive clothing items can be rented or you just go for the trend of "fast fashion", even extremely expensive cell phones like Samsung's Galaxy Fold series can be had with a contract for under 100€ a month.
And if you're just looking for something to prop up your Instagram profile, everything you need sans cosmetic products can be rented for cheap - no need to actually buy all that stuff.
> what is considered "luxury" has become more and more accessible/affordable or is not a status symbol any more
This seems to be the reality for many HN users. But not being able to buy a home or even pay rent seems quite common in the general population.
This seems to be the reality for many HN users. But not being able to buy a home or even pay rent seems quite common in the general population.
Yeah the tech bubble is one of the worse ones. 800eur/month is not even possible for most people, let alone pocket change.
Not disagreeing with you but quite a few younger people driving those cars are living at their parents and have little to no other significant expenses. Yes, 800€/mo is a lot for many but for some it's in the "affordable if I don't do much else" category.
I've also heard about people pooling their money and driving them on alternating weekends. Luxury car ownership has gotten a lot cheaper than before when you needed to pay upfront or with hefty interest.
I've also heard about people pooling their money and driving them on alternating weekends. Luxury car ownership has gotten a lot cheaper than before when you needed to pay upfront or with hefty interest.
The real weirdness is that bad local policy has led to uneven inflation, so our cultural 'anchors' of luxury are all thrown off.
A luxury car? We've gotten 10x+ better at making those since the 1950's, so ofc it's cheaper.
A trip to the Maldives? Same.
A reasonable house to live in? Well, we've sort of gotten better at making those, but not as drastically, AND we've decided to make laws that make it harder to build more of them anyway.
Lot's of fun hierarchy of needs debates to be had from that.
A luxury car? We've gotten 10x+ better at making those since the 1950's, so ofc it's cheaper.
A trip to the Maldives? Same.
A reasonable house to live in? Well, we've sort of gotten better at making those, but not as drastically, AND we've decided to make laws that make it harder to build more of them anyway.
Lot's of fun hierarchy of needs debates to be had from that.
It would seem luxuries have gotten more accessible while necessities have gotten more dear. Not sure what that says about global versus local inequality.
That's luxury brands moving downmarket to cash in. I've seen a lot more Maseratis out in my part of the 'burbs than before. We're not the rich 'burbs or area of the city, but deeply middle-class, and I'm quite certain that hasn't changed. I suspect instead that brand has moved down-market.
Some try to ride the line and do both. Create an overpriced line that's maybe less well-made than the "real" ones, and slap your brand name all over it because some segments of society think advertising the right brand names and lots of fake gold and such are what rich people like, and they want to be like them while prominently advertising that they can afford "luxury". Then you sell them in different stores from where you sell your actually-luxury goods. A Gucci bag with the most prominent design element being "Gucci" tiled all over it isn't actually a luxury item. "Big pony" Ralph Lauren isn't even luxury-adjacent like the mainline brand is (or, at least, has been), it's trashy as hell—but they produce them for a reason, and in some stores that's nearly all they have. That's a signal of the kind of store you're in and who they're selling to, not a sign that luxury has become more accessible.
None of this is "luxury" becoming more affordable.
Some try to ride the line and do both. Create an overpriced line that's maybe less well-made than the "real" ones, and slap your brand name all over it because some segments of society think advertising the right brand names and lots of fake gold and such are what rich people like, and they want to be like them while prominently advertising that they can afford "luxury". Then you sell them in different stores from where you sell your actually-luxury goods. A Gucci bag with the most prominent design element being "Gucci" tiled all over it isn't actually a luxury item. "Big pony" Ralph Lauren isn't even luxury-adjacent like the mainline brand is (or, at least, has been), it's trashy as hell—but they produce them for a reason, and in some stores that's nearly all they have. That's a signal of the kind of store you're in and who they're selling to, not a sign that luxury has become more accessible.
None of this is "luxury" becoming more affordable.
Well, the financing plans you use which make luxury "affordable" are more a symptom of our debt based economy and monetary policy. Most people expect it to crash at some point
That's almost $1k/month. I don't know where you live or what life you live that $1k/month for a car that's probably not very practical is viable, but that's not normal in the US. That's rent in the exurbs, never mind the city. That's over a third of median annual salary before taxes. Now add fuel, maintenance, registration, and insurance. And leases usually require better than minimum insurance, so factor in good insurance on a $90-100k car.
Those leases include maintenance.
> 7-series BMW models can be leased for ~800€ a month
€800 a month? i have an income of €1100 per month. so after rent and bills (€500), i have €600 per month for all my other costs. no BMW for me.
although (like you(?)) i do live in a European country (Holland) where there is excellent, although expensive, rail/bus travel and biking infrastructure.
€800 a month? i have an income of €1100 per month. so after rent and bills (€500), i have €600 per month for all my other costs. no BMW for me.
although (like you(?)) i do live in a European country (Holland) where there is excellent, although expensive, rail/bus travel and biking infrastructure.
Is that a full time job?
I thought holland was better paid than that. Short term unemployment benefits in Denmark would pay out approx 1808 eur a month after taxes.
I thought holland was better paid than that. Short term unemployment benefits in Denmark would pay out approx 1808 eur a month after taxes.
Are you a programmer.
€1100 is not a lot of money.
But now I'm thinking that's a possible retirement destination
€1100 is not a lot of money.
But now I'm thinking that's a possible retirement destination
> Both closed circle SM (checking on your friends and acquaintances) and public facing SM (checking the influencers)
It's even worse than that because of the algorithms.
They show you more of what they think you like, but the bubbles are quite narrow. For example, suppose you want to see what's going on with all the vaccine skepticism.
There is a bubble centered around Joe Rogan. They're talking about how the existing vaccines aren't as effective against Omicron as they were against previous variants, and debating whether the (in both cases low) incidence of myocarditis in adolescents is higher from the vaccine or from the virus.
Then there is a bubble centered around Alex Jones. They're telling you that Bill Gates is putting microchips in the vaccines and that the vaccines cause protein folding and therefore prions.
You click on the wrong thing and the algorithm decides you want to see more of that. It surrounds you with the people who already believe those things. Now you're the skeptic and they're the establishment and you're trying to remember enough of high school biology to describe the relationship between protein folding and prions while conceding that maybe Bill Gates does suck and maybe that does make him technically a vampire, but could someone explain what that has to do with population control?
Meanwhile there are plenty of scientists who are happy to explain it to you, but once it decides you want to see fear porn, you don't get to see the people debunking it anymore.
And Alex Jones is just the canonical exemplar. The bubbles like that form everywhere. You have people who still believe that the people Kyle Rittenhouse shot were black, or that Julian Assange reports to Putin.
One of the most self-perpetuating ones is the myth that "misinformation" is caused by not banning "bad" people, when it's actually caused by not exposing everyone to contrary viewpoints so that they lose the opportunity to have their mistakes corrected.
But telling people what they want to hear sells more advertising than eat your vegetables, so doing the wrong thing is more profitable.
It's even worse than that because of the algorithms.
They show you more of what they think you like, but the bubbles are quite narrow. For example, suppose you want to see what's going on with all the vaccine skepticism.
There is a bubble centered around Joe Rogan. They're talking about how the existing vaccines aren't as effective against Omicron as they were against previous variants, and debating whether the (in both cases low) incidence of myocarditis in adolescents is higher from the vaccine or from the virus.
Then there is a bubble centered around Alex Jones. They're telling you that Bill Gates is putting microchips in the vaccines and that the vaccines cause protein folding and therefore prions.
You click on the wrong thing and the algorithm decides you want to see more of that. It surrounds you with the people who already believe those things. Now you're the skeptic and they're the establishment and you're trying to remember enough of high school biology to describe the relationship between protein folding and prions while conceding that maybe Bill Gates does suck and maybe that does make him technically a vampire, but could someone explain what that has to do with population control?
Meanwhile there are plenty of scientists who are happy to explain it to you, but once it decides you want to see fear porn, you don't get to see the people debunking it anymore.
And Alex Jones is just the canonical exemplar. The bubbles like that form everywhere. You have people who still believe that the people Kyle Rittenhouse shot were black, or that Julian Assange reports to Putin.
One of the most self-perpetuating ones is the myth that "misinformation" is caused by not banning "bad" people, when it's actually caused by not exposing everyone to contrary viewpoints so that they lose the opportunity to have their mistakes corrected.
But telling people what they want to hear sells more advertising than eat your vegetables, so doing the wrong thing is more profitable.
> when it's actually caused by not exposing everyone to contrary viewpoints so that they lose the opportunity to have their mistakes corrected
There appears to be a growing trend that claims it's innately harmful to experience contrary viewpoints.
There appears to be a growing trend that claims it's innately harmful to experience contrary viewpoints.
Yes... and anyone who peddles that line of thinking must be afraid of counter-arguments.
Oh god, thankfully small but a world of snowflakes is something to fear so let’s keep it in check.
> One of the most self-perpetuating ones is the myth that "misinformation" is caused by not banning "bad" people, when it's actually caused by not exposing everyone to contrary viewpoints so that they lose the opportunity to have their mistakes corrected.
I'd argue that it's really two sides of the same coin. Take a social graph where nodes are people. It's not that eliminating bad nodes is a good solution, it's just that when you eliminate the dangerously influential bad nodes (the bad ones with a disproportionate amount of connections), it can have the effect of redistributing interactions more evenly in the graph, which means any given node is more likely to be exposed to a greater variety of nodes.
Ideally, we wouldn't have to eliminate any bad nodes, but that would require a stable graph where bad nodes don't attract more and more connections. Which I believe is an alternative formulation of your comment about the need to regulate algorithms.
I'd argue that it's really two sides of the same coin. Take a social graph where nodes are people. It's not that eliminating bad nodes is a good solution, it's just that when you eliminate the dangerously influential bad nodes (the bad ones with a disproportionate amount of connections), it can have the effect of redistributing interactions more evenly in the graph, which means any given node is more likely to be exposed to a greater variety of nodes.
Ideally, we wouldn't have to eliminate any bad nodes, but that would require a stable graph where bad nodes don't attract more and more connections. Which I believe is an alternative formulation of your comment about the need to regulate algorithms.
> It's not that eliminating bad nodes is a good solution, it's just that when you eliminate the dangerously influential bad nodes (the bad ones with a disproportionate amount of connections), it can have the effect of redistributing interactions more evenly in the graph, which means any given node is more likely to be exposed to a greater variety of nodes.
There are at least two problems with this.
The first is that as long as you have an algorithm which is isolating people into silos and frothing people for "engagement," all you're going to do is create another one.
The second is that the bad man doesn't actually disappear from the world, and many people will follow them to wherever they go instead, where they're even more isolated and have less opportunity to break out of the bubble. The general trend is also causing alternate social media platforms to spring up which are splitting the population along party lines. Having more platforms is good, having the platforms be implicitly partisan is terrible. And having everyone on the right move to other platforms would leave the existing platforms with only people on the left, which will melt their brains just as much. You need the opposition around to keep yourself honest.
> Which I believe is an alternative formulation of your comment about the need to regulate algorithms.
Regulate algorithms can't work. Never mind the obvious First Amendment problems, think about the incentives. To fix the problem would be to break the business model; stop driving engagement. Billions of dollars at stake. So the political incentive is instead to let them keep radicalizing people, as long as they're radicalizing people for whoever is currently in power. If this isn't sufficiently alarming to you because of who is currently in power, imagine the public official they have to appease is Trump.
What we need are social media companies with a different business model. Ideally in some kind of federated system with competing discovery algorithms so the harm from a bad one has less scope, and people can choose not to use the ones known to be malignant without having to opt out of the networks with the largest network effect.
There are at least two problems with this.
The first is that as long as you have an algorithm which is isolating people into silos and frothing people for "engagement," all you're going to do is create another one.
The second is that the bad man doesn't actually disappear from the world, and many people will follow them to wherever they go instead, where they're even more isolated and have less opportunity to break out of the bubble. The general trend is also causing alternate social media platforms to spring up which are splitting the population along party lines. Having more platforms is good, having the platforms be implicitly partisan is terrible. And having everyone on the right move to other platforms would leave the existing platforms with only people on the left, which will melt their brains just as much. You need the opposition around to keep yourself honest.
> Which I believe is an alternative formulation of your comment about the need to regulate algorithms.
Regulate algorithms can't work. Never mind the obvious First Amendment problems, think about the incentives. To fix the problem would be to break the business model; stop driving engagement. Billions of dollars at stake. So the political incentive is instead to let them keep radicalizing people, as long as they're radicalizing people for whoever is currently in power. If this isn't sufficiently alarming to you because of who is currently in power, imagine the public official they have to appease is Trump.
What we need are social media companies with a different business model. Ideally in some kind of federated system with competing discovery algorithms so the harm from a bad one has less scope, and people can choose not to use the ones known to be malignant without having to opt out of the networks with the largest network effect.
You have to interpret “regulate” charitably. I wasn’t advocating for any particular type of regulation, and not necessarily in reference to government intervention. Substitute with “tweak” if that’s less bothersome.
Fair enough.
It seems like it's an incentives problem. Something needs to change so that making money stops being aligned with doing the wrong thing.
Whatever fixes it is going to have a different business model. Maybe the best thing the government could do is do some trust busting. Make it easier to enter the market, increase the number of competitors and we have more chances to find the answer.
It seems like it's an incentives problem. Something needs to change so that making money stops being aligned with doing the wrong thing.
Whatever fixes it is going to have a different business model. Maybe the best thing the government could do is do some trust busting. Make it easier to enter the market, increase the number of competitors and we have more chances to find the answer.
>or that Julian Assange reports to Putin
Ah...this has been debunked?
The story so far as I know is that "multiple US intelligence agencies" told Congress that (in 2016) people working for the Russian government hacked the DNC and provided the emails to Wikileaks.
Wikileaks didn't reveal its source, but Assange said "no, nope, it definitely wasn't the Russian government, no way".
Mueller proceeded to indict a lot of Russians who allegedly were involved.
Where/what was the debunking?
Ah...this has been debunked?
The story so far as I know is that "multiple US intelligence agencies" told Congress that (in 2016) people working for the Russian government hacked the DNC and provided the emails to Wikileaks.
Wikileaks didn't reveal its source, but Assange said "no, nope, it definitely wasn't the Russian government, no way".
Mueller proceeded to indict a lot of Russians who allegedly were involved.
Where/what was the debunking?
> Ah...this has been debunked?
> The story so far as I know is that "multiple US intelligence agencies" told Congress that (in 2016) people working for the Russian government hacked the DNC and provided the emails to Wikileaks.
Assange is the one publishing the secrets of "US intelligence agencies," so they don't like him very much. Given this conflict of interest and the knowledge that they'd never be asked to provide any actual evidence, their credibility is low.
> Mueller proceeded to indict a lot of Russians who allegedly were involved.
He indicted actual Russians, who are in Russia and not subject to US jurisdiction. The expectation was that they wouldn't show up in court and prosecutors would never have to prove their allegations.
Then some of the accused did show up, so they dropped the charges against them: https://slate.com/technology/2020/03/justice-department-drop...
But even ignoring that they never proved it in court, that still doesn't imply that Assange reports to Putin or had any knowledge Russians were involved (if indeed they were).
"Sources lacking in credibility make claim without evidence" is debunked by Hitchens's razor.
> The story so far as I know is that "multiple US intelligence agencies" told Congress that (in 2016) people working for the Russian government hacked the DNC and provided the emails to Wikileaks.
Assange is the one publishing the secrets of "US intelligence agencies," so they don't like him very much. Given this conflict of interest and the knowledge that they'd never be asked to provide any actual evidence, their credibility is low.
> Mueller proceeded to indict a lot of Russians who allegedly were involved.
He indicted actual Russians, who are in Russia and not subject to US jurisdiction. The expectation was that they wouldn't show up in court and prosecutors would never have to prove their allegations.
Then some of the accused did show up, so they dropped the charges against them: https://slate.com/technology/2020/03/justice-department-drop...
But even ignoring that they never proved it in court, that still doesn't imply that Assange reports to Putin or had any knowledge Russians were involved (if indeed they were).
"Sources lacking in credibility make claim without evidence" is debunked by Hitchens's razor.
>"Sources lacking in credibility make claim without evidence"
Sure, if you like, there is no need to debunk the claims. Let's not bicker and argue about that, as I certainly have no idea. I still, perhaps pedantically, would claim that "no need to debunk" is different from "has been debunked".
Regardless, the breathtaking size of this isolated bubble of disinformation is worthy of note.
Four bubbles I see in the original comment: Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, people who believe false things about Rittenhouse and then there is...
Maybe it's true! But it sure raises a lot of questions, and something funny is going on if people don't even agree that one item in the list stands out.
Something even funnier is going on if people get mad at you for noticing. People who make fun of conspiracy theories. Remember that's where this started, a comment on how prone people are to believing in conspiracies.
You can't trust the establishment! Still, big conspiracy.
Sure, if you like, there is no need to debunk the claims. Let's not bicker and argue about that, as I certainly have no idea. I still, perhaps pedantically, would claim that "no need to debunk" is different from "has been debunked".
Regardless, the breathtaking size of this isolated bubble of disinformation is worthy of note.
Four bubbles I see in the original comment: Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, people who believe false things about Rittenhouse and then there is...
...most of the US government, media, and Democratic party.
Maybe it's true! But it sure raises a lot of questions, and something funny is going on if people don't even agree that one item in the list stands out.
Something even funnier is going on if people get mad at you for noticing. People who make fun of conspiracy theories. Remember that's where this started, a comment on how prone people are to believing in conspiracies.
You can't trust the establishment! Still, big conspiracy.
You may be the victim of a large disinformation campaign.
[deleted]
There is definitely a very large disinformation campaign going on, we can all agree on that.
I think it's access to broadcast media. When access to broadcast media was heavily gatekept, the official reality bubbles were few and strengthened everywhere. Now everyone has it, there can be far more bubbles.
I also hope that we're in a transitional time as people get used to the new technology. I'm sure that it took people a while to understand how much they should believe newspapers or not when they first came along. And it's laughable to people now that War of The Worlds caused such a sensation when aired on the radio, or the BBC spaghetti harvest april fools was believed by so many.
I also hope that we're in a transitional time as people get used to the new technology. I'm sure that it took people a while to understand how much they should believe newspapers or not when they first came along. And it's laughable to people now that War of The Worlds caused such a sensation when aired on the radio, or the BBC spaghetti harvest april fools was believed by so many.
> Now everyone has it, there can be far more bubbles.
Yeah, I feel like this is the issue. I've heard the theory that in the past, every village had a village idiot. The internet has enabled all these village idiots to find each other and to broadcast their idiocies. They feel strengthened in finding like-minded people and feel vindicated in their beliefs.
Due to the size of the group and how vocal they are, they're now also pulling in people who might have previously ignored the village idiot because everyone else did.
Yeah, I feel like this is the issue. I've heard the theory that in the past, every village had a village idiot. The internet has enabled all these village idiots to find each other and to broadcast their idiocies. They feel strengthened in finding like-minded people and feel vindicated in their beliefs.
Due to the size of the group and how vocal they are, they're now also pulling in people who might have previously ignored the village idiot because everyone else did.
I've heard the effect of internet compared to the effect of the printing press.
For the people on the other side of the curve from the village idiot that was true. Before the internet we (on HN I think most of us are on that side of the curve justifying the use of "we" here) had libraries and we had elaborate systems for indexing and searching [1] and providing notification of new information in our areas of interest.
We could do then most of what we now do on the internet as far as getting and processing information is concerned, just slower and we usually had to be fully clothed while doing it.
Like the printing press, what the internet did for us was make it so we could get that information faster, cheaper, and we could do it from home in whatever state of undress suited us.
For people on the village idiot side of the curve, the invention of the internet was not like invention of the printing press.
It was like the discovery of fire.
[1] A good example is a law library. Besides the books that contained the chronological record of cases and decisions from a given court, we had books that organized those cases by topic, books that provided summaries of the key legal points of each case, organized by topic, books that provided cross references for each case showing what later cases cited it, which points of the case they cited it for, and whether those citations were agreeing with it or overruling it.
For the people on the other side of the curve from the village idiot that was true. Before the internet we (on HN I think most of us are on that side of the curve justifying the use of "we" here) had libraries and we had elaborate systems for indexing and searching [1] and providing notification of new information in our areas of interest.
We could do then most of what we now do on the internet as far as getting and processing information is concerned, just slower and we usually had to be fully clothed while doing it.
Like the printing press, what the internet did for us was make it so we could get that information faster, cheaper, and we could do it from home in whatever state of undress suited us.
For people on the village idiot side of the curve, the invention of the internet was not like invention of the printing press.
It was like the discovery of fire.
[1] A good example is a law library. Besides the books that contained the chronological record of cases and decisions from a given court, we had books that organized those cases by topic, books that provided summaries of the key legal points of each case, organized by topic, books that provided cross references for each case showing what later cases cited it, which points of the case they cited it for, and whether those citations were agreeing with it or overruling it.
