None of the competitors needed anything like decades. Companies like PayPal, Venmo, Square, etc. had far more usage with a year or two of launch, and nothing like the high percentage of companies who started using them and removed the option because the fraud / benefit ratio was dismal.
I got involved with bitcoin in 2010. I never expected it to take off (price-wise) so soon. I thought maybe 2050, and I still think that's a reasonable guess. Overturning the global financial system from the bottom-up takes time.
ARPANet started in 1969. The internet as we know it today didn't take off until the late 90's, and wasn't a profitable world-changing sector until the 00's.
Do you have any examples of meaningful real-world usage? Boosters have tried hard to make this argument but haven’t found much adoption due to the greater cost and inconvenience.
Indeed! On that note, if Douglas Adams were still alive he’d have cleared this entire situation up years ago. And it’s NOT that NFTs are themselves worthless…
Reading below it’s clearly a perception problem.
The fundamental concept of NFTs is profoundly useful. The fact a trivial use case (to represent ownership of JPGs) is all anyone here knows or talks about is the real problem.
That's like saying the Internet is totally useless for anything other than sending bits around. There's entire industries dedicated to financial speculation.
The Internet immediately solved problems people had which were unrelated to selling internet service. Even before the web launched, things like email, FTP, telnet, etc. were generating real value for organizations around the world.
NFTs haven’t had that because they solve a problem almost nobody actually has: complete trust less processing of transactions small and slow enough to be handled on a blockchain. Most real world applications necessitate trusted third parties and at that point you can use a much simpler system at considerably lower cost.
Those original internet services didn't solve problems for the vast majority of business (or people) immediately! The technology was solid from the start, but the adoption curve was far, far slower than you suggest. By a long shot.
The difference with NFTs is the concept is sound - trusted, immutable transactions recorded on a public ledger without a third-party intermediary. The difficult part is making it work efficiently and securely. Until very recently NFTs have been slow and expensive (in cost and energy) to transact. The most visible use cases being trivial (proof of ownership of JPGs). But the answer to those technical limitations IS already here and getting better, speed and costs are not a problem if you stop referring to Bitcoin and Ethereum.
The problem is, most people dismiss the entire venture (tokenisation and the larger benefits of public DLTs) because they are only looking at the mainstream projects and agreeing with lazy journalism to have their biases validated.
> Those original internet services didn't solve problems for the vast majority of business (or people) immediately! The technology was solid from the start, but the adoption curve was far, far slower than you suggest. By a long shot.
I was there and, no, it wasn’t. It’s true that it wasn’t universally accessible on day one but that actually makes the comparison even less favorable for NFTs because even with far lower barriers to entry they’ve had far lower adoption. Businesses got online because it was profitable within months, not decades!
I’m old, I’ve been using the internet since the late 1980’s.
The web was spectacularly useful right from the beginning. You could look up airline schedules and buy tickets instead of going downtown to a travel agent. You could email someone instead of sending a letter or making an expensive long distance call. And like a million other things.
NFTs on the other hand are fucking useless. Unless you’re counting “scam others out of money with bullshit stories” to be a use case.
I too am old. I hear you. But just because you could do those things back then doesn't prove your point. Businesses took the large part of the 90s, at the very least, to really get on board with those technologies. And it wasn't though lack of desire - a lot of other factors need to come together to make the web viable in the mainstream (broadband, browser standards, TLS, countless components). None of which happened overnight.
Reading all the comments here, the sentiment over NFTs is clearly reductionist ("just monkey JPGs") and based on a very limited understanding of the fundamental benefits of the technology. Most of the real world benefits are overshadowed by this kind of sentiment and shows a clear lack of knowledge and research from the wider community.
If you truly are technically literate, you'll know the mainstream view of any nascent technology is always very weak and sensationalist (the headline in the OP a good example). If you were well versed in NFTs and DLT technology you'll know there is new ground being broken here. Your last sentence tells me that you are not well informed on the subject. If you were, you would not be saying such things and understand the computer science behind the core concepts.
So yes, whilst the NFT space is largely full of scams and is apparently useless, that doesn't mean there isn't a viable technology at play which has major benefits in multiple industries.
> If you were well versed in NFTs and DLT technology you'll know there is new ground being broken here. Your last sentence tells me that you are not well informed on the subject.
This is the key difference: you have been conspicuously unable to provide examples of a competitive service. Nobody in the 90s internet struggled to do that, and they rarely were asked to because there were so many cases where the internet did something useful that even a casual follower of the news would be aware of. There were plenty of dodgy companies but they weren’t the only ones, and existing major businesses were also jumping on board.
Yeah, I had a ton of people who were basically switching from “we take orders/provide support over the phone/mail” to “over the internet”. It wasn’t the kind of stuff which gets you on the cover of Wired as a visionary but it sure outlasted a lot of that because it was instantly recognizable as a good move.
- The instantaneous transfer of value between two parties, without an intermediary.