Notably, the printing press didn't immediately make good knowledge more accessible. A press was a very expensive, risky investment, and so was the typesetting of any particular content. The first killer apps were indulgences and polemic pamphlets. So basically a money racket and influencer content. Not much has changed.
Could you please expand upon how it was like the 'discovery of fire'? There are many ways to interpret this, and I'm not certain I know what you are saying.
Giving fire to a society that does not have it greatly increases their power and efficiency to a much greater extent than does giving the printing press to a society that not have it.
So what I'm saying is that while the invention of the internet was a big change to everyone, for those on the other half of the curve from the village idiots it was a change that let them do things they were already doing but faster and more efficiently (an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary step, much like the Gutenberg's printing press was to 15th century Europe), but for those down in village idiot territory it allowed them to do things with information that they had not been able to do before such as large scale collaboration (a revolutionary change rather than an evolutionary change, much like the discovery of fire was for early humans.
So what I'm saying is that while the invention of the internet was a big change to everyone, for those on the other half of the curve from the village idiots it was a change that let them do things they were already doing but faster and more efficiently (an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary step, much like the Gutenberg's printing press was to 15th century Europe), but for those down in village idiot territory it allowed them to do things with information that they had not been able to do before such as large scale collaboration (a revolutionary change rather than an evolutionary change, much like the discovery of fire was for early humans.
So Tim Berners-Lee and Mark Andreesen are our modern Prometheus? Eagles picking their livers at dusk forever more?
The "peer to peer idiot networking and amplification" effect you mention is real but it's dangerous, or at least wildly inaccurate, to explain the rise of our "disinformation society" by dismissing the culprits as "idiots." Many of them are, but...
Look at the politicians and others pushing blatant disinformation and profiting from it. They are doing this with a great degree of skillful malice. Nobody listens to actual idiots; they want to emulate and follow the successful/powerful people who are savvy enough to hone their message and their image.
Look at the people swallowing these lies. Many of them are generally intelligent and/or successful people. Many Trump supporters are quite successful and affluent. However, their faith in actual academics, experts, and traditional institutions has been shattered, leaving uniquely susceptible to malignant influences who are eager to fill this "trust vacuum."
Look at the politicians and others pushing blatant disinformation and profiting from it. They are doing this with a great degree of skillful malice. Nobody listens to actual idiots; they want to emulate and follow the successful/powerful people who are savvy enough to hone their message and their image.
Look at the people swallowing these lies. Many of them are generally intelligent and/or successful people. Many Trump supporters are quite successful and affluent. However, their faith in actual academics, experts, and traditional institutions has been shattered, leaving uniquely susceptible to malignant influences who are eager to fill this "trust vacuum."
This is it. Whoever builds a study around this phenomenon will have it named after them.
> And it's laughable to people now that War of The Worlds caused such a sensation when aired on the radio
But it didn't:
https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-wo...
But it didn't:
https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-wo...
> War of The Worlds caused such a sensation when aired on the radio
Today, the majority would dismiss the broadcast as nonsense, but a small, ardent minority would form a distributed, international community around taking it seriously that would then continue on for years and rip apart friendships and families, and potentially have sufficient critical mass to do something stupid.
I feel the difference may be in the stickyness of ideas (across a wider spectrum of merit) and what enables that stickyness.
On the topic of popular scifi, I often think back to this exchange between two characters in Michael Crichton's The Lost World (1997), a bestseller at the time:
"[...] Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species."
- "Yes? Why is that?"
"Because it means the end of innovation," Malcolm said. "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. [...]"
When I read this as a young teenager, enthusiastic about scifi and technology and curious about the internet, I dismissed it as cynical and conservative. And of course he got wrong - we don't really lack diversity of thought in the cyberspace age. Instead we managed to create a new kind of cyber-enabled tribalism. Or, maybe, one is a reaction to the other.
Today, the majority would dismiss the broadcast as nonsense, but a small, ardent minority would form a distributed, international community around taking it seriously that would then continue on for years and rip apart friendships and families, and potentially have sufficient critical mass to do something stupid.
I feel the difference may be in the stickyness of ideas (across a wider spectrum of merit) and what enables that stickyness.
On the topic of popular scifi, I often think back to this exchange between two characters in Michael Crichton's The Lost World (1997), a bestseller at the time:
"[...] Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species."
- "Yes? Why is that?"
"Because it means the end of innovation," Malcolm said. "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. [...]"
When I read this as a young teenager, enthusiastic about scifi and technology and curious about the internet, I dismissed it as cynical and conservative. And of course he got wrong - we don't really lack diversity of thought in the cyberspace age. Instead we managed to create a new kind of cyber-enabled tribalism. Or, maybe, one is a reaction to the other.
I remember being a teen in the early '90s and hating the mandatory conformity - if you didn't wear the same things or listen to the same music as your peers, you were an immediate outcast. By the end of the decade, not only could you find a peer group no matter what you wore or listened to, being too conformist wasn't considered a good thing any more. I really believe that's the phenomenon the 'only 90's kids will understand' meme is about.
I must say, I don't miss that kind of conformity. It allowed for much larger tribes, but creativity was a lot harder within all of them.
I must say, I don't miss that kind of conformity. It allowed for much larger tribes, but creativity was a lot harder within all of them.
I don't know enough biology to know if the metaphor is apt, but I think he's wrong. Small groups in isolation speciate faster, but that's not the same as evolving faster. I would expect that larger groups spanning many diverse ecological niches would feature greater diversity within the group and are able to explore more evolutionary avenues. Perhaps that's what we see intellectually as well.
Interesting, so by speciate faster, you mean they will evolve to be successful in their little niche, but probably become less resilient to diverse conditions?
Like English sparrows in the US, they are here about 150 years or something and spread all across North America, and are showing significant regional variations in plumage and song. No doubt they would give rise to a whole clade of sparrow species if the humans all disappeared.
Rapid speciation on and island is like the finches on Galapagos; there were just one kind of bird on the island so all the ecological notches were available (bug eating, grass eating, seed eating on ground, eating stuff on trees, etc.), so those finches evolved relatively quickly into different species with different beaks and behaviors to get different food sources.
Evolution itself is more or less constant process, genes reproduce in populations whose size is constrained by the conditions, with heritable variations. How much evolution pushes the phenotypes (actual bodies of the organisms) to change over time has a lot to do with the conditions and probably a lot to do with “how does the genetic and developmental system allow things to change easily” nature of the creature. So getting larger or smaller is real simple. Flying is possible but takes more time. For vetebrates, getting four eyes seems to be right out. Getting smarter seems to be hard. Etc.
Rapid speciation on and island is like the finches on Galapagos; there were just one kind of bird on the island so all the ecological notches were available (bug eating, grass eating, seed eating on ground, eating stuff on trees, etc.), so those finches evolved relatively quickly into different species with different beaks and behaviors to get different food sources.
Evolution itself is more or less constant process, genes reproduce in populations whose size is constrained by the conditions, with heritable variations. How much evolution pushes the phenotypes (actual bodies of the organisms) to change over time has a lot to do with the conditions and probably a lot to do with “how does the genetic and developmental system allow things to change easily” nature of the creature. So getting larger or smaller is real simple. Flying is possible but takes more time. For vetebrates, getting four eyes seems to be right out. Getting smarter seems to be hard. Etc.
> But in the last ten years, something seems to have arrested this direction of travel and reinstated local bubbles of thought, insulated from outside challenge.
I agree there is a troubling bubble here. I just don't agree that the bubble in question has anything to do with crypto, as opposed to those getting their jollies dunking on crypto bros.
How many tweets do you have to read before you escape the bubble of OP and learn that the tweet is false...? (By my count, you have to go through 320 HN comments before you will find the first deeply-buried comment pointing out that OP is false and the buyers believed no such thing; this submission is at +501 points, BTW.) Here is a quote from an article published well over a month before OP tweeted: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amansethi/spicedao-dune...
"Now that they have won the bid, Saqib and his associates must make good on their promise to bring the bible to the people and prove that their fundraising approach was not just a gimmick.
As things stand, Saqib still owns Jodorowsky’s bible but is in the process of transferring ownership to the DAO. Meanwhile, the copyrights for the bible’s contents are held by multiple artists and their estates. Jodorowsky is now 92 years old; Jean Giraud, or Moebius, the legendary French illustrator who did all the storyboards, died in 2012; H.R. Giger, who designed the creepy home planet of the House of Harkonnen, died two years later.
“We can’t just scan it and put it on the internet,” Fang said. But by raising the money as a DAO, Fang said they hoped to show the various estates and stakeholders that there is a massive online interest in making the bible more accessible to the public."
They explicitly acknowledge they do not 'own the IP' and can't just scan it etc and it is positioning for negotiation for the actual IP.
I agree there is a troubling bubble here. I just don't agree that the bubble in question has anything to do with crypto, as opposed to those getting their jollies dunking on crypto bros.
How many tweets do you have to read before you escape the bubble of OP and learn that the tweet is false...? (By my count, you have to go through 320 HN comments before you will find the first deeply-buried comment pointing out that OP is false and the buyers believed no such thing; this submission is at +501 points, BTW.) Here is a quote from an article published well over a month before OP tweeted: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amansethi/spicedao-dune...
"Now that they have won the bid, Saqib and his associates must make good on their promise to bring the bible to the people and prove that their fundraising approach was not just a gimmick.
As things stand, Saqib still owns Jodorowsky’s bible but is in the process of transferring ownership to the DAO. Meanwhile, the copyrights for the bible’s contents are held by multiple artists and their estates. Jodorowsky is now 92 years old; Jean Giraud, or Moebius, the legendary French illustrator who did all the storyboards, died in 2012; H.R. Giger, who designed the creepy home planet of the House of Harkonnen, died two years later.
“We can’t just scan it and put it on the internet,” Fang said. But by raising the money as a DAO, Fang said they hoped to show the various estates and stakeholders that there is a massive online interest in making the bible more accessible to the public."
They explicitly acknowledge they do not 'own the IP' and can't just scan it etc and it is positioning for negotiation for the actual IP.
Neal Stephenson explored this in this book Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (And to a lesser extent, Termination Shock). In this depiction, parts of the world; especially red state USA, has succumbed to a post-truth society, made possible through the internet. The narrator implies that we had a limited window in human history where people took a fact-based approach to knowledge, starting with the scientific revolution, and ending with internet circa ~2010.
Examining mainly the pre-truth half, Carl Sagan goes into this in Demon Haunted world, and focuses on remnants that have stuck around, eg UFOs, cults etc.
Examining mainly the pre-truth half, Carl Sagan goes into this in Demon Haunted world, and focuses on remnants that have stuck around, eg UFOs, cults etc.
This makes me think of Wilbur's writings on the pre-trans fallacy, the idea that 'post truth' and 'pre-truth' are identical. A lot of the 'facts based' approach did require trusted authorities, and there wasn't much thought paid as to who was a trusted authority. Now that some serious abuses of authority have happened we're suddenly aware of just how screwed we can be if we trust the wrong authorities, but the answer isn't to do away with all trust in authorities. The people most able to navigate complexity seem to update both their mental models of the world and their trust in given authorities gradually, neither over-nor-undercorrecting when new information is added to the whole. At least that's my belief after reading 'superforecasters', something I recommend to anyone wrestling with the implications of the post-truth era.
Sounds very Baysian.
It is. The book is basically a primer on Bayesian thinking for everyday life.
> especially red state USA
This is funny because you can say exactly the same about blue state USA. They seem to live in a totally alien world.
This is funny because you can say exactly the same about blue state USA. They seem to live in a totally alien world.
There’s little use arguing that point with parent, because he was summarizing Stephenson rather than postulating anything.
My dad believes 30-foot tall giants once roamed the earth, and that the archaeological evidence is being suppressed by mainstream academia and the government. He believes this based on a passage from the Bible and some YouTube videos.
The "something" you refer to, is the problem of scale. Within a "small, local information bubble", you have enough experience with each source of information to be able to accurately evaluate its reliability. Some in your hunter/gatherer group were reliable, others were not, you knew who was which.
With a large group, at some point you can no longer tell, because each source is a one-time source (or close to it). Plus, the potential profits from compromising that source become so large that, for example, newspapers get bought by corporations, to help mold popular opinion. People cannot tell who they can trust, but they know there's a lot of untrustworthy out there. So, they retreat back into a local bubble.
Whoever is in this person's local bubble, is currently getting a valuable data point as to their trustworthiness. :)
With a large group, at some point you can no longer tell, because each source is a one-time source (or close to it). Plus, the potential profits from compromising that source become so large that, for example, newspapers get bought by corporations, to help mold popular opinion. People cannot tell who they can trust, but they know there's a lot of untrustworthy out there. So, they retreat back into a local bubble.
Whoever is in this person's local bubble, is currently getting a valuable data point as to their trustworthiness. :)
It's the continuing advancement of post-reality into more and more of people's existence. Back twenty years ago when we were all just dipping our toes into the Internet, the majority of our existence was still rooted in traditional society. You might dig around on the Web and find "conspiracy" discussions, but you knew that these topics wouldn't pass the bar for conversation with your family and friends, so you just compartmentalized them. Eventually you either found a way to process the grains of truth in such thoughts (eg the military industrial complex didn't "do" 9/11, but they greatly benefited from it), or you kept on compartmentalizing those thoughts until you forgot about them for whatever reason. Now most of our social interactions are online, and at the very least mediated by online communities. When you run across some outlandish theory, it's easy enough to share it, even if you editorialize a bit to soften the blow- "does anyone think this might be true", "sounds crazy but I'm just passing it on", etc. You don't have to leave the post-reality environment, so it never even occurs to you to temper it down a bit to avoid being the crazy person (coupled with people's lack of physical empathy when communicating through text. I suspect us early Internet citizens are more reflective here, because we learned to overcompensate with left-brained sympathy early on, before pictures supplied a substitute empathy signal). Additionally, most of this communication is done through third party intermediaries whose main metric is to maximize "engagement", and so they'll amplify the signal to those who are receptive, and hide it from those who would shun you because of it.
Furthermore, I characterized our previous existence as "traditional society", but it really wasn't that either. Rather it was a different post-reality as mediated by broadcast media, progressed to be owned by a handful of corporations. This kept us all on the same page and working for common goals, even if the goals weren't necessarily in our own interests (eg widening wealth gap, elective wars). That is what passed for the traditional zeitgeist that we were steeped in, and everyone accepted it because of the massive social proof from The Important People on TV. Now looking back, we can see that the traditional zeitgeist was not in our interest either, and so it does not offer a compelling focus point to return to. And so we're just kind of lost and rudderless, looking for new directions to suspend our disbelief for.
Furthermore, I characterized our previous existence as "traditional society", but it really wasn't that either. Rather it was a different post-reality as mediated by broadcast media, progressed to be owned by a handful of corporations. This kept us all on the same page and working for common goals, even if the goals weren't necessarily in our own interests (eg widening wealth gap, elective wars). That is what passed for the traditional zeitgeist that we were steeped in, and everyone accepted it because of the massive social proof from The Important People on TV. Now looking back, we can see that the traditional zeitgeist was not in our interest either, and so it does not offer a compelling focus point to return to. And so we're just kind of lost and rudderless, looking for new directions to suspend our disbelief for.
That is what passed for the traditional zeitgeist
that we were steeped in, and everyone accepted it
because of the massive social proof from The Important
People on TV. Now looking back, we can see that the
traditional zeitgeist was not in our interest either,
and so it does not offer a compelling focus point to
return to. And so we're just kind of lost and rudderless,
looking for new directions to suspend our disbelief for.
Cf. Robert Anton Wilson, specifically his writing regarding "reality tunnels".
In brief, what you're describing is the default state of humanity. In colorful language, human civilization is "the war between gangs of hypnotists".
In brief, what you're describing is the default state of humanity. In colorful language, human civilization is "the war between gangs of hypnotists".
> in the last ten years, something seems to have arrested this direction of travel and reinstated local bubbles of thought, insulated from outside challenge.
...you are using one right now
...you are using one right now
I think a lot about the issues you have touched on here. What you refer to as, "reality-defiance", I call, "knowledge immunity".
Long story short, by my estimation what has "arrested this direction of travel" and "reinstated local bubbles of thought" is fear, the mind killer, and where they've headed, is back into superstition, global superstition, where they substitute whatever comfortable story, for whatever uncomfortable reality.
Long story short, by my estimation what has "arrested this direction of travel" and "reinstated local bubbles of thought" is fear, the mind killer, and where they've headed, is back into superstition, global superstition, where they substitute whatever comfortable story, for whatever uncomfortable reality.
I've noticed the same phenomenon. I think it is, at least partly, driven by the collapse of local power structures that the local information bubbles (great phrase, btw!) enabled. Those power structures are built into our genes, and have roots that go back ages. They are fighting back, or at least our innate responses are fighting back. It's tough to run a church or a school or a family, when those under you can reveal your ignorance quickly on their phone. And so the power structures are attempting to exert their own reality. It's what Trump runs on, he pushes a reality that people want to exist, and are willing to let go of actual reality to get it. Not that the phenomenon isn't also seen in the Left, it just is less malignant (for now).
This seems a really important point because it explains why this happens. It’s about power.
Additional one could hypothesize that conspiracies are so effective here because they are (almost by definition) unfalsifiable. Similar to how churches still stay powerful by running on dogma.
Additional one could hypothesize that conspiracies are so effective here because they are (almost by definition) unfalsifiable. Similar to how churches still stay powerful by running on dogma.
Your description sounds very apt for most of the posters on r/wallstreetbets. Not that most of the chatter on there is much removed from cryptoscams.
> Not that most of the chatter on there is much removed from cryptoscams.
There's an enormous amount of gambling going on on WSB and the average post quality is... well, there's a reason they're self-identifying as apes. But in any case, there is a key difference: WSB deals with legitimate, established companies only and have a zero-tolerance policy against pennystocks and crypto.
The one exception where your comparison is retrospectively (!) on point are wish.com and Chinese stocks, but at least for the Chinese stocks one can say that the radicality of Xi Jinping's actions on the tech/finance sector could not have been reasonably expected - and even Wish.com has been around for over a decade, whereas most of the rug-pull crypto ops and NFTs isn't even two years old.
(Disclosure: HODL'ing a couple hundred euros in Gamestop and AMC)
There's an enormous amount of gambling going on on WSB and the average post quality is... well, there's a reason they're self-identifying as apes. But in any case, there is a key difference: WSB deals with legitimate, established companies only and have a zero-tolerance policy against pennystocks and crypto.
The one exception where your comparison is retrospectively (!) on point are wish.com and Chinese stocks, but at least for the Chinese stocks one can say that the radicality of Xi Jinping's actions on the tech/finance sector could not have been reasonably expected - and even Wish.com has been around for over a decade, whereas most of the rug-pull crypto ops and NFTs isn't even two years old.
(Disclosure: HODL'ing a couple hundred euros in Gamestop and AMC)
> But in the last ten years, something seems to have arrested this direction of travel and reinstated local bubbles of thought, insulated from outside challenge.
Been going on a lot longer than 10 years. I saw the same thing in the late 90s, and the only reason I didn’t see it earlier than that is that before then I wasn’t really looking.
Been going on a lot longer than 10 years. I saw the same thing in the late 90s, and the only reason I didn’t see it earlier than that is that before then I wasn’t really looking.
>But in the last ten years, something seems to have arrested this direction of travel and reinstated local bubbles of thought, insulated from outside challenge.
I've noticed this specifically with covid denial/conspiracy nuts.
Sure, there have always been conspiracy nuts (and some conspiracy theories are later proven not theories at all), but covid-related conspiracies are a different beast altogether in terms of how widespread they got.
There seems to be a personality type that is prone to believing in conspiracy theories of any kind, and the bar or threshold for that kind of personality seems to have lowered all of a sudden -- otherwise normal people that were not particularly conspiracy theory-leaning are way into the craziest covid stuff.
The level of angst involved is also on a whole other level: while in other conspiracy theories the "Enemy" is usually a small evil cabal and the general "blue pill" public is just "misinformed sheep", now suddenly everyone _not a conspiracy nut_ is immediately evil.
I've noticed this specifically with covid denial/conspiracy nuts.
Sure, there have always been conspiracy nuts (and some conspiracy theories are later proven not theories at all), but covid-related conspiracies are a different beast altogether in terms of how widespread they got.
There seems to be a personality type that is prone to believing in conspiracy theories of any kind, and the bar or threshold for that kind of personality seems to have lowered all of a sudden -- otherwise normal people that were not particularly conspiracy theory-leaning are way into the craziest covid stuff.
The level of angst involved is also on a whole other level: while in other conspiracy theories the "Enemy" is usually a small evil cabal and the general "blue pill" public is just "misinformed sheep", now suddenly everyone _not a conspiracy nut_ is immediately evil.
> But in the last ten years, something seems to have arrested this direction of travel and reinstated local bubbles of thought, insulated from outside challenge.
Personalized and targeted ads.
Personalized and targeted ads.
Are there any books written about this phenomenon?
Probably many, but it seems like the WWW never got its seminal, "Amusing Ourselves to Death"-type status report, so far.
Wow, what a great comment. You just explained how the whole 'mass formation psychosis' was/is possible.
It’s happening because people subconsciously have learned the global system is compromised
My favorite part of this story is that they DAO has actually raised ~$8m, spent $3m on the book (10x the expected auction price), then the "core team" has started paying themselves ~$30k a month[0]. Also, how is this "decentralised" when one person owns over 50% of the voting token?
[0] https://snapshot.org/#/dunedao.eth/proposal/0x2038fc240d0e85...
[0] https://snapshot.org/#/dunedao.eth/proposal/0x2038fc240d0e85...
It's unbelievably funny and scary at the same time. This is the profile of their "Marketing Lead":
https://twitter.com/YOJIMBO_KING/media
Qualifications listed for their team include "Bitcoin Class of 2013", not sure if a joke or not? The impression is that this is a bunch of 13 year olds who suddenly got a windfall...
https://twitter.com/YOJIMBO_KING/media
Qualifications listed for their team include "Bitcoin Class of 2013", not sure if a joke or not? The impression is that this is a bunch of 13 year olds who suddenly got a windfall...
"They worked as Product Manager on StarChant and Project Manager of PegzDAO; consulted with POAP on their communications strategy and Raid Guild DAO on business development. DeFi trader, yield farmer and liquidity provider on DEXs. Bitcoin Class of 2013."
You weren't kidding, this sounds like an application for a World of Warcraft Guild I applied to in 2008 or something. I have no idea what any of this means
You weren't kidding, this sounds like an application for a World of Warcraft Guild I applied to in 2008 or something. I have no idea what any of this means
It means “I’m in on the con job so let’s play ball”
The language and behaviour is consistent with the cant generally spoken by the crypto community. It's a similar idea to /r/wsb/ and does the job of identifying insiders while keeping outsiders out.
Not supporting crypto one way or another. But EVERY technical industry is full of jargon.
"Did you verify that the RVSM system was talking to the FMS after completing the JIC during the RON?" - Aviation "Are you sure the packets are flowing on UDP? Can someone check the CAT6?" - Simple networking
Etc. So I wouldn't say the jargon is constructed solely to keep outsiders out.
"Did you verify that the RVSM system was talking to the FMS after completing the JIC during the RON?" - Aviation "Are you sure the packets are flowing on UDP? Can someone check the CAT6?" - Simple networking
Etc. So I wouldn't say the jargon is constructed solely to keep outsiders out.
It's not only jargon, because a lot of it is used as watchwords or shiboleths.
I was referring specifically to the example above, or at least the jargon I've seen used. And EVERY community is going to have specific language or "Slang".
I mean, even the specific resume example above simply translates to "Worked as a Product Manager on moderately successful project, worked as a Project Manager on random project, consulted with highly successful marketing firm and extremely successfully and profitable co-operative consulting firm on business development. Likes to trade high-risk stocks, puts money into high-risk interest bearing accounts and likes to give random unsecured loans to strangers"
I understand there's a ton of bashing of crypto, but I think that looking at a unknown sub-cultures language and assuming that they are purposely using jargon antagonistic to outsiders is rather closed minded. As someone who dipped their toe in, but still doesn't understand, they have been extremely helpful in explaining the concepts even when I argue against them.
I mean, even the specific resume example above simply translates to "Worked as a Product Manager on moderately successful project, worked as a Project Manager on random project, consulted with highly successful marketing firm and extremely successfully and profitable co-operative consulting firm on business development. Likes to trade high-risk stocks, puts money into high-risk interest bearing accounts and likes to give random unsecured loans to strangers"
I understand there's a ton of bashing of crypto, but I think that looking at a unknown sub-cultures language and assuming that they are purposely using jargon antagonistic to outsiders is rather closed minded. As someone who dipped their toe in, but still doesn't understand, they have been extremely helpful in explaining the concepts even when I argue against them.
Slang:= (in tech) shortcuts for meaningful technical information
Watchwords:= seemingly slang, but conveys only group membership
Watchwords:= seemingly slang, but conveys only group membership
Crypto Watchwords:= seemingly slang, but conveys only group membership. Group membership revoked if you try to define any of those watchwords at a first principles level (which is precisely why a group of young people raised on NFT's doesn't understand the possession/copyright ownership split)
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It’s entirely possible that that’s exactly what happened. The space is awash with people that got lucky in the initial boom and have convinced themselves (and a few others) that they’re investing geniuses and not just lucky fools. Come to think of it, this phenomenon isn’t limited to bitcoin, although the signaling behavior is quite different than a VC that’s gotten lucky once.
How can they take themselves seriously?
No idea why the other comment is dead. It's obvious the entire thing is a way for them to con some suckers into giving them what is basically a golden ticket to a life without any worries. They don't take themselves seriously. They're laughing all the way to the bank.
For the sake of accuracy, it appears to me that it is $30k per month total for the core team not each. There is a total maximum operating budget of $50k per month including a maximum of $30k for the core team. When the core team has 4. That is about $8k per month each.
8K seems plenty when you can do your "work" from anywhere in the world (and probably have a good reason to not be too easy to find by your scam victims)
... and possibly if the "work" is not like 40-50 hours/week, but more like a couple hours per month ...
Sounds like a board seat.
Will be interesting to see how this, as in the whole DAO space, works out. Part of the problem with the ICO craze in 2017* is that the founders got all the money up front without having any obligation to do anything, so the tiny minority of well intentioned ones ended up simply enjoying the money rather than doing something hard like actual work. Seems like this is still a risk here - the founder can string people along for a few months or years until they lose interest, all the while drawing down the money and living rather comfortably.
* The other problem with the ICO craze is of course that the combination of money up-front and no obligations and anonymity meant almost all were simply out-and-out scams.
* The other problem with the ICO craze is of course that the combination of money up-front and no obligations and anonymity meant almost all were simply out-and-out scams.
Which is why there are rules and layers of checks to actually IPO - another term misappropriated to ICO like currency was misappropriated for cryptocurrency to mislead; stock markets would lose all trust and credibility if they didn't curate and require due diligence.
Perhaps we should look forward to innovations like “Special Purpose Acquisition Coins” then?
SPACs have gotten rid of much of the diligence traditionally part of the IPO process.
SPACs have gotten rid of much of the diligence traditionally part of the IPO process.
From my understanding may also be taking advantage of the money the government's currently printing - at the externalized cost of general society, an additional wealth transfer? I haven't looked read too much into SPACs yet, though they certainly did start to pop out of nowhere and in huge sums as "special purpose vehicles;" I'd sure love to raise a quick $1 billion SPAC though to fund my endless projects.
That's not how SPACs work. You can only use the funding raised as basically a dowry for a merger with a private company. It's low risk to investors because they simply get their money back if 2 years pass without a merger, and the people who run the SPAC lose everything they spent on getting their SPAC to the stock market. Right now, the market is saturated with SPACs, but there are only so many private companies looking to go public.
The filings are pretty much the same. The biggest difference, as far as I know, is there's no roadshow to get institutional investors onboard. But this isn't technically a requirement of an IPO. And a direct listing also skips that.
I think what the previous poster was referring to is that the filings for the SPAC (acquisition company) are the same as any other IPO, but there's nothing in the SPAC (just money and a management team). For the company that gets acquired by the SPAC, however, it's a different story. That company does not have to go through the IPO process itself, so it goes public with a lot less regulatory scrutiny than it would have had had it pursued an IPO itself.
That's not really true though. The SPAC needs to file an S-4 before the deSPAC (the merger), which informs investors in minute detail about the target company and the merger deal. I don't know exactly how it compares to an S-1, but it's extremely comprehensive.
The biggest difference I can see is that a traditional IPO can't succeed without getting institutional investors onboard, and there are strict guidelines about what can be pitched to them. The negotiations between a SPAC and its target company are much less constrained.
I'm not an expert in this, so I'm probably wrong on some of the details, but my company is undergoing a SPAC merger, so I've tried to inform myself on how it works.
The biggest difference I can see is that a traditional IPO can't succeed without getting institutional investors onboard, and there are strict guidelines about what can be pitched to them. The negotiations between a SPAC and its target company are much less constrained.
I'm not an expert in this, so I'm probably wrong on some of the details, but my company is undergoing a SPAC merger, so I've tried to inform myself on how it works.
There are laws for ICOs as well when they are marketed in US: they are securities. The SEC knows this perfectly, they just don't do anything for some reason.
"Decentralized" means "out of the reach of law enforcement". Or at least that's what these people treat it as.
Hey that's pretty unfair, I was just chastised a couple days ago for implying the killer use case for the blockchain was criminality!
"Criminal" is such a strong word. We prefer "less normatively constrained".
I'm moralatypical myself.
It's not criminality, it's _regulatory arbitrage_.
Hey now, its not criminality, its jurisdictional arbitrage
> the "core team" has started paying themselves ~$30k a month each
But don't forget this team has the Q1 deliverable of presenting "a film treatment and budget by Roble Ridge Productions for the original animated limited series inspired by the book for a community vote on Snapshot" - which one can only assume will be a lot of work... :)
But don't forget this team has the Q1 deliverable of presenting "a film treatment and budget by Roble Ridge Productions for the original animated limited series inspired by the book for a community vote on Snapshot" - which one can only assume will be a lot of work... :)
And also will be unauthorized since they own no rights to derivative work (or even the original work)
Perhaps it will be a series inspired by the book (the physical object) not the contents/story
They could release a series about overpaying for a copy of dune at auction and technically fulfill their mission
They could release a series about overpaying for a copy of dune at auction and technically fulfill their mission
> Salvador Dalí was set to play the Emperor and claimed he wanted to be the highest-paid actor in Hollywood history. He asked for $100,000 per hour to act in the movie. Jodorowsky accepted, but then reduced the Emperor’s scenes so that Dalí would be needed for no more than one hour with the rest of his lines spoken by a robotic lookalike. Dalí accepted on condition that the plastic lookalike was donated to his museum, and that his throne was to be a toilet made up of two intersected dolphins.
Absolutely incredible.
Absolutely incredible.
> And also will be unauthorized since they own no rights to derivative work (or even the original work)
I'm sorry for the confusion, but my post was supposed to be humorous.
On reflection I think there's nothing that can actually be said about this auction that can possibly be as funny/sad as the original situation.
I'm sorry for the confusion, but my post was supposed to be humorous.
On reflection I think there's nothing that can actually be said about this auction that can possibly be as funny/sad as the original situation.
> Also, how is this "decentralised" when one person owns over 50% of the voting token?
A professional definitive edition exit scam, waiting to happen. It is ConstitutionDAO all over again, but this time without the refunds.
A professional definitive edition exit scam, waiting to happen. It is ConstitutionDAO all over again, but this time without the refunds.
I’m reminded somewhat of cases where VCs like A16Z push DAOs as the future, and we’re supposed to just pretend that they’re not going to buy up as many tokens as possible so that they can extract maximal profits like usual. It seems like exactly the same scam as ICOs with another level of indirection.
(not 10x, it’s 100x)
why did they spend so much for it, I cant seem to find that out. Was that their opening bid?
This is my question. If so, then not only do they suck at Intellectual property, but they suck at getting a good deal at an auction. Hopefully their screen writing skills are better?
Technically, 30k/team, not 30k/person... But there's 4 members.
Almost all positions are "not to exceed X/month" for X~=7000 USD. So, not too shabby!
Almost all positions are "not to exceed X/month" for X~=7000 USD. So, not too shabby!
[deleted]
It's either teenagers or money laundering.
Funny how it could be either.
Has anyone checked if the seller is legit?
Maybe the profit was meant to be split once the item "sold".
Funny how it could be either.
Has anyone checked if the seller is legit?
Maybe the profit was meant to be split once the item "sold".
[deleted]
I made the mistake of diving a bit deeper into the group who bought it and found a proposal where they are talking about literally burning the book they just bought after digitizing it for … reasons I guess [0]
At this point I just hope its some sort of practical joke or whatever because this just seems a bit much.
[0] https://forum.spicedao.xyz/t/nft-of-the-book-w-proof-of-jpeg...
At this point I just hope its some sort of practical joke or whatever because this just seems a bit much.
[0] https://forum.spicedao.xyz/t/nft-of-the-book-w-proof-of-jpeg...
Fuck me, they’re talking about using JPEG as an archival format before destroying the original. What is going on here.
"""Since each page of the book will require many miners (minters), we must decide on what type of NFT each minter gets. I propose the following NFT variations ordered from easiest to most complex:
1. Every minter is rewarded with an identical NFT of the page.
2. Every minter is rewarded with a fraction of the final NFT that contains the page. [...]
3. By leveraging progressive JPEG 7 tech, every minter gets a unique NFT which contains the uploaded image but with different degrees of quality. [...]"""
Holy fucking shit. This could be extremely high quality satire, but they're serious, which makes it even funnier.
1. Every minter is rewarded with an identical NFT of the page.
2. Every minter is rewarded with a fraction of the final NFT that contains the page. [...]
3. By leveraging progressive JPEG 7 tech, every minter gets a unique NFT which contains the uploaded image but with different degrees of quality. [...]"""
Holy fucking shit. This could be extremely high quality satire, but they're serious, which makes it even funnier.
> By leveraging progressive JPEG 7 tech, every minter gets a unique NFT which contains the uploaded image but with different degrees of quality.
This is both brilliant and insane at the same time. Next up, I have an MPEG stream to sell you ... where the I-frames are charged at a higher rate than the B-frames!
This is both brilliant and insane at the same time. Next up, I have an MPEG stream to sell you ... where the I-frames are charged at a higher rate than the B-frames!
If you think of them as eager and well intentioned children, the whole thing is kind of sweet, tho also a big fuck up. It is like a kid driver denting a car because something something girlfriend.
What’s tragic is they could just upload the damn thing to internet archive but instead they’re going to use some bizarre storage method that will help ensure the book is actually hard for people to read.
[deleted]
> Because the book remains on-chain, the book does not die, but crosses the boundary of physical to digital.
It reminds me of the video game SOMA, where people upload a brain-scan of themselves to live on after some catastrophe, essentially making a digital copy of their consciousness. But because they are also still physically alive, they see the digital version of themselves as a clone, someone else. To "complete the transition", they decide they must end their lives at the exact moment the scan is complete.
It reminds me of the video game SOMA, where people upload a brain-scan of themselves to live on after some catastrophe, essentially making a digital copy of their consciousness. But because they are also still physically alive, they see the digital version of themselves as a clone, someone else. To "complete the transition", they decide they must end their lives at the exact moment the scan is complete.
It goes back at least 50 years more, to Star Trek transporters.
And the most chilling version I've seen is in Charles Stross' Glasshouse, where some soldiers fight a virus that infects the consciousness of everyone using such a transporter. They "rescue" an infected population by chopping off their heads and throwing them into a transporter hacked to remove the virus. IIRC only the heads because transporting the entire bodies would be slower and the other side is expected to reconstruct a living body anyway.
A few hundred or thousand beheaded people later, they realize that the transporter is broken and would not reconstruct anything.
And the most chilling version I've seen is in Charles Stross' Glasshouse, where some soldiers fight a virus that infects the consciousness of everyone using such a transporter. They "rescue" an infected population by chopping off their heads and throwing them into a transporter hacked to remove the virus. IIRC only the heads because transporting the entire bodies would be slower and the other side is expected to reconstruct a living body anyway.
A few hundred or thousand beheaded people later, they realize that the transporter is broken and would not reconstruct anything.
For me the archetypal story of the genre is Think Like a Dinosaur:
The story postulates a transportation device (supervised by a dinosaur-like race of aliens) which can transmit an exact copy of a person's body to distant planets. The original body is disintegrated once reception at the destination is confirmed. In the story a woman is teleported to an alien planet, but the original is not disintegrated because reception cannot be confirmed at the time. Reception is later confirmed, and the original, not surprisingly, declines to "balance the equation" by re-entering the scanning and disintegrating device. This creates an ethical quandary which is viewed quite differently by the cold-blooded aliens who provided the teleportation technology, and their warm-blooded human associates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Like_a_Dinosaur
Transmission protocol errors, eh.
The story postulates a transportation device (supervised by a dinosaur-like race of aliens) which can transmit an exact copy of a person's body to distant planets. The original body is disintegrated once reception at the destination is confirmed. In the story a woman is teleported to an alien planet, but the original is not disintegrated because reception cannot be confirmed at the time. Reception is later confirmed, and the original, not surprisingly, declines to "balance the equation" by re-entering the scanning and disintegrating device. This creates an ethical quandary which is viewed quite differently by the cold-blooded aliens who provided the teleportation technology, and their warm-blooded human associates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Like_a_Dinosaur
Transmission protocol errors, eh.
Even aliens haven't solved the problem of exactly-once message delivery
>It goes back at least 50 years more, to Star Trek transporters.
Personally, I like to trace this stuff back to early Christian theological debates. Here's an illuminating quotation:
Origen's belief that he could be resurrected in a numerically different body is parallel to Derek Parfit's belief that he could enjoy some kind of survival short of identity, if his present body was destroyed, but the information from it was electronically beamed, so as to construct an exactly similar body and brain with exactly similar psychology at a distance, say on the planet Mars (Reasons and Persons, 199-320). Parfit, like Origen, discounts the need for bodily continuity, and discounts the idea we encountered in Philoponus that it matters whether the original body is replaced gradually, or all at once (op. cit., Appendix D).
Personally, I like to trace this stuff back to early Christian theological debates. Here's an illuminating quotation:
Origen's belief that he could be resurrected in a numerically different body is parallel to Derek Parfit's belief that he could enjoy some kind of survival short of identity, if his present body was destroyed, but the information from it was electronically beamed, so as to construct an exactly similar body and brain with exactly similar psychology at a distance, say on the planet Mars (Reasons and Persons, 199-320). Parfit, like Origen, discounts the need for bodily continuity, and discounts the idea we encountered in Philoponus that it matters whether the original body is replaced gradually, or all at once (op. cit., Appendix D).
The NFT craze reminds me of Nasrudin's "Smoke Seller."[0]
[0] https://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~schiff/Net/t26.jpg
[0] https://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~schiff/Net/t26.jpg
SOMA was brilliant. That moment in particular I think was really thrilling, it made me consider some pretty fundamental questions about consciousness in a totally absurd setting. The setting I think helped isolate the core questions really well I felt.
Trying not to spoil it by discussing it, if anyone hasn't yet you really should try it, it's a really unique experience in gaming and that's hard to come by these days.
Trying not to spoil it by discussing it, if anyone hasn't yet you really should try it, it's a really unique experience in gaming and that's hard to come by these days.
Yeah it's a bit of a shame that the parent comment spoiled the plot. I definitely enjoyed SOMA's admittedly simplistic take on the teletransportation paradox; however, for me the atmosphere was much more impactful, especially given the story. I think they executed the "last survivor on Earth" trope really well, and it was tough to get through because of that.
You may enjoy Returnal as well. In terms of an experience you can't replicate in other mediums.
Are you familiar with the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult?
I believe JPEG2000 is commonly used as an archival format.
Compression artifacts are irrelevant if your scan resolution is significantly higher than the print resolution.
Compression artifacts are irrelevant if your scan resolution is significantly higher than the print resolution.
JPEG2000 supports lossless encoding. Even if you scan at higher than print resolution, if you compress too much with lossy compression, the original print resolution date won't be recoverable.
But the person who made the suggestion claims to be a post-doc and they ‘invented’ ‘JPEG mining’ whatever that is. So…
If they only they took a step back, they'd realize yes they can scan it, but nothing beats preserving the original book itself physically. These guys need to go out, breathe air, and talk to people outside of their bubble.
Yeah of all of the NFT silliness, this one takes the cake for me. I can just imagine the screams from historians and archivists.
They didn't mention making it an NFT? Ideology gone wild, wild west.
That's pretty insane.
Oddly enough - the process in a library for digitising a copy of a book can be fairly destructive, as far as I understood from those doing it (at CUDL). The spine is chopped off, to make it easier to put it into a machine for scanning all the pages.
The digital images can (should?) then be stored in a format that allows zooming, for example : https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-03967/1
Oddly enough - the process in a library for digitising a copy of a book can be fairly destructive, as far as I understood from those doing it (at CUDL). The spine is chopped off, to make it easier to put it into a machine for scanning all the pages.
The digital images can (should?) then be stored in a format that allows zooming, for example : https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-03967/1
> Oddly enough - the process in a library for digitising a copy of a book can be fairly destructive, as far as I understood from those doing it (at CUDL). The spine is chopped off, to make it easier to put it into a machine for scanning all the pages.
The general consensus among modern librarians came around on that subject, and now this kind of destructive processes is rare and generally frowned upon. A librarian friend once explained to me there was always two "schools" among librarians:
1. Those who only value the content of books. For those, copying/digitalizing a rare book is all that is needed in order to preserve said book.
2. Those who also value the physical object of the book as a historical artifact. For those keeping rare books in good condition is also necessary for preservation.
In the middle 1900s with the mass adoption of the microfilm, the first school gained the upper hand, and many libraries conducted mass projects of microfilming and destroying historical archives. Those were mostly motivated by a false belief that books were super fragile and wouldn't last anyway (I mean, if you believe the book will fall apart on its own, then you would be less reticent about using destructive methods to make the best copy possible).
In the last few decades the tides changed, librarians realized that books are not that fragile, and can be kept pretty much indefinitely if closed and protected from humidity (and fire). Also they realized that microfilm is crap, and that copying/digitizing is a error prone process, so a lot of stuff was lost because someone skipped a page, or the film was damaged, and the original was destroyed. So the movement to keep originals grew in strength, being almost a consensus now a days, and modern digitizing processes/machines are specially designed to be gentle and non destructive.
The general consensus among modern librarians came around on that subject, and now this kind of destructive processes is rare and generally frowned upon. A librarian friend once explained to me there was always two "schools" among librarians:
1. Those who only value the content of books. For those, copying/digitalizing a rare book is all that is needed in order to preserve said book.
2. Those who also value the physical object of the book as a historical artifact. For those keeping rare books in good condition is also necessary for preservation.
In the middle 1900s with the mass adoption of the microfilm, the first school gained the upper hand, and many libraries conducted mass projects of microfilming and destroying historical archives. Those were mostly motivated by a false belief that books were super fragile and wouldn't last anyway (I mean, if you believe the book will fall apart on its own, then you would be less reticent about using destructive methods to make the best copy possible).
In the last few decades the tides changed, librarians realized that books are not that fragile, and can be kept pretty much indefinitely if closed and protected from humidity (and fire). Also they realized that microfilm is crap, and that copying/digitizing is a error prone process, so a lot of stuff was lost because someone skipped a page, or the film was damaged, and the original was destroyed. So the movement to keep originals grew in strength, being almost a consensus now a days, and modern digitizing processes/machines are specially designed to be gentle and non destructive.
Archive.org has a non destructive book scanning technique!
http://blog.archive.org/2021/02/09/meet-eliza-zhang-book-sca...
http://blog.archive.org/2021/02/09/meet-eliza-zhang-book-sca...
Nice. I suppose it also depends on how rare the item being scanned is. For a recent printed work, with multiple copies it's less important, while scanning a fragment from a Genizah or a notebook is much more careful process.
The first time I encountered a digital facsimile was when I studied medieval literature in Germany.
There is the great "Codex Manesse" [1] (I once had the opportunity to see the real one in an exhibition) that is one of a kind.
It is irreplaceable and there are but a selected few people who are even allowed to touch it (with gloves). It could not be damaged, but was digitized without harm nonetheless [2].
So I actually never thought of digitalisation as a destructive process.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Manesse?wprov=sfla1
[2]: https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg848
There is the great "Codex Manesse" [1] (I once had the opportunity to see the real one in an exhibition) that is one of a kind.
It is irreplaceable and there are but a selected few people who are even allowed to touch it (with gloves). It could not be damaged, but was digitized without harm nonetheless [2].
So I actually never thought of digitalisation as a destructive process.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Manesse?wprov=sfla1
[2]: https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg848
Well ideally digitisation would not be destructive, I suppose. With any preservation or analysis of historical artefacts there is some risk/reward calculation. Like some books are so delicate that there is an approach to scan them while still closed:
https://news.mit.edu/2016/computational-imaging-method-reads...
not sure how much that is used, though (not my area :) )
https://news.mit.edu/2016/computational-imaging-method-reads...
not sure how much that is used, though (not my area :) )
If you then destroy the physical copy, how can you validate if the digitalisation succeeded?
For example, many Xerox scanners "switch" numbers when scanning:
https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...
Those who used them to digitize, e.g, accounting documents, and then destroyed the originals, are proper screwed.
For example, many Xerox scanners "switch" numbers when scanning:
https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...
Those who used them to digitize, e.g, accounting documents, and then destroyed the originals, are proper screwed.
>Oddly enough - the process in a library for digitising a copy of a book can be fairly destructive
Not that long ago, there was a very destructive push to convert old books to microfilm. I worry that not enough lessons were learned. Here's an interesting review of a book about the subject:
https://thefateofbooks.wordpress.com/2021/11/29/a-classic-tu...
Not that long ago, there was a very destructive push to convert old books to microfilm. I worry that not enough lessons were learned. Here's an interesting review of a book about the subject:
https://thefateofbooks.wordpress.com/2021/11/29/a-classic-tu...
> Oddly enough - the process in a library for digitising a copy of a book can be fairly destructive, as far as I understood from those doing it (at CUDL). The spine is chopped off, to make it easier to put it into a machine for scanning all the pages.
I don't think it necessarily has to be that way. I recall seeing a photo or video of a book-scanner that would project laser grid-lines onto the book, to non-destructively correct for the deformations caused by the binding in software.
Edit: not sure if this is the one, but it shows the concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03ccxwNssmo
I don't think it necessarily has to be that way. I recall seeing a photo or video of a book-scanner that would project laser grid-lines onto the book, to non-destructively correct for the deformations caused by the binding in software.
Edit: not sure if this is the one, but it shows the concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03ccxwNssmo
Let’s suspend disbelief for a moment and pretend everything worked as they say, in what world is giving access to the book to the few people that pay for the nft, “democratising”?
The dude in the linked forum post goes on to say this:
> Here is where we make the dreams of the Harkonnen become true. [...]
I'm finding it really very difficult to imagine that someone's read/watched Dune and come away thinking the the Harkonnen are the good guys. So I can't imagine that intellectual honesty is one of their strong points.
> Here is where we make the dreams of the Harkonnen become true. [...]
I'm finding it really very difficult to imagine that someone's read/watched Dune and come away thinking the the Harkonnen are the good guys. So I can't imagine that intellectual honesty is one of their strong points.
NFT data is public, generally.
Then in what sense is owning a token owning anything?
> The little prince was still not satisfied. "If I own a scarf, I can tie it around my neck and take it away. If I own a flower, I can pick it and take it away. But you can't pick the stars!" "No, but I can put them in the bank." "What does that mean?" "That means that I write the number of my stars on a slip of paper. And then I lock that slip of paper in a drawer." "And that's all?" "That's enough!"
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry satirized NFTs 70 years before they were invented!
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry satirized NFTs 70 years before they were invented!
Forget the idea that owning the token represents something. Buying an NFT just means you bought the NFT itself; it does not mean you bought the image, have access to the image, bought any rights to the image. It just means you bought the NFT.
Kinda missing the point of NFTs there, it's a collector's item and I can't spend $2.6m to buy the actual physical book, but I could spend $2.6k to buy an NFT with 1000 editions which was minted by the owner of the physical book. I don't care about Jorodowsky's Dune, but if I was a fan I could then show off my NFT on twitter, or <<the metaverse>> or just print it out and frame it.
FAQS
- Can't someone else just download the image and pretend they own it? Yes, just as someone can buy a fake LV bag and show it off. Other collectors will still know, and don't care about the fakes. As the tech becomes more mainstream, sites like twitter will show whether you actually own the NFT you claim to.
- Can't someone else mint their own NFT? Yes, but like with real collectors items, provenance matters. Just like one can forge a perfect Picasso but without any plausible proof of origin it would not be worth much.
- Can't they decide to mint more "fragments" after the fact, therefore diluting the price of each of the 1000 editions. No, the smart contract that governs the NFT can't be changed.
- Won't the link inside my NFT die? No, the link is usually just a SHA256 hash of the content; with the content being hosted on IPFS. It's all p2p so as long as a host somewhere in the world has a copy, you can always find the content by hash, even if the underlying technology changes with time.
FAQS
- Can't someone else just download the image and pretend they own it? Yes, just as someone can buy a fake LV bag and show it off. Other collectors will still know, and don't care about the fakes. As the tech becomes more mainstream, sites like twitter will show whether you actually own the NFT you claim to.
- Can't someone else mint their own NFT? Yes, but like with real collectors items, provenance matters. Just like one can forge a perfect Picasso but without any plausible proof of origin it would not be worth much.
- Can't they decide to mint more "fragments" after the fact, therefore diluting the price of each of the 1000 editions. No, the smart contract that governs the NFT can't be changed.
- Won't the link inside my NFT die? No, the link is usually just a SHA256 hash of the content; with the content being hosted on IPFS. It's all p2p so as long as a host somewhere in the world has a copy, you can always find the content by hash, even if the underlying technology changes with time.
So NFT's are just a way to introduce artificial scarcity for what is otherwise a reproducible digital good? A way for people to flex money on things that don't exist? They're like DLC skins in a video game - worth nothing, other than showing off that you spent $x dollars?
Kinda? Most things are reproducible. Limited edition sneakers are reproducible, and yet scarcity makes them worth thousands of dollars.
Is it stupid to pay $10k for some hard to find sneakers? maybe, but people do it because they have the money and they're collectors, or they want to flex. Is it more real because there's a physical item which costs maybe $20 to manufacture?
It's not like your example with the DLC skins, DLC skins are not limited in any way, the game company can create more and more of them. An NFT collection is limited, there will never be more than the amount the contract specifies (unless the contract leaves that open-ended intentionally). The creator can't simply sell new ones, because using a new contract would make the new ones lose all inherent value.
It's exactly the same as how certain sneakers are worth $10k and others that are from the same brand, same designers, same materials are worth $100 – provenance matters, and knowing it was released in an extremely limited way makes something more valuable.
Is it stupid to pay $10k for some hard to find sneakers? maybe, but people do it because they have the money and they're collectors, or they want to flex. Is it more real because there's a physical item which costs maybe $20 to manufacture?
It's not like your example with the DLC skins, DLC skins are not limited in any way, the game company can create more and more of them. An NFT collection is limited, there will never be more than the amount the contract specifies (unless the contract leaves that open-ended intentionally). The creator can't simply sell new ones, because using a new contract would make the new ones lose all inherent value.
It's exactly the same as how certain sneakers are worth $10k and others that are from the same brand, same designers, same materials are worth $100 – provenance matters, and knowing it was released in an extremely limited way makes something more valuable.
The problem that they don’t have the rights to make digital copies of the book let alone sell digital copies remains
As far as I understand it, NFTs usually represent the title for the copyright, etc for the piece of art or whatever other non fungible item it is supposed to represent. Honestly NFTs should be pointing to a legal document showing that it's acting that way in addition to a copy of the image asset. 2 urls. Maybe NFTs do or should have an addendum part for transactions, so you can add URL or hash updates as hosting goes down.
When you transfer an NFT from one address to another, you have transferred title to whoever owns the private keys for it.
When you transfer an NFT from one address to another, you have transferred title to whoever owns the private keys for it.
> As far as I understand it, NFTs usually represent the title for the copyright
You don't understand it. This is false. NFTs do not represent copyrights of any kind, either in theory or in common practice.
You don't understand it. This is false. NFTs do not represent copyrights of any kind, either in theory or in common practice.
You’d need a separate legal contract that was valid in whatever jurisdiction saying the owner of an NFT owned the copyright. At which point the NFT is basically superfluous, because the contract is doing all the work and at that point you may as well just have the contract itself.
An NFT is more like an autographed photocopy of something. Except apparently a lot of NFTs on popular platforms are created from stolen digital art, so you get the fun of not even being completely sure if the autograph is actually by the creator of the art (but it’s verifiable that is is by the creator of the token).
An NFT is more like an autographed photocopy of something. Except apparently a lot of NFTs on popular platforms are created from stolen digital art, so you get the fun of not even being completely sure if the autograph is actually by the creator of the art (but it’s verifiable that is is by the creator of the token).
It's just like having your name plate under a painting at a public museum
Not really. Those are on loan, which is not the default state of a piece of art.
Libertarian heaven
What happens if you upload copyright protected data in cleartext on a blockchain without having the distribution rights?
You can't really put content on the blockchain, that costs a surprising amount because of all the proof-of-waste. What happens is people put the content on a host and the URL on the blockchain. I suppose in theory it could be kept in IPFS, but few NFTs seem to bother with that.
The idea that people put the URL in the blockchain is misleading and people keep repeating it as a mantra.
Yes, you put a URL on the blockchain but it's almost always a URL to the ipfs protocol e.g. ipfs://QmVc6zuAneKJzicnJpfrqCH9gSy6bz54JhcypfJYhGUFQu
This identifier is a base58 encoding of a sha256 hash that points to the content. It doesn't actually tell you what host to use to find the content, that's completely left to the client app; so you could use an ipfs gateway like cloudflare-ipfs.com or ipfs.io or you could, imagining a future in which ipfs is not used anymore, use any other kind of p2p network to find the content.
Just like gnutella, or torrents, as long as someone out there is hosting the content it's usually possible to find it.
Yes, you put a URL on the blockchain but it's almost always a URL to the ipfs protocol e.g. ipfs://QmVc6zuAneKJzicnJpfrqCH9gSy6bz54JhcypfJYhGUFQu
This identifier is a base58 encoding of a sha256 hash that points to the content. It doesn't actually tell you what host to use to find the content, that's completely left to the client app; so you could use an ipfs gateway like cloudflare-ipfs.com or ipfs.io or you could, imagining a future in which ipfs is not used anymore, use any other kind of p2p network to find the content.
Just like gnutella, or torrents, as long as someone out there is hosting the content it's usually possible to find it.
Except ipfs content disappears if no one is pinning it. And you can find IPs of hosts which are pinning it. Yes there is FileCoin but there are minimum and maximum file size and contract duration limits. So someone has to periodically check pins, contracts and keep purchasing new FileCoin contracts to keep it online.
Yes, true, I don't think ipfs is meant to be censorship-resistant though, so finding the IP of hosts doesn't seem like a big deal for the project goals.
My point was more that the NFT metadata itself could still be usable x years in the future when another protocol has replaced ipfs – it would just have to make the files findable by the existing hash.
The biggest potential risk would be if sha256 becomes broken and finding collisions is trivial.
My point was more that the NFT metadata itself could still be usable x years in the future when another protocol has replaced ipfs – it would just have to make the files findable by the existing hash.
The biggest potential risk would be if sha256 becomes broken and finding collisions is trivial.
What blockchain? Some newer ones are not expensive (but also are not decentralized enough yet). They dismiss ipfs straight away in the responses already for it and actually say they will put the actual imagine on the blockchain. This will cost something (possibly a lot) depending on which chain, but they have $4m+ left to burn on ‘the good cause’. This all stinks but I must agree, if you want something for eternity (well, in their minds), putting the content on a big (btc/eth) chain would be the only way; seems the rest is far more brittle.
Current eth prices are about 233M$/GB to get something on the chain. They could get about 17MB with all of their remaining funds.
Jikes, that's even worse than I thought. So then they will probably just go for another coin and store it there. Not sure how else. Or maybe they'll raise a few billion after this victory /s
Unfortunately, things like that actually happen even though everyone here would consider it a joke.
Unfortunately, things like that actually happen even though everyone here would consider it a joke.
A handful of words can be copyrightable. The idea of copyrighted content being stored on a blockchain that thousands of nodes duplicate and offer freely is an interesting conundrum that your reply entirely sidesteps. I’m guessing it has happened already but I too am interested in the legal implications of this.
Legally it's not complicated: is it a copy? Is it permitted by the copyright owner? No? Then it's an infringing copy.
Actually doing something about it is a problem, as shown throughout the post-Napster era, but every node that serves an infringing copy is potentially liable.
Actually doing something about it is a problem, as shown throughout the post-Napster era, but every node that serves an infringing copy is potentially liable.
A lot of nodes are run by some (relatively) well-known, well-funded companies. See https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/nodes-and-clients/no...
Wonder if they will be or have been subject to copyright complaints / lawsuits.
Wonder if they will be or have been subject to copyright complaints / lawsuits.
I'd add a number of additional complications.
* Is the material copyrightable? A novel is copyrightable, but a recipe is not. The layout format of a telephone book is copyrightable, but the contents of it are not.
* Is the copyright still in effect? Unfortunately, this is a less relevant question now, as anything written within living memory is under copyright, but it is still a required step.
* Is permission from the copyright holder required? If I am sold a copy of a computer program, I'm allowed to make whatever copies are necessary (e.g. copying from the hard drive to RAM) that are necessary to execute the program, without the permission of the copyright holder.
* What is being done with the copy? If I buy a work, the copyright owner has no right to prevent me from selling it, nor are they entitled to any portion of the proceeds. Re-sale of authorized copies, regardless of permission, are not infringements.
* Is the material copyrightable? A novel is copyrightable, but a recipe is not. The layout format of a telephone book is copyrightable, but the contents of it are not.
* Is the copyright still in effect? Unfortunately, this is a less relevant question now, as anything written within living memory is under copyright, but it is still a required step.
* Is permission from the copyright holder required? If I am sold a copy of a computer program, I'm allowed to make whatever copies are necessary (e.g. copying from the hard drive to RAM) that are necessary to execute the program, without the permission of the copyright holder.
* What is being done with the copy? If I buy a work, the copyright owner has no right to prevent me from selling it, nor are they entitled to any portion of the proceeds. Re-sale of authorized copies, regardless of permission, are not infringements.
Read the linked parent forum post. They are talking exactly about putting the actual images on the blockchain.
Well, they won't. All NFTs are hosted on hilariously centralized services like googleusercontent.com and similar.
Browse through https://opensea.io/, the most prominent NFT marketplace at the moment. Digging through the DOM of their website will reveal a lot of links to quite standard content storage solutions. They usually go through a bit of trouble to prevent people from simply clicking "view image in new tab" to reveal the actual location, but it's not difficult to get around.
Browse through https://opensea.io/, the most prominent NFT marketplace at the moment. Digging through the DOM of their website will reveal a lot of links to quite standard content storage solutions. They usually go through a bit of trouble to prevent people from simply clicking "view image in new tab" to reveal the actual location, but it's not difficult to get around.
Almost all NFTs are hosted on IPFS. Opensea shows a CACHED version of the image, because pulling them directly from IPFS puts unnecessary strain on the network and is comparatively slow.
The contract for the NFT generally just points to an IPFS identifier (a sha256 hash of the content), and it's up to the viewer (a website like opensea) to decide what ipfs gateway to use. Even if the ipfs network died you could still use other p2p methods to find the content, as long as someone was still hosting it.
The contract for the NFT generally just points to an IPFS identifier (a sha256 hash of the content), and it's up to the viewer (a website like opensea) to decide what ipfs gateway to use. Even if the ipfs network died you could still use other p2p methods to find the content, as long as someone was still hosting it.
The amount of artwork NFTs that has "Metadata: Centralized" in their details appear very high, although it's difficult to get any exact numbers. As far as I can tell, OpenSea doesn't provide an option to filter based on this field.
Some high value collections like BAYC have frozen metadata, so it can never be changed. I do know some other big collections serve images from AWS or their own domains, this happens because it's extremely expensive at current gas prices to do partial reveals or any kind of metadata changes on-chain
It's a problem, it used to be the grand majority of collections were fully decentralised and frozen but nowadays it's a mixed bag – I think it will change once the gas problem is solved, but it's also partly because the audience has changed and newcomers into NFTs don't care so much about their tokens being fully decentralised.
It's a problem, it used to be the grand majority of collections were fully decentralised and frozen but nowadays it's a mixed bag – I think it will change once the gas problem is solved, but it's also partly because the audience has changed and newcomers into NFTs don't care so much about their tokens being fully decentralised.
Did you actually read the post? They propose to put it on-chain, and even say
> [O]ur NFT collection could very possibly become the largest on-chain collection ever in the history of Ethereum. Time would only be on our side because as gas becomes more expensive, the window of opportunity to bypass our on-chain NFT collection would fade away.
> [O]ur NFT collection could very possibly become the largest on-chain collection ever in the history of Ethereum. Time would only be on our side because as gas becomes more expensive, the window of opportunity to bypass our on-chain NFT collection would fade away.
Remember that this is from the people that believe buying a book gives them the IP rights to the work (should have bought a Harry Potter book). They may not have thought it all the way through.
To give an idea of the storage costs associated, I dug up this old stackexchange-answer about storage costs on Ethereum [0], which estimates that it costs about 76.000 USD / GB stored. Note that this is 5 year old answer, so the price will probably have multiplied like the price of ETH since then.
Edit: Here's [1] a newer, updated price estimate that takes current prices into account : 309.9 Million / GB. LoL!
[0] https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/872/what-is-the...
[1] https://proderivatives.com/blog/2019/5/10/minimizing-data-st...
To give an idea of the storage costs associated, I dug up this old stackexchange-answer about storage costs on Ethereum [0], which estimates that it costs about 76.000 USD / GB stored. Note that this is 5 year old answer, so the price will probably have multiplied like the price of ETH since then.
Edit: Here's [1] a newer, updated price estimate that takes current prices into account : 309.9 Million / GB. LoL!
[0] https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/872/what-is-the...
[1] https://proderivatives.com/blog/2019/5/10/minimizing-data-st...
Oh, no-one here is claiming that their idea makes any financial (or technological) sense, just that their idea is indeed storing it on the blockchain.
I naively always thought NFT's live on the actual block chain. That is the only thing that made them interesting to me.
IPFS isn't hosting, it's transport. You can't "put something on ipfs" and expect it to stay there any more than when you "put something on http".
https://ipfs.io/ says:
> Here's what happens when you add a file to IPFS — whether you're storing that file on your own local node or one operated by a pinning service or IPFS-enabled app.
Notice that wording: “Add a file to IPFS”.
It’s likewise fine to say, then, that you “put something on ipfs”.
> Here's what happens when you add a file to IPFS — whether you're storing that file on your own local node or one operated by a pinning service or IPFS-enabled app.
Notice that wording: “Add a file to IPFS”.
It’s likewise fine to say, then, that you “put something on ipfs”.
That's odd, since the TP in HTTP stands for transfer protocol, but the FS in IPFS stands for file system. You'd expect to be able to store data on a file system. That's what I use my file system for anyway.
A file system is simply a system for storing files.
The filing cabinet is the storage, the way I organize files in the cabinet is the filing system.
The filing cabinet is the storage, the way I organize files in the cabinet is the filing system.
Most IPFS gateways allow you to pin content, plus they will automatically pin popular content to keep it available.
> plus they will automatically pin popular content to keep it available
This is false. Popular content is cached temporarily. Pinning persists the data until unpinned; the ipfs daemon does not automatically pin anything.
This is false. Popular content is cached temporarily. Pinning persists the data until unpinned; the ipfs daemon does not automatically pin anything.
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I’m tempted to upload a magnet URL dump to a cheap blockchain (there has to be one, right?)
Bruce Schneier wrote about this on his blog about illegal content on Bitcoin's ledger:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/03/illegal-conte...
The answer seems to be that 'nothing much happens, yet'.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/03/illegal-conte...
The answer seems to be that 'nothing much happens, yet'.
You don't need to guess - someone is holding that copyright right now.
[Q] Do we really want to be perceived as book burners?
[A] Tbh I don’t care too much what a bunch of normies that probably didn’t even know the book existed think. The book would still exist but digitized and in the blockchain.
[Q] Why not just use Arweave, IPFS, and a variety of other long-term digital preservation strategies? All of them are less expensive and resource-intensive.
IPFS is not permanent. If it stops being hosted it disappears. Arweave cannot compare to something like Ethereum which is a truly decentralized network. But upmost I would say that cost of uploading is a feat, not a problem. It would make our collection even more special.
These are a bunch of seriously sociopathic, inconsiderate and reckless thugs. I'm happy to see them fleecing each other.
[A] Tbh I don’t care too much what a bunch of normies that probably didn’t even know the book existed think. The book would still exist but digitized and in the blockchain.
[Q] Why not just use Arweave, IPFS, and a variety of other long-term digital preservation strategies? All of them are less expensive and resource-intensive.
IPFS is not permanent. If it stops being hosted it disappears. Arweave cannot compare to something like Ethereum which is a truly decentralized network. But upmost I would say that cost of uploading is a feat, not a problem. It would make our collection even more special.
These are a bunch of seriously sociopathic, inconsiderate and reckless thugs. I'm happy to see them fleecing each other.
I wonder how crunchy the jpeg quality needs to be for this to be viable.
A crude back of the envelope calculation after some googling would put the storage price on Ethereum at around 3.5eth per mb.
So that would be around 10k€ per mb. Certainly doable if they like burning money, but likely not at archival quality.
A crude back of the envelope calculation after some googling would put the storage price on Ethereum at around 3.5eth per mb.
So that would be around 10k€ per mb. Certainly doable if they like burning money, but likely not at archival quality.
"Crunchy jpeg" reminded me of this scene https://youtu.be/EklmUZF6lm0?t=220
>If it stops being hosted it disappears
The same thing applies to blockchains. If no one is hosting it, you can't download it.
The same thing applies to blockchains. If no one is hosting it, you can't download it.
Sure but ipfs hosting etc rely on one or a few hosts; if you use a blockchain like btc, at least it is vast and that means someone will be hosting at least until btc reaches $0.
not necessarily. BTC has UTXO (unspent transaction output), whereas ETH has proper accounts and the money is a property of the account.
so if any of these chains only want to focus on sending/storing money (or simply address the evergrowing size of the chain), then they can start purging the old transactions from the ledger.
(yes, ETH has smart contracts, but it's not impossible to imagine that ETH will start charging gas for upkeep of that data, and when the smart contract runs out of upkeep it gets deleted.)
so if any of these chains only want to focus on sending/storing money (or simply address the evergrowing size of the chain), then they can start purging the old transactions from the ledger.
(yes, ETH has smart contracts, but it's not impossible to imagine that ETH will start charging gas for upkeep of that data, and when the smart contract runs out of upkeep it gets deleted.)
Yes, but most other way of storage are even easier to purge. Also these people are not exactly sane, so I can see them spend millions on ‘securing the documents on chain’.
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They've bought into the idea of artificial scarcity, so of course destroying real things makes them more valuable.
I think one thing many people are missing is how much of this space is children, by now.
While the past decade has been about adults risking their fiat capital, children are forced to only earn crypto onchain, as they cannot get the bank account or money without bothering their parents. It is less wise to bother their parents. People like you and I who will proselytize about crypto or any particular crypto investment, while also having incentive to assume custody over the money and benefit from it instead.
Whereas in the crypto space natively they can earn and trade and acquire goods and services. Something harder for adults to even notice is possible since the fiat system serves us well enough, so it is an easier frame of reference to only think about crypto as “earn dollars, buy crypto, have more or less dollars later” compared to “earn crypto, trade crypto to have more crypto”.
There is no way to quantify it, but if you lead with this assumption you will find it.
I know children that have a few hundred $ in their joint bank account but $100k in crypto onchain and just waiting till they turn 18 so they can cash out without telling their parents.
As the things they invest in also grow 100x, this is a formidable force of capital, that would represent a cognitive distortion in the markets. So it is no longer just passionate adults that simply never traded before, its teenagers and possibly even Generation Alpha at this point.
A lot of things make a lot more sense with this assumption.
Use that information however you please.
While the past decade has been about adults risking their fiat capital, children are forced to only earn crypto onchain, as they cannot get the bank account or money without bothering their parents. It is less wise to bother their parents. People like you and I who will proselytize about crypto or any particular crypto investment, while also having incentive to assume custody over the money and benefit from it instead.
Whereas in the crypto space natively they can earn and trade and acquire goods and services. Something harder for adults to even notice is possible since the fiat system serves us well enough, so it is an easier frame of reference to only think about crypto as “earn dollars, buy crypto, have more or less dollars later” compared to “earn crypto, trade crypto to have more crypto”.
There is no way to quantify it, but if you lead with this assumption you will find it.
I know children that have a few hundred $ in their joint bank account but $100k in crypto onchain and just waiting till they turn 18 so they can cash out without telling their parents.
As the things they invest in also grow 100x, this is a formidable force of capital, that would represent a cognitive distortion in the markets. So it is no longer just passionate adults that simply never traded before, its teenagers and possibly even Generation Alpha at this point.
A lot of things make a lot more sense with this assumption.
Use that information however you please.
> "children are forced to only earn crypto onchain"
What use do children have for cryptocurrencies? Buying items in World of Warcraft?
> "I know children that have a few hundred $ in their joint bank account but $100k in crypto onchain and just waiting till they turn 18 so they can cash out without telling their parents."
This entire post reads like some weird crypto-bro FOMO propaganda. To "cash out" they'll need a bank account which will accept their shady funds, and they'll have to prove they paid their taxes for it like everybody else. Until then, they can't do anything with it.
What use do children have for cryptocurrencies? Buying items in World of Warcraft?
> "I know children that have a few hundred $ in their joint bank account but $100k in crypto onchain and just waiting till they turn 18 so they can cash out without telling their parents."
This entire post reads like some weird crypto-bro FOMO propaganda. To "cash out" they'll need a bank account which will accept their shady funds, and they'll have to prove they paid their taxes for it like everybody else. Until then, they can't do anything with it.
> This entire post reads like some weird crypto-bro FOMO propaganda.
Its intended to be devoid of opinion to the extent possible which is probably why you don't recognize it.
Your thoughts on what they can do are incorrect. The only thing a child still cannot do is enter into a real world contract and have it be enforceable. But in environments that require zero, or less, or different kinds of non-contractually enforced trust, with a crypto balance sheet the children can acquire goods, services and investments, they can access capital, they can pool investments and share proceeds, they can hire and fire other real world humans, they can acquire real world assets where merchants accept crypto or use a payment processor that does. And this is what some or many are doing, the path of least resistance and beyond the wildest aspirations that any multinational trade deal could ever achieve. So I’m not sure what standard you can really rely on here aside from being unaware.
If you weren't aware of a crypto centric form of wealth, where the fiat dollars are the novelty to be temporarily held, then you’re a decade behind.
The only thing new here (circa the last 2-3 years) is that its much easier for the children to earn the initial crypto, given how robust that economy is.
They’ll cash out when they are 18 if they need to. No different than people only taking money out of their stock and bond holdings for large purchases. Except its a hybrid where they earned the investments directly instead of having to initially purchase them.
Its intended to be devoid of opinion to the extent possible which is probably why you don't recognize it.
Your thoughts on what they can do are incorrect. The only thing a child still cannot do is enter into a real world contract and have it be enforceable. But in environments that require zero, or less, or different kinds of non-contractually enforced trust, with a crypto balance sheet the children can acquire goods, services and investments, they can access capital, they can pool investments and share proceeds, they can hire and fire other real world humans, they can acquire real world assets where merchants accept crypto or use a payment processor that does. And this is what some or many are doing, the path of least resistance and beyond the wildest aspirations that any multinational trade deal could ever achieve. So I’m not sure what standard you can really rely on here aside from being unaware.
If you weren't aware of a crypto centric form of wealth, where the fiat dollars are the novelty to be temporarily held, then you’re a decade behind.
The only thing new here (circa the last 2-3 years) is that its much easier for the children to earn the initial crypto, given how robust that economy is.
They’ll cash out when they are 18 if they need to. No different than people only taking money out of their stock and bond holdings for large purchases. Except its a hybrid where they earned the investments directly instead of having to initially purchase them.
I'm asking for specific and concrete examples that would demonstrate what use do children have for cryptocurrencies - and you respond by using the same vague promises of a revolutionary technology intermixed with keywords from investment and financial jargons, sprinkled with a bit of FOMO propaganda on-top.
Kids could buy and trade items in World of Warcraft or Club Penguin for 20 years now. They collected and traded marbles, then Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards. Music albums and candy. Kids will always find a "currency" to play with, depending on what's trendy and hip right now.
Kids could buy and trade items in World of Warcraft or Club Penguin for 20 years now. They collected and traded marbles, then Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards. Music albums and candy. Kids will always find a "currency" to play with, depending on what's trendy and hip right now.
Children have the same use adults do. The subset of adults that use crypto natively, maybe "crypto onchain native" sounds like vague jargon to you but nothing I said were promises of a revolutionary change, this is what is happening right now.
You are the one that doesn't understand and this is not the thread for you to learn that, what example would you like to see if it was? The only education offered is that children are using it, instead of spending year after year acting confused of its existence like many people I know here do. Gen Z and Gen Alpha looked at tools available and picked them up instead of attempting to interface with the caste system we normalized towards people under 18, its simple and all that's happened. So, that's different because we don't have to wait 15-20 years for new generations to enter the economy and see what happens, they are active and autonomous nodes in just a few years for better of for worse, but making an opinion about that requires noticing and acknowledging that its occurring.
To really illustrate the disconnect here, an example is that What you are saying relies on you not knowing how to borrow against your crypto with a lending smart contract and purchase other things you want with it. It relies on you thinking these are buzzwords instead of actual etymology and additions to the lexicon that can coordinate people to do the same thing because they understand a shared concept, concepts you personally don't know yet.
I'm not sure what answers you are looking for.
But they understand that they can accumulate wealth, the majority of which can be useful for a later time, without running into the liquidity issues that accumulating marbles and trading cards have.
You are the one that doesn't understand and this is not the thread for you to learn that, what example would you like to see if it was? The only education offered is that children are using it, instead of spending year after year acting confused of its existence like many people I know here do. Gen Z and Gen Alpha looked at tools available and picked them up instead of attempting to interface with the caste system we normalized towards people under 18, its simple and all that's happened. So, that's different because we don't have to wait 15-20 years for new generations to enter the economy and see what happens, they are active and autonomous nodes in just a few years for better of for worse, but making an opinion about that requires noticing and acknowledging that its occurring.
To really illustrate the disconnect here, an example is that What you are saying relies on you not knowing how to borrow against your crypto with a lending smart contract and purchase other things you want with it. It relies on you thinking these are buzzwords instead of actual etymology and additions to the lexicon that can coordinate people to do the same thing because they understand a shared concept, concepts you personally don't know yet.
I'm not sure what answers you are looking for.
But they understand that they can accumulate wealth, the majority of which can be useful for a later time, without running into the liquidity issues that accumulating marbles and trading cards have.
How old do you think I am? And how out-of-touch with the technology and the industry do you think I must be? Let me assure you, your presuppositions and biases don't make your points come across any better.
> "Children have the same use adults do."
This can't possibly be true, because kids and adults have different needs and are in different stages in life. I can't take the rest of your comment seriously when it's based on this claim.
I'm still waiting for concrete examples for uses children have for cryptocurrencies, and for some proof that this is somehow different than any other fad we've had before. I'm not denying kids will find random "currencies" (reference my previous response) to play with, but I'm absolutely discarding the idea that cryptocurrencies offer anything of meaning to children.
There's another comment under this very thread claiming that there's "code written by a 13 year old managing billions of capital in crypto". This too reads like typical FOMO propaganda. That somebody can "manage billions of capital in crypto" is an absolute meaningless claim, and it's easy to see how people that lack the knowledge and the context about the technology can be FOMO'd into spending money on this based on such grandiose vague statements.
The reality is that anybody can start their own "blockchain" and "manage trillions of capital in crypto" if they want to (why stop at billions when you can be so much richer?). Posting these claims doesn't resolve core questions such as "what do they use the cryptocurrency for", "how do they benefit from doing this", "what is the path into 'cashing-out' and extracting value from the cryptocurrency back into the traditional financial system", "how do they get other people to participate in their ecosystem", "how do they ensure their blockchain survives years into the future", "how do they protect themselves against common pitfalls that can undermine the cryptocurrency", "how do they protect themselves against fraud" etc. Ironically, those questions don't just apply to children by the way - they apply to pretty much every other use-case of crypto being touted today.
> "Children have the same use adults do."
This can't possibly be true, because kids and adults have different needs and are in different stages in life. I can't take the rest of your comment seriously when it's based on this claim.
I'm still waiting for concrete examples for uses children have for cryptocurrencies, and for some proof that this is somehow different than any other fad we've had before. I'm not denying kids will find random "currencies" (reference my previous response) to play with, but I'm absolutely discarding the idea that cryptocurrencies offer anything of meaning to children.
There's another comment under this very thread claiming that there's "code written by a 13 year old managing billions of capital in crypto". This too reads like typical FOMO propaganda. That somebody can "manage billions of capital in crypto" is an absolute meaningless claim, and it's easy to see how people that lack the knowledge and the context about the technology can be FOMO'd into spending money on this based on such grandiose vague statements.
The reality is that anybody can start their own "blockchain" and "manage trillions of capital in crypto" if they want to (why stop at billions when you can be so much richer?). Posting these claims doesn't resolve core questions such as "what do they use the cryptocurrency for", "how do they benefit from doing this", "what is the path into 'cashing-out' and extracting value from the cryptocurrency back into the traditional financial system", "how do they get other people to participate in their ecosystem", "how do they ensure their blockchain survives years into the future", "how do they protect themselves against common pitfalls that can undermine the cryptocurrency", "how do they protect themselves against fraud" etc. Ironically, those questions don't just apply to children by the way - they apply to pretty much every other use-case of crypto being touted today.
You're really worried about people spending money on something. How does people earning or managing other people's money inspire someone else to have confidence to spend money on something? In what way would it be "FOMO propoganda" (which doesn't mean false, by the way) to spend anything?
This entire thread isn't about spending money, its about earning money from organizations that already have wealth in the crypto space. These things don't happen on blockchains people spent up on their own, they happen on blockchains with larger saturation of attention.
Yes, a 13 year old could manage be managing hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. You won't reach your standard of proof here, information appears where there is a benefit to that information existing publicly. There is no benefit for that. The applications are fairly simple and simply isn't an oversaturated space yet. Easy.
> I can't take the rest of your comment seriously when it's based on this claim.
Since you probably shut your brain off again at my first sentence, here is just a stream of thought to your "core questions" in no particular order. They extract value by taking a percentage of volume that passes through their applications. Their applications can manage unlimited sums if people like it. They get other people to participate by being active on forums and social media. The audit system and insurance industry is the protection against fraud, or none at all. They don't launch their own blockchains, bad assumption to begin with, the applications solve problems on existing ones or just provide entertainment. Children cash out when they are 18 by opening an exchange account at that time, this was answered earlier, they can acquire property, make investments, and get access to capital before they are 18, also answered earlier. Pretend to be a US child and look it up on youtube and ask around on TikTok and discord and see where you get.
This entire thread isn't about spending money, its about earning money from organizations that already have wealth in the crypto space. These things don't happen on blockchains people spent up on their own, they happen on blockchains with larger saturation of attention.
Yes, a 13 year old could manage be managing hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. You won't reach your standard of proof here, information appears where there is a benefit to that information existing publicly. There is no benefit for that. The applications are fairly simple and simply isn't an oversaturated space yet. Easy.
> I can't take the rest of your comment seriously when it's based on this claim.
Since you probably shut your brain off again at my first sentence, here is just a stream of thought to your "core questions" in no particular order. They extract value by taking a percentage of volume that passes through their applications. Their applications can manage unlimited sums if people like it. They get other people to participate by being active on forums and social media. The audit system and insurance industry is the protection against fraud, or none at all. They don't launch their own blockchains, bad assumption to begin with, the applications solve problems on existing ones or just provide entertainment. Children cash out when they are 18 by opening an exchange account at that time, this was answered earlier, they can acquire property, make investments, and get access to capital before they are 18, also answered earlier. Pretend to be a US child and look it up on youtube and ask around on TikTok and discord and see where you get.
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You are more right than wrong there...
I know under 18 year olds behind a pseudo name running large capital and lending pools in crypto. All it takes is writing smart contracts and deploying them. Voila, you can run your own automated lending or exchange pool.
Flash loans are something I have seen 13 year old kiddos experiment with using crypto. It's unbelievable until you see it.
Code written by a 13 year old managing billions of capital in crypto.
Many are even public and probbed up by VCs like founder of rari capital and many startups connected to them.
I think this is getting even truer for real world stock market.
Kids are increasingly investing using custodial accounts.
https://www.joinbloom.co/ - teen stock investing funded by YC.
There are many of these popping up
I know under 18 year olds behind a pseudo name running large capital and lending pools in crypto. All it takes is writing smart contracts and deploying them. Voila, you can run your own automated lending or exchange pool.
Flash loans are something I have seen 13 year old kiddos experiment with using crypto. It's unbelievable until you see it.
Code written by a 13 year old managing billions of capital in crypto.
Many are even public and probbed up by VCs like founder of rari capital and many startups connected to them.
I think this is getting even truer for real world stock market.
Kids are increasingly investing using custodial accounts.
https://www.joinbloom.co/ - teen stock investing funded by YC.
There are many of these popping up
A lot of claims being made here without any actual proof.
You need a bank account to buy cryptocurrencies. You also need fiat money to buy it. In the US at least, you need to be KYC'd to buy it from an exchange with fiat.
It's really tiring hearing propaganda like this, that easily falls apart under even a little bit of scrutiny. Like "banking the unbanked", it's lies being told that try to sell people on how cryptocurrency is enriching people who'd otherwise be poor, and opening opportunities to people who otherwise would not have them, but it's nothing more than preying on people's greed and FOMO, to pull in more suckers to fleece.
You need a bank account to buy cryptocurrencies. You also need fiat money to buy it. In the US at least, you need to be KYC'd to buy it from an exchange with fiat.
It's really tiring hearing propaganda like this, that easily falls apart under even a little bit of scrutiny. Like "banking the unbanked", it's lies being told that try to sell people on how cryptocurrency is enriching people who'd otherwise be poor, and opening opportunities to people who otherwise would not have them, but it's nothing more than preying on people's greed and FOMO, to pull in more suckers to fleece.
Earning cryptocurrency does not require a bank account or KYC.
Read that again until you understand it and tell me why you don't understand that.
The whole post distinguished the difference between buying versus earning. If you dont get that yet, you’re in the wrong place.
Read that again until you understand it and tell me why you don't understand that.
The whole post distinguished the difference between buying versus earning. If you dont get that yet, you’re in the wrong place.
This place is about critical thinking, and skepticism, especially around wild and unlikely claims, is part of that.
The point is that this story is almost certainly a fabrication, especially since it has wild claims of teenagers making small fortunes. There's no evidence such a situation has happened, and it's extremely unlikely that it's common enough to be a thing we need to be concerned with.
The point is that this story is almost certainly a fabrication, especially since it has wild claims of teenagers making small fortunes. There's no evidence such a situation has happened, and it's extremely unlikely that it's common enough to be a thing we need to be concerned with.
What evidence would satisfy you?
How common does it need to be to matter? Several thousand teenagers with six or seven figures of liquid crypto assets is still over a billion dollars deciding if a new product or service gets off the ground.
Why do you think you need to be concerned?
How common does it need to be to matter? Several thousand teenagers with six or seven figures of liquid crypto assets is still over a billion dollars deciding if a new product or service gets off the ground.
Why do you think you need to be concerned?
Where is the evidence for these teenagers? I mean, there's no evidence at all from what I can tell, except for the op saying it's "a real thing I totally didn't make up to give you FOMO".
Second time asking, what would you like to see?
If I gave you a screenshot from an instagram comment, what would your rebuttal be?
Would you like an interview with that teen?
Would a discord server full of them satisfy you?
Do you want them to sign addresses with high balances to show they control it? Because thats not going to happen.
The same issue would apply to any segment of the population. Nobody is going to do any of that so how would you prove it for any segment?
If you can go make money in crypto by simply showing up to a chat room looking for workers, but aren't interested in doing so, think about who is. Think about who is then trading these juvenile things. Think about which colorful sensory assaulting NFTs are a hit and which aren't. Match that up with the admissions of people saying "yeah I'm a teen and accumulated and bunch of crypto and flip NFTs to accumulate more". At a certain point there is a consensus you can just rely upon, for your own participation in the economy. That's whats happening here.
If I gave you a screenshot from an instagram comment, what would your rebuttal be?
Would you like an interview with that teen?
Would a discord server full of them satisfy you?
Do you want them to sign addresses with high balances to show they control it? Because thats not going to happen.
The same issue would apply to any segment of the population. Nobody is going to do any of that so how would you prove it for any segment?
If you can go make money in crypto by simply showing up to a chat room looking for workers, but aren't interested in doing so, think about who is. Think about who is then trading these juvenile things. Think about which colorful sensory assaulting NFTs are a hit and which aren't. Match that up with the admissions of people saying "yeah I'm a teen and accumulated and bunch of crypto and flip NFTs to accumulate more". At a certain point there is a consensus you can just rely upon, for your own participation in the economy. That's whats happening here.
I just re-read everything about this particular event through this lens and it is absolutely horrifying how much it fits. It reads as if kids are using crypto in a similar way they would if they were to play a game, with the difference being that through this game they can cash out eventually.
Right yes, they can accumulate like a game often times by playing games, but just as easily by moonlighting as a community moderator or launching their own projects. many do like the financials sector and use the defi space.
If its any consolation, I don't think this knowledge is known enough yet for unscrupulous marketers to be specifically target children and their money, as opposed to merely selective evolution of which goofy projects attract an audience at all. But yeah this will increasingly be something to watch for and assume, also remember that it will be other children marketing to each other more and more, in comparison to adults taking advantage (which will also happen). Not that there will be any way to tell who is taking advantage of who.
If its any consolation, I don't think this knowledge is known enough yet for unscrupulous marketers to be specifically target children and their money, as opposed to merely selective evolution of which goofy projects attract an audience at all. But yeah this will increasingly be something to watch for and assume, also remember that it will be other children marketing to each other more and more, in comparison to adults taking advantage (which will also happen). Not that there will be any way to tell who is taking advantage of who.
One of the more wild things I learned in the past year came from a reasonable explanation for something I have observed for years: why is Venmo vs Cash App so radically split among racial lines? Because, to some order of approximation, they are, and I would bet many people reading this comment can reconcile this with their own experiences.
The explanation as it was described to me (though I have a difficult time verifying its accuracy): Cash App was very early on the "all-in-one banking" experience, whereas Venmo spent years as a value-addition to a bank (account/routing number) you already had. Socioeconomically disenfranchised portions of the population, which statistically bias toward Black Americans, gravitated toward Cash App because they didn't otherwise have bank accounts. Then, network effects kick in, as they always do.
Again, I'm not 100% sure on the veracity of those claims, but it makes sense; and it mirrors a similar trend across age groups. Older people use Zelle (a fully bank-sponsored product). Millennials (of any race), being the middle child, split the difference, and oftentimes have Zelle, Venmo, Cash App, and some Crypto. But all of these "official" apps still have age restrictions, and as they've matured have been forced into more customer risk mitigation, which primarily serves to do the same thing the banking system has statistically done to the black american population for decades; limit access to financial services (even if its for what we old people would call a "totally valid reason" like "dude you're 12", its still limiting access to financial services).
Capital moves mountains. The crypto markets, in aggregate, represent an absolutely massive amount of capital. Its biased young. Its very difficult to legally liquidate into the traditional financial system; but within the crypto ecosystem, its more liquid than any financial instrument ever invented by mankind. It attracts scams (like any financial product does); it attracts idiots (through virtue of being able to serve: anyone); but even among projects like this one, their idiotic understanding of how their actions could integrate with the traditional system of laws is counterbalanced with rather intelligent understanding of distributed financial systems, corporate governance, data structures, algorithms, and most of all, an undeniable love for a piece of cultural history.
Anytime anyone bashes crypto; the reasons may be legitimate; Check your age. You sound a lot like my parents wondering why my Chase account doesn't appear in their Chase home page, so they can send me money every Christmas by just clicking "transfer money". Your criticism may be totally valid and legitimate: but irrelevant. That's the curse of getting older; inescapable, undeniable, and one day you just don't matter anymore. This world isn't your's; it belongs to our Children.
The explanation as it was described to me (though I have a difficult time verifying its accuracy): Cash App was very early on the "all-in-one banking" experience, whereas Venmo spent years as a value-addition to a bank (account/routing number) you already had. Socioeconomically disenfranchised portions of the population, which statistically bias toward Black Americans, gravitated toward Cash App because they didn't otherwise have bank accounts. Then, network effects kick in, as they always do.
Again, I'm not 100% sure on the veracity of those claims, but it makes sense; and it mirrors a similar trend across age groups. Older people use Zelle (a fully bank-sponsored product). Millennials (of any race), being the middle child, split the difference, and oftentimes have Zelle, Venmo, Cash App, and some Crypto. But all of these "official" apps still have age restrictions, and as they've matured have been forced into more customer risk mitigation, which primarily serves to do the same thing the banking system has statistically done to the black american population for decades; limit access to financial services (even if its for what we old people would call a "totally valid reason" like "dude you're 12", its still limiting access to financial services).
Capital moves mountains. The crypto markets, in aggregate, represent an absolutely massive amount of capital. Its biased young. Its very difficult to legally liquidate into the traditional financial system; but within the crypto ecosystem, its more liquid than any financial instrument ever invented by mankind. It attracts scams (like any financial product does); it attracts idiots (through virtue of being able to serve: anyone); but even among projects like this one, their idiotic understanding of how their actions could integrate with the traditional system of laws is counterbalanced with rather intelligent understanding of distributed financial systems, corporate governance, data structures, algorithms, and most of all, an undeniable love for a piece of cultural history.
Anytime anyone bashes crypto; the reasons may be legitimate; Check your age. You sound a lot like my parents wondering why my Chase account doesn't appear in their Chase home page, so they can send me money every Christmas by just clicking "transfer money". Your criticism may be totally valid and legitimate: but irrelevant. That's the curse of getting older; inescapable, undeniable, and one day you just don't matter anymore. This world isn't your's; it belongs to our Children.
Yes, very good observations.
The network affects are at play here too. Influencers who cover crypto projects begin skewing younger and younger are filling in documentation and awareness far far better than any developer would.
The network affects are at play here too. Influencers who cover crypto projects begin skewing younger and younger are filling in documentation and awareness far far better than any developer would.
This is, obviously, silly. There are a lot of silly cryptostuff.
Silliness aside though, this highlights a point to me. Methods of organising are (1) very important (2) relatively undiverse (3) hard to create out of whole cloth.
The creation/ascendance of "modern" joint stock companies circa 1600 was (arguably) responsible for some serious revolution. The 90s produced some very interesting examples: GNU, Linux, Wikipedia, WWW... These are "organisations" organised in unconventional ways and they produced results that a conventional non profit, commercial or government organisation could not have produced.
New ways of organising are potentially very powerful.
CryptoBro naivety isn't necessarily terrible for this end. It'll produce a lot of stupid moves, but stupidity and creativity are often neighbors. CryptoBros' typically mercenary and/or ideological tendencies might be more of a hurdle.
Besides laws, norms & regulatory structure, what's the difference between a DAU and a joint stock company?
Silliness aside though, this highlights a point to me. Methods of organising are (1) very important (2) relatively undiverse (3) hard to create out of whole cloth.
The creation/ascendance of "modern" joint stock companies circa 1600 was (arguably) responsible for some serious revolution. The 90s produced some very interesting examples: GNU, Linux, Wikipedia, WWW... These are "organisations" organised in unconventional ways and they produced results that a conventional non profit, commercial or government organisation could not have produced.
New ways of organising are potentially very powerful.
CryptoBro naivety isn't necessarily terrible for this end. It'll produce a lot of stupid moves, but stupidity and creativity are often neighbors. CryptoBros' typically mercenary and/or ideological tendencies might be more of a hurdle.
Besides laws, norms & regulatory structure, what's the difference between a DAU and a joint stock company?
> stupidity and creativity are often neighbors
That seems to be true in movies, but in the real world new advancements are created by experts that know the basics. Serendipity is part of that, but you need to have the basic knowledge.
I will concede, thou, that ideas to be rich can come from anywhere as the only metric is to convince investors, to produce something useful is not required.
That seems to be true in movies, but in the real world new advancements are created by experts that know the basics. Serendipity is part of that, but you need to have the basic knowledge.
I will concede, thou, that ideas to be rich can come from anywhere as the only metric is to convince investors, to produce something useful is not required.
I'll not argue that "who" matters. The sense in which stupidity and creativity are neighbors is the difference between expertise and qualifications. I didn't mean that stupid people are more creative. Where unqualified and uncredentialed people can play, you'll find a bunch of clueless morons but also uncredentialed geniuses. Where only the credentialed and qualified can play, say traditional finance, you'll find mostly regular bankers and financiers.
I certainly wouldn't have elected to create the current blaze of cryptmadness, but the fact that most of what it produces is scams and bullshit doesn't mean nothing else can come out of it.
I certainly wouldn't have elected to create the current blaze of cryptmadness, but the fact that most of what it produces is scams and bullshit doesn't mean nothing else can come out of it.
The fact that cryptocurrency schemes like DAOs allow people to raise vast sums of money in very short spaces of time with no evidence of anyone involved having the ability, skills or even intention of delivering anything, seems to be fundamentally flawed to me. It seems that you are only going to attract dreamers who want to be able to get rich really quickly without having to do anything much, and I wouldn't have thought those would include the sorts of people who would be most likely to put in the time and effort and attention to detail and hard work required to build things that are truly worthwhile and which will stand the test of time.
Sure.
OTOH, I think cryptocynicism may be blinding us to the possibility of doing exactly what this hapless bunch did, but actually ending up owning the copyright to something... as they intended. The road from there to something noteworthy is still long, but I don't think it's inconceivable.
As I said, silliness is prevalent. That doesn't mean something useful can't emerge. But obviously, yes, most of most of the stuff happening is a comical blend of mercenary, hapless and foolish... guided by the smell of riches.
OTOH, I think cryptocynicism may be blinding us to the possibility of doing exactly what this hapless bunch did, but actually ending up owning the copyright to something... as they intended. The road from there to something noteworthy is still long, but I don't think it's inconceivable.
As I said, silliness is prevalent. That doesn't mean something useful can't emerge. But obviously, yes, most of most of the stuff happening is a comical blend of mercenary, hapless and foolish... guided by the smell of riches.
> The road from there to something noteworthy is still long, but I don't think it's inconceivable.
That already happens. People who know what they are doing (i.e. professionals) already buy scripts and book rights and make movies out of them. It works pretty well already.
That already happens. People who know what they are doing (i.e. professionals) already buy scripts and book rights and make movies out of them. It works pretty well already.
SPAC does the same. See also the Nikola story (the fraudulent electric vehicle company).
It seems to me that the primary mechanism for organising here - as with most crypto projects - is Discord, not crpyto itself. Crypto is just the vehicle for the fanaticism that drives people to Discord
> Besides laws, norms & regulatory structure, what's the difference between a DAU and a joint stock company?
This might have been a rhetorical question but I'll give an answer anyway - this article [0] makes the same comparison and discusses that exact analogy
[0] https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/dao
This might have been a rhetorical question but I'll give an answer anyway - this article [0] makes the same comparison and discusses that exact analogy
[0] https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/dao
Since it is an auction, besides the winning bidder, there was at least another bidder, which makes two of them and is even more perplexing.
It is not really the "Dune" book, but rather its storyboard, more details and a few photos here:
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20211122-doomed-dune-s...
It is not really the "Dune" book, but rather its storyboard, more details and a few photos here:
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20211122-doomed-dune-s...
> Since it is an auction, besides the winning bidder, there was at least another bidder, which makes two of them and is even more perplexing.
I see nothing perplexing about it because this was not an ordinary auction, but an auction with one member being a public DAO, where the amount of money the DAO will bid is thus public.
Let's say the DAO bids $100, but they have $200 in contributions. Someone can then safely bid $190, knowing that the DAO will raise to $200. It's in the agreement for the DAO more or less, and because it's on the blockchain and organized in a public-ish discord server, their cap is absolutely public.
So, who has the motivation to make these known-bad bids? Anyone who profits off the sale being more, and anyone who just doesn't like crypto-techbros and wants them to lose more money than they would otherwise.
I think the use of DAOs for auctions is quite funny for this reason. A private company that kept the total contribution amount private until just after the auction ended would end up with a much more favorable dynamic than this "the amount we can bid is on the blockchain, you already know our move when you bid".
Disclaimer: I know nothing about this specific auction, and may be missing some key detail. This is simply an observation and speculation from a naive bystander
I see nothing perplexing about it because this was not an ordinary auction, but an auction with one member being a public DAO, where the amount of money the DAO will bid is thus public.
Let's say the DAO bids $100, but they have $200 in contributions. Someone can then safely bid $190, knowing that the DAO will raise to $200. It's in the agreement for the DAO more or less, and because it's on the blockchain and organized in a public-ish discord server, their cap is absolutely public.
So, who has the motivation to make these known-bad bids? Anyone who profits off the sale being more, and anyone who just doesn't like crypto-techbros and wants them to lose more money than they would otherwise.
I think the use of DAOs for auctions is quite funny for this reason. A private company that kept the total contribution amount private until just after the auction ended would end up with a much more favorable dynamic than this "the amount we can bid is on the blockchain, you already know our move when you bid".
Disclaimer: I know nothing about this specific auction, and may be missing some key detail. This is simply an observation and speculation from a naive bystander
>Disclaimer: I know nothing about this specific auction, and may be missing some key detail. This is simply an observation and speculation from a naive bystander
Sorry, but how do you know it was a DAO (whatever it is)?
From what I could find:
https://www.capital.fr/economie-politique/dune-le-storyboard...
>Les enchères se sont rapidement envolées et ont donné lieu au final à une rude bataille entre deux enchérisseurs étrangers, au téléphone. L'enchérisseur gagnant est américain.
it was a normal auction with two bidders (on the telephone).
EDIT: Ok, found some more info: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amansethi/spicedao-dune...
the winning bidder was a guy for TheSpiceDAO, but who was the other bidder?
Sorry, but how do you know it was a DAO (whatever it is)?
From what I could find:
https://www.capital.fr/economie-politique/dune-le-storyboard...
>Les enchères se sont rapidement envolées et ont donné lieu au final à une rude bataille entre deux enchérisseurs étrangers, au téléphone. L'enchérisseur gagnant est américain.
it was a normal auction with two bidders (on the telephone).
EDIT: Ok, found some more info: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amansethi/spicedao-dune...
the winning bidder was a guy for TheSpiceDAO, but who was the other bidder?
The twitter thread this post is to retweets the DAO in question claiming responsibility, specifically this twitter account: https://twitter.com/TheSpiceDAO
Googling finds this website: https://dune.foundation/, and some info about the etherium they raised here https://juicebox.money/#/p/spicedao
Maybe this is some sorta elaborate hoax, but it looks like it's real eth, so unless juicebox is also in on it, it seems like a hard hoax to pull.
Googling finds this website: https://dune.foundation/, and some info about the etherium they raised here https://juicebox.money/#/p/spicedao
Maybe this is some sorta elaborate hoax, but it looks like it's real eth, so unless juicebox is also in on it, it seems like a hard hoax to pull.
Yep, but all this is "after the fact".
In real time you are either on the auction in person or at the telephone, and there is someone else on a telephone connection.
How do you know who that someone else is?
All you know is the auction firm personnel on that phone line raises against your bid and conversely all the someone else knows is that someone (you in this hypothetical case) is offering and counter-raising.
To go from 25,000 to 2,500,000 (100x) two bidders are needed, and the question remains, given that one of the two is some crazy[1] guy backed by a DAO, who is the other one (almost as crazy as the first one).
[1] as seen by a "normie"
In real time you are either on the auction in person or at the telephone, and there is someone else on a telephone connection.
How do you know who that someone else is?
All you know is the auction firm personnel on that phone line raises against your bid and conversely all the someone else knows is that someone (you in this hypothetical case) is offering and counter-raising.
To go from 25,000 to 2,500,000 (100x) two bidders are needed, and the question remains, given that one of the two is some crazy[1] guy backed by a DAO, who is the other one (almost as crazy as the first one).
[1] as seen by a "normie"
The DAO, by how its structured, had to raise the money beforehand, and it did so using etherium in a public manner.
You could go to this page the day of the auction, before it started: https://juicebox.money/#/p/spicedao
From that page, you could tell how much money they had raised in etherium, and you could guess their cap from that.
I also give it better than even odds that the person bidding on behalf of the DAO was in discord, bragging about how much money they had to bid, right up until they won.
If you were interested in this auction selling for a large amount, would you not google a bit and find the spice DAO? Would you, perhaps, join their discord server, get on the auction call, and bid it up a bit?
This seems like something that quite reasonably could happen.
That's what I was suggesting above. One bidder is the DAO guy, the other bidder is someone who knows how much the DAO will bid, since it's public, and so raises it up to near that price for some ulterior motive, whether it's because they get a profit off of a high sell, or because they want the idiots who put money into the DAO to lose it. I have no doubt there are many people in both camps who were aware of the DAO before the auction started.
You could go to this page the day of the auction, before it started: https://juicebox.money/#/p/spicedao
From that page, you could tell how much money they had raised in etherium, and you could guess their cap from that.
I also give it better than even odds that the person bidding on behalf of the DAO was in discord, bragging about how much money they had to bid, right up until they won.
If you were interested in this auction selling for a large amount, would you not google a bit and find the spice DAO? Would you, perhaps, join their discord server, get on the auction call, and bid it up a bit?
This seems like something that quite reasonably could happen.
That's what I was suggesting above. One bidder is the DAO guy, the other bidder is someone who knows how much the DAO will bid, since it's public, and so raises it up to near that price for some ulterior motive, whether it's because they get a profit off of a high sell, or because they want the idiots who put money into the DAO to lose it. I have no doubt there are many people in both camps who were aware of the DAO before the auction started.
I see, but it is actually risky business, what if the "crazy" guy stops raising offers (for whatever reasons, let's say because he is struck by a lightning) and you win the auction with a bid of - say - 2,400,000 dollars?
I don't know how exactly offerers are "checked" or "validated" by Christie's in these kind of auctions, but there should be some process of some kind - particularly for telephone bidders - of checking identity and financial capabilities.
Or anyone can offer crazy amounts of money and then retire the offer without consequences?
I don't know how exactly offerers are "checked" or "validated" by Christie's in these kind of auctions, but there should be some process of some kind - particularly for telephone bidders - of checking identity and financial capabilities.
Or anyone can offer crazy amounts of money and then retire the offer without consequences?
[deleted]
I’ve never thought about this! That’s hilarious.
Although I assume, like everything crypto, there’s some centralized SPOF; in this case, the one guy from the “team” making the actual bids, who could stop things from getting truly out of hand.
Although I assume, like everything crypto, there’s some centralized SPOF; in this case, the one guy from the “team” making the actual bids, who could stop things from getting truly out of hand.
Sounds like a great way to launder money
You know what's even than laundering money by bidding ridiculously high on an auction for something you're selling? Being overbid by idiots.
Spending €2.6M on something worth €26,000? Sounds like a crappy return to me.
If the person who owned the book is the same as the bidder, or in cahoots, they can buy cryptocurrency with dirty money, buy the book at an inflated price, get ostensibly legitimate money back but have to pay the auction house a commission for the privilege. Since most of the crypto world does not do AML-KYC, it is a very attractive for money laundering, and I would say this is by design.
The seller of the crappy book now has €2.6M of 'clean' money...
Not if it’s a pump and dump. The DAO collected a couple million dollars of other people’s money and used it to win an expensive auction, thus “proving” that the idea is worth lots of money. Now their second DAO can collect even more because it’s been legitimized.
Unless you already owned it and are now selling it via auction.
Auctions always sell for exactly what the item is worth.
1. I think the winning bidder posted that right away. How terrible it must feel to wonder whether there's anyway to stop payment, cancel, back out, anything.
2. And what luck the runner-up must feel. (Who may now perhaps offer the winner 40k for the book.)
2. And what luck the runner-up must feel. (Who may now perhaps offer the winner 40k for the book.)
The founders of this DAO are paying themselves >$30,000/month [0] out of the pool to look after an old book and to commission an animated TV series [0] from a company that does music videos and commercials [1].
[0] https://snapshot.org/#/dunedao.eth/proposal/0x2038fc240d0e85... [1] https://robleridgeproductions.com/about/
[0] https://snapshot.org/#/dunedao.eth/proposal/0x2038fc240d0e85... [1] https://robleridgeproductions.com/about/
Someone else here pointed out that it's likely the total budget for the 4 person core team is $30k, not $30k each.
That's still an absurd amount of money, since everything they're proposing to do, they can't legally do. They don't have any actual work to do, and are being paid $90k a year each to do nothing.
> “We can’t just scan it and put it on the internet,” Fang said. But by raising the money as a DAO, Fang said they hoped to show the various estates and stakeholders that there is a massive online interest in making the bible more accessible to the public.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amansethi/spicedao-dune...
I don't know what they're doing, but it seems that they are at least a bit aware that they don't own the rights.
Who exactly are they trying to convince, and about what? I mean they don't just need the rights to the art in the book itself, but they also need to get the movie/TV rights for Dune itself.
Is this really spending €2.6M just to get a foot in the door, to be able to spend, what, another $200M for the actual rights?
But even then, why do they think this DAO is the best way to execute this vision?
They could just go "oh, people are interested in Dune? Ok, let's make a movie, but without involving these DAO people". Oh wait, there already is a Dune series of movies currently being made/in theaters.
But also: The contents have been on the internet for years, apparently: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNGBuasYa_WETf7sF6Q9W3S... (from the twitter thread)
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amansethi/spicedao-dune...
I don't know what they're doing, but it seems that they are at least a bit aware that they don't own the rights.
Who exactly are they trying to convince, and about what? I mean they don't just need the rights to the art in the book itself, but they also need to get the movie/TV rights for Dune itself.
Is this really spending €2.6M just to get a foot in the door, to be able to spend, what, another $200M for the actual rights?
But even then, why do they think this DAO is the best way to execute this vision?
They could just go "oh, people are interested in Dune? Ok, let's make a movie, but without involving these DAO people". Oh wait, there already is a Dune series of movies currently being made/in theaters.
But also: The contents have been on the internet for years, apparently: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNGBuasYa_WETf7sF6Q9W3S... (from the twitter thread)
>I don't know what they're doing
Now it will be hosted on some other server as well (THE REAL DECENTRALIZED SERVER) but wrapped into some NFT, where they will sell each page - or even better - each square of the storyboard, coated into some fucked up story like:
"You can own a piece of a future TV Show based on this story board!"
And they will probably come out profiting because people will buy this illusion.
Edit: From a quick Google search there's around 3000 drawings, so 3000 NFTs at some absurd price that people will want for a piece of the pipe dream. They didn't even had to pay an artist or create a story this time around...
Beeple sold 5000 renders for 69 million.
Now it will be hosted on some other server as well (THE REAL DECENTRALIZED SERVER) but wrapped into some NFT, where they will sell each page - or even better - each square of the storyboard, coated into some fucked up story like:
"You can own a piece of a future TV Show based on this story board!"
And they will probably come out profiting because people will buy this illusion.
Edit: From a quick Google search there's around 3000 drawings, so 3000 NFTs at some absurd price that people will want for a piece of the pipe dream. They didn't even had to pay an artist or create a story this time around...
Beeple sold 5000 renders for 69 million.
Ah, that's interesting.
They can't, of course, sell the images themselves; they don't hold the copyright. But they can sell URLs referring to the content.
That's pretty clever. I mean it's super dumb, but it's clever.
By that I mean that an NFT whose content is an URL to an image you don't own, is dumb. But it's clever to "mint" these, and you'll find more fools to buy the NFTs if you give the appearance of legitimacy.
In other words: They have no more rights to sell NFTs for the contents than I do, but they'll be more successful at implying to buyers that they do.
The most interesting thing about NFTs (and most blockchain tech) is the question "is this actually fraud, or is it merely stupid?". It's philosophy about the meaning of "fraud".
They can't, of course, sell the images themselves; they don't hold the copyright. But they can sell URLs referring to the content.
That's pretty clever. I mean it's super dumb, but it's clever.
By that I mean that an NFT whose content is an URL to an image you don't own, is dumb. But it's clever to "mint" these, and you'll find more fools to buy the NFTs if you give the appearance of legitimacy.
In other words: They have no more rights to sell NFTs for the contents than I do, but they'll be more successful at implying to buyers that they do.
The most interesting thing about NFTs (and most blockchain tech) is the question "is this actually fraud, or is it merely stupid?". It's philosophy about the meaning of "fraud".
I don't know the legal intricacies of this, like to what extent can they sell not the content but the actual physical square piece of the book, under an NFT?
For example, a company called MSCHF sold 999 fake Warhol drawings and 1 real[0], all mixed up so no one knows which one is the real one, for 250$ each... can they do this? Is this legal? At least people were aware of it, so I doubt it's fraud.
Here's the math of it:
- they paid 8,125$ for the original;
- they sold 1000 for 250$ = 250,000$
- they profited 250,000$ - 8,125$ = 241k$
Of course this was also a mix of a PR stunt, still, if you can do PR stunts and profit... I mean... isn't this what Supreme has been doing for years?
So I don't even think the legality of it all is a issue, because has you hinted, people are deliberately rolling into this...stupidity(?).
I think all of these use similar emotional mechanisms of gambling, which if you think about it, most of the current collectibles market nowadays is gambling for everyone, kids included.
[0]https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/art-pranksters-sel...
For example, a company called MSCHF sold 999 fake Warhol drawings and 1 real[0], all mixed up so no one knows which one is the real one, for 250$ each... can they do this? Is this legal? At least people were aware of it, so I doubt it's fraud.
Here's the math of it:
- they paid 8,125$ for the original;
- they sold 1000 for 250$ = 250,000$
- they profited 250,000$ - 8,125$ = 241k$
Of course this was also a mix of a PR stunt, still, if you can do PR stunts and profit... I mean... isn't this what Supreme has been doing for years?
So I don't even think the legality of it all is a issue, because has you hinted, people are deliberately rolling into this...stupidity(?).
I think all of these use similar emotional mechanisms of gambling, which if you think about it, most of the current collectibles market nowadays is gambling for everyone, kids included.
[0]https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/art-pranksters-sel...
Sounds like it was just a raffle. $250 for a 1 in 1,000 chance to win a prize worth ~$8,125. Happens all the time in school fundraisers and other community events. Of course they didn’t need to use a blockchain or cryptocurrency to hold a simple raffle, but here we are.
Also in a raffle they usually just tell you when you’ve won.
Better odds and potential return dollar for dollar than the lottery, though.
Also in a raffle they usually just tell you when you’ve won.
Better odds and potential return dollar for dollar than the lottery, though.
But a raffle doesn't have the copyright infringement.
You can't make a bunch of copies of a Disney movie but with the ending cut off, and have them be the "losing" consolation prizes.
You can't make a bunch of copies of a Disney movie but with the ending cut off, and have them be the "losing" consolation prizes.
Right, it’s a raffle with more steps and dubious legality. Seems unnecessary when a regular raffle would have sufficed, but I suppose that wouldn’t have got attention.
It's clever, and is in itself art that makes you think. Ideally they'd first make a deal with the copyright holder to not sue. But I like it.
> I don't know the legal intricacies of this, like to what extent can they sell not the content but the actual physical square piece of the book, under an NFT?
I am also not a lawyer, but for the physical piece either you own it or you don't. If you own it then surely there must be some contract where you "lease it out" to the "keeper" of it. Or if you're the one "keeping" it (and owning it), then some contract that you can't sell the NFT to one person and the physical item to another?
But all these have to be legal contracts. And if you have a legal contract with someone about how you're not allowed to sell a physical thing you own, ever, do you truly own it? (not to mention who is on the other side of this contract? Who has legal standing to sue if you violate the contract?)
One thing this reminds me of is Commonhold (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonhold), which is a home ownership form in some countries, and some other apartment ownership models. In some models you don't "own" your own apartment, but own a stake in the house, and this stake gives you the full access to a contractually specified apartment number.
That and, of course, its similarity to bearer bonds.
Let's say you own the NFT and legally possess the physical item. Can you retire the NFT, and have it be physical-only from now on? Can you still sell it as an NFT after you sold the physical item? The simple answer to that last part is "of course you can. NFT means nothing".
You can mint an NFT for my house. But good luck trying to kick me out. The police will not be impressed.
The owner of this book needs not to make sure "math" secures transfer of legal ownership, but law. And that's the problem with these blockchain inventions.
> For example, a company called MSCHF sold 999 fake Warhol drawings and 1 real[0], all mixed up so no one knows which one is the real one, for 250$ each... can they do this? Is this legal? At least people were aware of it, so I doubt it's fraud.
Again I'm not a lawyer, but I would think that no it's not fraud, but it's copyright infringement. And if the copyright holder doesn't sue you, then that's their choice.
But good luck buying a Disney movie for $10, and selling 9 copies+original for $1 each. Even without profit the mouse will go after you, and he'll be legally right.
I am also not a lawyer, but for the physical piece either you own it or you don't. If you own it then surely there must be some contract where you "lease it out" to the "keeper" of it. Or if you're the one "keeping" it (and owning it), then some contract that you can't sell the NFT to one person and the physical item to another?
But all these have to be legal contracts. And if you have a legal contract with someone about how you're not allowed to sell a physical thing you own, ever, do you truly own it? (not to mention who is on the other side of this contract? Who has legal standing to sue if you violate the contract?)
One thing this reminds me of is Commonhold (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonhold), which is a home ownership form in some countries, and some other apartment ownership models. In some models you don't "own" your own apartment, but own a stake in the house, and this stake gives you the full access to a contractually specified apartment number.
That and, of course, its similarity to bearer bonds.
Let's say you own the NFT and legally possess the physical item. Can you retire the NFT, and have it be physical-only from now on? Can you still sell it as an NFT after you sold the physical item? The simple answer to that last part is "of course you can. NFT means nothing".
You can mint an NFT for my house. But good luck trying to kick me out. The police will not be impressed.
The owner of this book needs not to make sure "math" secures transfer of legal ownership, but law. And that's the problem with these blockchain inventions.
> For example, a company called MSCHF sold 999 fake Warhol drawings and 1 real[0], all mixed up so no one knows which one is the real one, for 250$ each... can they do this? Is this legal? At least people were aware of it, so I doubt it's fraud.
Again I'm not a lawyer, but I would think that no it's not fraud, but it's copyright infringement. And if the copyright holder doesn't sue you, then that's their choice.
But good luck buying a Disney movie for $10, and selling 9 copies+original for $1 each. Even without profit the mouse will go after you, and he'll be legally right.
I guess we're all waiting for the first NFT legal dispute, and see how it will roll out and what precedents it will set for the future.
Because until then, they're all playing a make-belief game.
Like the guy who claimed the moon and actually sold plots of land on the moon to people[0]. He was navigating a "loop hole" and no one cared about it, or even took it serious. But if people are putting money upfront, at what point it should be addressed?
[0]https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/03/25/meet-the-man...
Because until then, they're all playing a make-belief game.
Like the guy who claimed the moon and actually sold plots of land on the moon to people[0]. He was navigating a "loop hole" and no one cared about it, or even took it serious. But if people are putting money upfront, at what point it should be addressed?
[0]https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/03/25/meet-the-man...
I guess, if you think in NFTs all day and truly believe that your JSON receipt is worth anything and gives you legal ownership, stuff like this happens to you in the real world, too.
But that is what the industry is selling (even that it's obviously not legally true).
"NFT stands for non-fungible token, which basically means that it’s a one-of-a-kind digital asset that belongs to you and you only." https://fortune.com/2021/12/18/nft-making-selling/
Fortune, e.g., misinterpretes it in that same way. Anyone can make copies of an NFT backed asset unless you use other legal or technical methods to limit copies.
"NFT stands for non-fungible token, which basically means that it’s a one-of-a-kind digital asset that belongs to you and you only." https://fortune.com/2021/12/18/nft-making-selling/
Fortune, e.g., misinterpretes it in that same way. Anyone can make copies of an NFT backed asset unless you use other legal or technical methods to limit copies.
That definition isn't wrong. However, the "one-of-a-kind digital asset" is the NFT itself—basically a digital autograph—not a copy of the image (or book) the NFT describes, or even a license to such a copy, and certainly not the copyright, unless the copyright holder explicitly agreed to that when minting the NFT. (And you would need some out-of-band proof that the NFT was truly minted by the copyright holder.)
> 1. Make the book public (to the
> extent permitted by law)
Seems like NFT logic in reverse, lol
> Extra dumb: A big chunk of it is already online
Let's not pretend some low quality jpegs in a Google Photos album is an acceptable archive for this work.
Let's not pretend some low quality jpegs in a Google Photos album is an acceptable archive for this work.
Better we pretend that this fly-by-night operation is going to put care and consideration into their archival efforts?
Eh, that's the DAO's plan too. Just substitute the blockchain for Google Photos. They're even sticking with JPEGs as well.
Yeah the fact that a copy of this book isn't publicly available in a museum is a tragedy
2 things confuse me about this.
1. This was a normal auction and not an NFT one. How is a DAO enforced in this case? What happens if the nominated bidder decides to go rogue and bid more or less than the decided cap? What happens if the price of Ethereum drops to the point that the DAO is no longer able to find the 2.6M they need?
2. If this is an auction then there has to be another bidder (I doubt even the people in this DAO are dumb enough to make their initial bid 2.6M). Who was bidding 2.5M against them?
1. This was a normal auction and not an NFT one. How is a DAO enforced in this case? What happens if the nominated bidder decides to go rogue and bid more or less than the decided cap? What happens if the price of Ethereum drops to the point that the DAO is no longer able to find the 2.6M they need?
2. If this is an auction then there has to be another bidder (I doubt even the people in this DAO are dumb enough to make their initial bid 2.6M). Who was bidding 2.5M against them?
According to the buzzfeed article it was bought by one guy, and then the DAO community appears to reimburse him.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amansethi/spicedao-dune...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amansethi/spicedao-dune...
As expected, the problem of interacting with the real world comes up again.
It doesn't matter how decentralized your blockchain or "DAO" is, ultimately all interactions outside the blockchain will rely on one or more trusted parties that can go rogue or be coerced... at which point you may as well not have a blockchain and just trust these people directly.
It doesn't matter how decentralized your blockchain or "DAO" is, ultimately all interactions outside the blockchain will rely on one or more trusted parties that can go rogue or be coerced... at which point you may as well not have a blockchain and just trust these people directly.
And he is also using the DAO to fund his 800k capital gains taxes.
[deleted]
I actually interacted with the person running the DAO. I believe him to be a scam artist.
For context: I also set up a group to bid on the book. Our intent was to spend $100,000. He reached out to offer to join forces.
I mentioned that the goals of the DAO, the use of proceeds, and the general vision were pretty blurry and might not work.
He said he had been in touch with Jodorowsky and Moebius and they're excited to work on an exhibition or such kind of event with him.
When I pointed out that Moebius died in 2012, he paused for a few minutes then said oh I meant his estate.
I don't believe there's been any proof of such communication or plans with the estate yet.
For context: I also set up a group to bid on the book. Our intent was to spend $100,000. He reached out to offer to join forces.
I mentioned that the goals of the DAO, the use of proceeds, and the general vision were pretty blurry and might not work.
He said he had been in touch with Jodorowsky and Moebius and they're excited to work on an exhibition or such kind of event with him.
When I pointed out that Moebius died in 2012, he paused for a few minutes then said oh I meant his estate.
I don't believe there's been any proof of such communication or plans with the estate yet.
Thanks for posting this. It's nice to have a comment from someone with insight into the situation.
Your $100,000 goal wasn't unreasonable based on the estimates. What were your plans for the book if you'd won?
Your $100,000 goal wasn't unreasonable based on the estimates. What were your plans for the book if you'd won?
We were planning on talking with the Internet Archive see if they could make a digital copy, and then donate it to a scifi museum. Also throw some Dune theme parties.
Everyone's favourite Gary Brannon appearing on HN is a pleasant surprise :-) if you're not already familiar with "Citation Needed" or "Two of these people are lying" take a look at their YouTube series
Submitter here. I'm a huge techdiff fan, which is why I follow Gary on Twitter, which is why I saw this story in the first place :)
I think I'm beginning to understand the prices of art NFTs: the majory of people simply don't understand that NFTs aren't representing much anything of value. It's even harder to believe that the box is empty when its price was so high.
I came here to comment something in the likes of this, just to add it helps to understand not only the price of art NFTs but the dynamics of it.
These "investments" are all backed up by some fantasy that works in their "realm" - like buying an avatar that will be used in "the metaverse", being the metaverse a collective fantasy and illusion.
Just like these fellows are so emotionally invested in this fantasy that they were already selling the rights of a TV Show to a streaming service... and I bet that if you go to them now they have the narrative that this will be sold to some yet to exist streaming service of the metaverse based on NFTs.
These "investments" are all backed up by some fantasy that works in their "realm" - like buying an avatar that will be used in "the metaverse", being the metaverse a collective fantasy and illusion.
Just like these fellows are so emotionally invested in this fantasy that they were already selling the rights of a TV Show to a streaming service... and I bet that if you go to them now they have the narrative that this will be sold to some yet to exist streaming service of the metaverse based on NFTs.
To be fair, much of the art market is also smoke and mirrors. Witness Piero Manzoni's work:
https://www.chron.com/life/article/Barry-Tate-s-taste-in-art...
https://www.chron.com/life/article/Barry-Tate-s-taste-in-art...
Anti-art is actually a thing and kind of interesting, if also arguably also kind of dumb and pointless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-art. It's sort of the equivalent of trolling in the art world, and is usually a meta-commentary on what it means for something to be art.
I wouldn't really say that it makes up much of the art market, though they always get a lot of news attention when they appear.
I wouldn't really say that it makes up much of the art market, though they always get a lot of news attention when they appear.
The non-challan we will make an original series out of it and sell it to a streaming service must be the funniest thing I've read in a long time. cryptobros really are funny if you are not getting scamed by them.
sorry I hate to be that guy but its not non-challan, its nonchalant. I was confused for a minute their by what non-challan meant ... i was thinking tthat maybe it is related to https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/challan
I got stuck on that sentence too. I think it is the lack of quotes around the “we will make an original series out of it and sell it to a streaming service”-bit following it that stopped me from seeing 'non-challan' as a mistyped 'nonchalant'.
Non-challan: vegans who refuse to eat challah bread because it's got egg in it?
It's actually 2.66M + 5.5% VAT = 2.8M euros ($3.2M USD), as stated on the bottom of the auction page:
"VAT at the rate of 5.5% will be due on the total of the hammer price and fees charged to the buyer."
https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6345488
"VAT at the rate of 5.5% will be due on the total of the hammer price and fees charged to the buyer."
https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6345488
It's probably even more than that with the "Buyer's Premium" tacked on - the Christie's cost calculator linked reckons that would be another EUR540,000 on top...
The "price realized" includes the buyer's premium. It's a bit of sleight of hand auction houses do in reporting results.
I stand corrected - that's useful to know as I only recently discovered buyer's premium when thinking about dipping my toe into the auction waters
Also worth to understand and remember, from the linked thread: "digitisation does not = preservation. All they’ve done is replace a long term, resource-light asset with a short term and resource-heavy one that doesn’t work in the way the creator intended."
Can someone explain what he meant by that please.
Good grief, they are SO going to get sued if they try to do any of their proposed uses!
(They no more own the rights to "Dune" than you would if you bought a DVD in a second hand shop and decided to start selling copies of it.)
It'd have been a lot cheaper to ignore the NFT nonsense entirely, engage a motion picture rights agency, and pitch direct to Jodorowski and the Herbert estate for permission to use the IP.
(They no more own the rights to "Dune" than you would if you bought a DVD in a second hand shop and decided to start selling copies of it.)
It'd have been a lot cheaper to ignore the NFT nonsense entirely, engage a motion picture rights agency, and pitch direct to Jodorowski and the Herbert estate for permission to use the IP.
Code is law right? And the code (that they wrote) says it’s okay so it’s okay.
Cryptobro logic.
Cryptobro logic.
To be honest this looks like a very smart marketing strategy to me, making something so dumb that everyone starts talking about it.
This strategy is also used a lot in Tik Tok videos for example: you write the caption with some obvious errors like "your" instead of "you are" and people starts correcting you in the replies making the tik tok algo rank your video higher
This strategy is also used a lot in Tik Tok videos for example: you write the caption with some obvious errors like "your" instead of "you are" and people starts correcting you in the replies making the tik tok algo rank your video higher
Well, not the worst book to spend that much money on. If anyone hasn't seen the documentary Jodorowsky's Dune I highly recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfJi2sfduqk
Its truly one of the wildest stories very few people know about. He (very seriously) planned for it to star: Mick Jagger, Salvador Dali, Orson Welles, and... Jodorowsky's 12 year old son playing Paul. With music by Pink Floyd (post-Dark Side). This was not pie-in-the-sky dreaming; he met with all of these people, and they all agreed. Planning for a 14 hour movie, they ultimately gave up due to the budget being "short by $5M" (adjusted for inflation: ~$15M).
Though by the end of the documentary, you'll definitely arrive at the conclusion that it wouldn't just be another $5M, and the project had so many problems beyond money; it is interesting to think about how Dune (2021)'s budget came in at ~$165M. We missed out on something truly unique for sure; probably an acid-fueled fever dream, but I totally understand why some people have an obsession with the work Jodorowsky put into the adaptation, and would pay to own a piece of that history.
Though by the end of the documentary, you'll definitely arrive at the conclusion that it wouldn't just be another $5M, and the project had so many problems beyond money; it is interesting to think about how Dune (2021)'s budget came in at ~$165M. We missed out on something truly unique for sure; probably an acid-fueled fever dream, but I totally understand why some people have an obsession with the work Jodorowsky put into the adaptation, and would pay to own a piece of that history.
This YouTube video is blocked for me in the US, but for anyone else curious about the book and it’s history:
It not a copy of Dune, but a copy of a book created to show the vision of one of the first (failed) movie adaptations. French director Jodorowsky had an official adaptation of Dune (and had collaborated with Herbert) [0]. The adaptation failed after running out of money. Notable is the scope of the adaptation: 14 hours and millions poured into pre-production.
Subsequently, a documentary [1] was made about this failed adaptation. I think the parent link is to this documentary.
[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)#Early_stalled_a...
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky's_Dune
It not a copy of Dune, but a copy of a book created to show the vision of one of the first (failed) movie adaptations. French director Jodorowsky had an official adaptation of Dune (and had collaborated with Herbert) [0]. The adaptation failed after running out of money. Notable is the scope of the adaptation: 14 hours and millions poured into pre-production.
Subsequently, a documentary [1] was made about this failed adaptation. I think the parent link is to this documentary.
[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)#Early_stalled_a...
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky's_Dune
All I really want to know if they had to bet against another bunch of other crypto people to get the 3 million price... or if the 3 million was their first and only offer on a $60k book??
Based on how I understand the ContitutionDAO went down the problem is it’s clear to others what funds these things have available going into an auction (as it’s organised publicly).
In ConstitutionDAO’s case it means they were narrowly outbid. In this case the suggestion is it makes it safe for any second buyer to make high bids, knowing the DAO will counter up to a certain amount.
In ConstitutionDAO’s case it means they were narrowly outbid. In this case the suggestion is it makes it safe for any second buyer to make high bids, knowing the DAO will counter up to a certain amount.
Who was the seller?
Where did the 2.6 million come from?
How many other bidders were there?
What was the auction model used?
How are they going to recover the investment now? And if they won't how will they deal with the write-off?
So many questions...
Where did the 2.6 million come from?
How many other bidders were there?
What was the auction model used?
How are they going to recover the investment now? And if they won't how will they deal with the write-off?
So many questions...
Yes, we need answers to these !
I'll add one: why does the thread mention "cryptobros" about buyers when the auction was nothing related to crypto in any way?
Is it just becoming a generic insult to dumb people or am I missing something?
I'll add one: why does the thread mention "cryptobros" about buyers when the auction was nothing related to crypto in any way?
Is it just becoming a generic insult to dumb people or am I missing something?
> why does the thread mention "cryptobros" about buyers when the auction was nothing related to crypto in any way?
Because the group who won it crowdfunded the money via cryptocurrency, wants to turn the book into NFTs and is organized in a DAO, if I looked into this a bit more I am sure I would find something about web3 and metaverse and whatever else fits in the bullshit bingo of current discourse around the whole crypto scene. If this does not count as „cryptobros“ then I imagine nothing does.
Because the group who won it crowdfunded the money via cryptocurrency, wants to turn the book into NFTs and is organized in a DAO, if I looked into this a bit more I am sure I would find something about web3 and metaverse and whatever else fits in the bullshit bingo of current discourse around the whole crypto scene. If this does not count as „cryptobros“ then I imagine nothing does.
Thanks for the info I missed (and/or was too lazy to search).
Yep, cryptobros it is.
Yep, cryptobros it is.
Apparently this is a copy of the storyboards for a failed Dune movie adaptation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky%27s_Dune. Apparently a lot of famous artists were involved.
This site has scans/photos of most of the content: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNGBuasYa_WETf7sF6Q9W3S... (from https://www.muddycolors.com/2020/03/moebius-dune/).
Apparently it envisioned Gurney Halleck as a dwarf: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNGBuasYa_WETf7sF6Q9W3S...
This site has scans/photos of most of the content: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNGBuasYa_WETf7sF6Q9W3S... (from https://www.muddycolors.com/2020/03/moebius-dune/).
Apparently it envisioned Gurney Halleck as a dwarf: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNGBuasYa_WETf7sF6Q9W3S...
So many conversations here and on Twitter focus on laughing at these people.
But I think the most likely explanation is that they’re not this stupid. That it’s some form of fraud.
But I think the most likely explanation is that they’re not this stupid. That it’s some form of fraud.
I’ve been reading some crypto- and NFT focused Telegram channels. There’re many people who’d willingly “invest” into something like this.
Are you familiar with Hanlon's razor?
Sure. And Occam's razor. These are nice one-liners but not rules to base perspectives on.
What I'm focusing on is how everyone loves to feel smart, and most do that by making others feel dumb. And when you are anti-something (yes, I am anti NFT), you have further motivation to just chalk it up to, "haha look at these bozos."
The more useful, and in my opinion, more likely hypothesis to spend all our oxygen on is, "what kind of fraud might be going on here?" For example, did someone just make a ton of money by convincing a bunch of chumps to fund this?
What I'm focusing on is how everyone loves to feel smart, and most do that by making others feel dumb. And when you are anti-something (yes, I am anti NFT), you have further motivation to just chalk it up to, "haha look at these bozos."
The more useful, and in my opinion, more likely hypothesis to spend all our oxygen on is, "what kind of fraud might be going on here?" For example, did someone just make a ton of money by convincing a bunch of chumps to fund this?
Or maybe it is simply a group of people who love jodos vision for dune. the idea of a film as a guiding prophet, visions of a flowing creative universe. and we want to play with that.
so we raised a bunch of funds and bought a cool book. now we are making an animation. we've been discussing ideas like sending funds to the makers of Jodorowskys Dune documentary which didnt even break even, as a way of thanking them too.
y'know, playing in the way we were taught, as hackers, as kids who grew up on the internet. To go out and do things, make things. hang out with our friends.
but hn would rather take a few snippets, call us all scammers and frauds, and hate on us.
but whatever.. we're gonna keep having fun ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
so we raised a bunch of funds and bought a cool book. now we are making an animation. we've been discussing ideas like sending funds to the makers of Jodorowskys Dune documentary which didnt even break even, as a way of thanking them too.
y'know, playing in the way we were taught, as hackers, as kids who grew up on the internet. To go out and do things, make things. hang out with our friends.
but hn would rather take a few snippets, call us all scammers and frauds, and hate on us.
but whatever.. we're gonna keep having fun ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
> so we raised a bunch of funds and bought a cool book.
For about 100x its estimated value. I'm not sure that's really playing with a hacker mentality.
The plan is also to burn the "cool book". Again, I'm unsure how that fits into a hacker mindset.
For about 100x its estimated value. I'm not sure that's really playing with a hacker mentality.
The plan is also to burn the "cool book". Again, I'm unsure how that fits into a hacker mindset.
I think playing with money systems, ideas of value etc is interesting. The average contribution was about $50 - so like a kickstarter for a fan club.
and no, the plan is not to burn the book. there is an ongoing joke by a few people in the dao. but they do not represent the majority and the aims of the dao explicitly are to do with the preservation and protection of the book. so thats not going to happen.
but people arent actually interested in conversation here. hn hates crypto. we get it. people hating something they arent a part of and dont understand. But we are still going to have fun and make things, and the good vibes win in the end.
and no, the plan is not to burn the book. there is an ongoing joke by a few people in the dao. but they do not represent the majority and the aims of the dao explicitly are to do with the preservation and protection of the book. so thats not going to happen.
but people arent actually interested in conversation here. hn hates crypto. we get it. people hating something they arent a part of and dont understand. But we are still going to have fun and make things, and the good vibes win in the end.
Sure, I guess overpaying by 2 orders of magnitude is playing with money systems.
Do enjoy your exploration into copyright and IP law.
Do enjoy your exploration into copyright and IP law.
I want to believe that this is just some kind of marketing stunt. I don't want to believe that people can simultaneously be this wealthy and this stupid.
There was a movie made about that story book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky%27s_Dune
With it there are 4 Dune "movies" out: the 1984 Lynch version, the 2000 Sci-Fi Channel one (a 3 part mini series, nearly a movie), the aforementioned 2013 one, and of course the 2021 Villeneuve one.
With it there are 4 Dune "movies" out: the 1984 Lynch version, the 2000 Sci-Fi Channel one (a 3 part mini series, nearly a movie), the aforementioned 2013 one, and of course the 2021 Villeneuve one.
How did it sell for 10x of the expected auction price?
I understand that they thought they were buying the IP, but who was bidding against them?
I guess I'm asking if the seller or another party could see their publicly available bidding strategy and pushed the price up knowing their limits?
*100x. One of the other threads mentioned that they had to post their maximum bid publicly in a blockchain somewhere as part of the “dao” before the auction, so someone could easily have seen what they were willing to bid, and just bid them up to it.
I don't think that's true. From Buzzfeed article, it looks like a 25 year old crypto millionaire bid on this, and the SpiceDAO raised $12 million after the fact and are going to reimburse him (and use the rest of the funds for this derivative work)
The OP’s question was about how the bid got so high, i.e. it would take two people to get the bid that high.
I wasn't clear, but the winning bidder wasn't the DAO, so it's not like the Constitution DAO where they said "We raised 35 million to bid". The winning bidder used his own eth to win the auction and is only now going to be reimbursed by the DAO (who raised $12 million). So my point was that the winner bidder didn't disclose their max bid like the commentor said.
Buying a book at 10x the price kinda sounds like money laundering.
Reading the comments here I initially misread ‘cryptobros’ as ‘cryptouroboros’.
It’s actually a pretty good description for a bunch of guys passing the same tokens around for ever increasing amounts, thinking they’re getting richer.
It’s actually a pretty good description for a bunch of guys passing the same tokens around for ever increasing amounts, thinking they’re getting richer.
Im just wondering how they’ve spent MILLIONS of dollars on this auction and nobody ever told them this wasn’t gonna work.
How is this even possible? Didn’t they tell anyone about their plan before executing it?
How is this even possible? Didn’t they tell anyone about their plan before executing it?
I am sure they told a bunch of other cryptobros about it and they were all like yeah big brain idea.
I'm now afraid that Jodorowsky might die from laughter when he hears about this.
It's the first time something on HN gives me second-hand embarrassment.
Insane...
I first thought this was some elitist meme, but their following is taking it seriously.
https://nitter.net/TheSpiceDAO/status/1482404318347153413
I first thought this was some elitist meme, but their following is taking it seriously.
https://nitter.net/TheSpiceDAO/status/1482404318347153413
I barely read the tweets (I refuse to give more than 5 min of time to crypto news) so shame on me in advance if this has been covered:
Are we sure this isn’t just another elaborate scheme to launder money?
Are we sure this isn’t just another elaborate scheme to launder money?
Huh, second time today that this specific Garry Brannan has entered my… feeds? I guess I can call Hacker News a feed.
And I thought the work video from 5 months ago was surprising coincidence, given I otherwise only know him from The Technical Difficulties: https://youtu.be/3rEEnjA1_eA
And I thought the work video from 5 months ago was surprising coincidence, given I otherwise only know him from The Technical Difficulties: https://youtu.be/3rEEnjA1_eA
One of my goals in life is to produce the anime version of Dune. (I don't care from money or rights, I'd do it underground and release it for free.) The thing is, I want to follow the book as closely as possible. No interpretation or modification, just a visual translation of what Frank Herbert wrote.
Who was the other bidder(s) I wonder that allowed them to buy it so high
This guy apparently: https://twitter.com/productnerd/status/1462889815872004101
> https://twitter.com/productnerd/status/1462889815872004101
No. He underestimated the final price by 2M, which means he offered ~660k.
I watched the auction, there was one person from Colorado (possibly the DAO creator), and another person from Europe.
No. He underestimated the final price by 2M, which means he offered ~660k.
I watched the auction, there was one person from Colorado (possibly the DAO creator), and another person from Europe.
Thanks! I completely misunderstood his tweet. I somehow thought he bid 2 million.
I love how blockchain used to be the self proclaimed symbol of freedom from the Big {*}, and the current popular use is to make it an even shittier DRM mechanism
The level of understanding of copyright that these NFT "enthusiasts" have seems to be similar to their understanding of NFT's utility.
This surprises me even less than the $660 Centipede Press edition of Dune immediately reselling for >$3,000.
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I had commented before the other week so I'm gonna quote myself from now whenever I see NFT:
> I see a whole new wave of fouls about to lose their money to ponzi schemes and over-hyped "investments", much like it happened with the bitcoin/crypto train.
> I see a whole new wave of fouls about to lose their money to ponzi schemes and over-hyped "investments", much like it happened with the bitcoin/crypto train.
And this is why I can't take "web3" seriously.
This story is misinformation. It is a shame that so many are upvoting and spilling vitriol without properly vetting the information.
In fact, the winners of the book auction do understand that they do not own the intellectual property. They have a goal of using their remaining funds to acquire the intellectual property.
See https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amansethi/spicedao-dune...:
> As things stand, Saqib still owns Jodorowsky’s bible but is in the process of transferring ownership to the DAO. Meanwhile, the copyrights for the bible’s contents are held by multiple artists and their estates. [...]
> “We can’t just scan it and put it on the internet,” Fang said. But by raising the money as a DAO, Fang said they hoped to show the various estates and stakeholders that there is a massive online interest in making the bible more accessible to the public.
In fact, the winners of the book auction do understand that they do not own the intellectual property. They have a goal of using their remaining funds to acquire the intellectual property.
See https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amansethi/spicedao-dune...:
> As things stand, Saqib still owns Jodorowsky’s bible but is in the process of transferring ownership to the DAO. Meanwhile, the copyrights for the bible’s contents are held by multiple artists and their estates. [...]
> “We can’t just scan it and put it on the internet,” Fang said. But by raising the money as a DAO, Fang said they hoped to show the various estates and stakeholders that there is a massive online interest in making the bible more accessible to the public.
If that is the case it shows how much investment money is running wild around. They spend 2.6 million in something that is not so important. It could also be a publicity stunt, but they look quite bad right now.
My understanding is that purchasing the book is, among other things, supposed to be a publicity stunt that enables them to spur further interest in their project including convincing current IP holders that they are serious about producing new Dune-related content.
https://medium.com/@spicedao/roadmap-timeline-ae319c92505d
https://medium.com/@spicedao/roadmap-timeline-ae319c92505d
> the winners of the book auction do understand that they do not own the intellectual property
Then maybe when they wrote
Then maybe when they wrote
We won the auction for €2.66M. Now our mission is to:
1. Make the book public (to the extent permitted by law)
2. Produce an original animated limited series inspired by the book and sell it to a streaming service
On their official Medium account they are explicit about the fact that winning the auction has no direct legal effects on their ability to produce the animated series. [1]. Their goal is to leverage the publicity from the auction to open doors for discussions with the current IP holders in order to make progress on the animated series.
[1] https://medium.com/@spicedao/roadmap-timeline-ae319c92505d
[1] https://medium.com/@spicedao/roadmap-timeline-ae319c92505d
> ~$6.2MM (USD) to produce an animated film or TV series inspired by the contents of the manuscript
The budget seems low - more so if it has to pay for the rights (to multiple third parties!).
The budget seems low - more so if it has to pay for the rights (to multiple third parties!).
I know someone who worked for Jodorowsky and from the ‘less than jubilant’ stories I've heard about the guy, they'll have their work cut out, or they'll have to wait for him to pass.
It feels a bit weird to me to heavily mock and ridicule someone who thought they were doing something for public good.
How is buying a book, converting it into NFTs and then burning it a public good?
Where does it say anything about burning books? I'm referring to the bit about making it public and supporting derivative works.
In the fourth or fifth reply in the Twitter thread this post links to, it links to the DAO forum where they describe their plans to convert the book to JPEG NFTs and then burn the original.
Here's their plan: https://forum.spicedao.xyz/t/nft-of-the-book-w-proof-of-jpeg...
I do not buy the premise that they thought that they were doing something for public good. I'm glad to mock them, and all the other cryptocurrency/NFT morons.
didn't they initially intend to burn the book to make their NFT (or whatever kind of token) more valuable?
If that's true, then they deserve to be ridiculed and more.
If that's true, then they deserve to be ridiculed and more.
I have no idea. I'm only going by the information in this post.
They bought a rare Dune storybook, created by an all-star team of artists (Jodorowsky, Moebius, HR Giger, ...). I think that storybook was used to pitch the concept art to Movie Producers and Studios.
To make this easier to understand, substitute "Dune book" with "Gutenberg Bible" or, even better, "historic, ultrarare, pre-medieval parchment of a Bible translation".
The new owners of that Bible probably do not think (and do not intend to promote the idea) that they now own the property rights for "the" Bible, or for all Bibles, or for any Bible - except for that particular instance of the Bible.
Rather they now own that parchment, with all its decorated pages, handwriting, scripts, gemstones, peculiar translations, and compilation of Gospels and Letters.
These content, drawings and illustrations inside that Bible are really unique, unless the monks decided to draw everything ( or even more often.)
This content could indeed be monetized, or shared with the world, for the greater good.
To make this easier to understand, substitute "Dune book" with "Gutenberg Bible" or, even better, "historic, ultrarare, pre-medieval parchment of a Bible translation".
The new owners of that Bible probably do not think (and do not intend to promote the idea) that they now own the property rights for "the" Bible, or for all Bibles, or for any Bible - except for that particular instance of the Bible.
Rather they now own that parchment, with all its decorated pages, handwriting, scripts, gemstones, peculiar translations, and compilation of Gospels and Letters.
These content, drawings and illustrations inside that Bible are really unique, unless the monks decided to draw everything ( or even more often.)
This content could indeed be monetized, or shared with the world, for the greater good.
> This content could indeed be monetized, or shared with the world,
I suggest you read the rest of the discussion. No, it can't be shared, and it can't be monetized. You said it yourself - they do not own the intellectual property rights. They own a printed version of that content that does not include any rights for digital reproduction, derivative work or anything of the sort. Like any other book (!).
I suggest you read the rest of the discussion. No, it can't be shared, and it can't be monetized. You said it yourself - they do not own the intellectual property rights. They own a printed version of that content that does not include any rights for digital reproduction, derivative work or anything of the sort. Like any other book (!).
> This content could indeed be monetized
Yes, by the IP owner. Not by the owner of the book.
Yes, by the IP owner. Not by the owner of the book.
If so, why would they think they now have the right to make an animated series based on the IP (which their tweet explicitly states)? You’re being way too charitable.
And as the sibling comment said, this is not the only copy (but seeing elsewhere in the thread that they’ve talked about burning it, perhaps they thought so, too. That’s honestly not an impressive amount of due diligence in that case, to put it mildly).
And as the sibling comment said, this is not the only copy (but seeing elsewhere in the thread that they’ve talked about burning it, perhaps they thought so, too. That’s honestly not an impressive amount of due diligence in that case, to put it mildly).
There are other copies of the same artbook...
The difference between this and the Gutenberg bible is that Gutenberg isn't going to DMCA you.
Then somehow the world started to join up and information began to seep into local cultures and sweep away a lot of these pre-rational beliefs. And for a while, it seemed like the direction of travel was towards a global system of thought based on a widely distributed factual, rational approach.
But in the last ten years, something seems to have arrested this direction of travel and reinstated local bubbles of thought, insulated from outside challenge.
Cryptoscams are the perfect (but not only) example of a self-sustaining shared consensual delusion. They don’t talk to the outside world. So much so that something like this happens. They are living inside a pre-rational info-bubble which has budded off from reality and floated away on its own wind.
We are not just dealing with scams and fools here. There is an intense current of reality-defiance and cult behaviour. Some people get sucked into the crypto-attractor, but other hallucinations are available.