- The ability to publicly and immediately prove ownership (chain of provenance) to a third party.
- Multi-signatories, the ability for one or more parties to have joint cryptographic ownership over the token. For a pre-defined number of those owners (majority, 2 of 5, all members etc) to be able revoke, change, transfer the token as required, again without an intermediary.
> - The instantaneous transfer of value between two parties, without an intermediary.
This is the only one that isn't nonsense word salad. But it's simply not true.
The intermediary for a blockchain transaction is the group of people who run that blockchain.
The intermediary of PayPal is the group of people who run PayPal.
And so on. You can tell they are intermediaries because without them you can't transfer the value. There's no way to do it just between the two of you, you need this loosely organized group of people in between the two of you.
And that loosely organized group of people, it turns out, is WAY less reliable than basically every other option.
This is just one clip but the point is, referring back to the OP, the idea that NFTs have failed, that they are useless, that it’s just a load of bullshit is just another way of saying you have a very narrow understanding of tokenisation in the main.
You’ve linked to a company’s press releases, which rather verbosely tell us that they’re doing “tokenization” or selling shares like people have been doing for centuries. What’s omitted are the benefits from doing so – a company switching from mail/phone to internet ordering, for example, could easily show how they were saving money and shipping orders faster. For this, I’d expect to see favorable metrics for customers enjoying lower costs.
The press release was the first one that came up in my search that explained things clearly enough for the uninitiated. There are many other articles elsewhere covering these things if you care to look.
In multiple years despite huge amounts of hype and investment and trivial access to the technology by anyone on the internet no one has managed to find a single one besides “selling” “rare” “art”, which bombed spectacularly?
NFT art didn’t work. NFTs in games didn’t work. NFT shares of things didn’t work.
Enjoy your intangible beanie baby. At least those had a (small) intrinsic worth.
I am not interested in collectibles, I am talking about something much more interesting and practical.
But to entirely dismiss the category because you are only privy to slow & expensive implementations or trivial use cases is like saying no one will fly across the Atlantic or be able to transport heavy goods because the Wright Flyer can barely do 30mph.
There is a fundamental technology here that goes beyond trivial collectibles. If you need examples just ask rather than throw the baby out with the bath water.
"How tokenisation could benefit investors
The benefits of tokenisation extend to large investors as well, providing increased liquidity and the potential for additional value through asset fractionalisation.
In this way, we can take a US$100 million private equity asset, tokenise it, and turn it into 100 million US$1 tokens. These tokens can then be listed on a regulated digital securities exchange to trade on a secondary market. By doing this, the minimum investment is now affordable to the smallest investor, while the secondary market creates liquidity."
Agreed. "There's no obvious market for X" could also mean "all versions of X have sucked so far".
I'm not a VR enthusiast—I don't own any headsets, and will probably not be buying this one—but this is a profoundly lazy article, and not one I'd take seriously as far as judging the merits of Vision.
I believe you ;) I'm just curious about who it is, and what they buy them for.
I can mostly get my head around the iPad. My guess is that it's people who don't want (to get out / have) a laptop. In fact, this is the device the average person should probably have instead of a laptop.
The Apple Watch though? I can't fathom where these sales are coming from. It's been years, so it's no longer novelty of a new Apple product.
I can answer to my own reasoning. I have MacBook, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch.
- MacBook is my workhorse for work. When it retire this device will be the first to go.
- IPad Pro used for all manner of media and content consumption, mainly personal use and because it’s cellular enabled and portable enough it tends to go with me when I need to do work in a “device light” manner. This device of all would be my favorite piece of tech I have used in a near 40 year career in tech.
- IPhone is my phone, main audio player, occasionally used for browsing content consumption in a pinch.
- Apple Watch is probably the one I could live without the easiest, but it’s handy for health tracking, paying, and this may sound ridiculous…but the biggest value I get from it is walking up to my MacBook and not having to log in or type in a password.
decentralization of mechanical infrastructure is irrelevant. decentralization of human control over said infrastructure is all that matters.
one does not correlate with the other.
if anything, the strongest incentive is to mask centralized ownership behind a screen of decentralized infrastructure.
a culture of anonymity helps discourage inconvenient questions about transparency and thwarts attempts to formally analyze the relationship between agents and principals in a blockchain network.
all cryptocurrencies are thus fundamentally based on deception, as the blockchain is designed to expose activity statistics that demonstrate 'decentralization' of agency, but anonymizes the linkage between agent and principal, making those statistics worse than meaningless.
Least of all: require escrow-held-micro-payment to send an email to some location. If the item is marked as spam, the sender loses their money (perhaps to the spam-filter maintainer).
What is this single point of failure? You can take any server down on the internet and it will be fine. The DNS may be a more vulnerable point, but still, lots of different organisations have DNS servers on lots of different places.
>What is this single point of failure? You can take any server down on the internet and it will be fine. The DNS may be a more vulnerable point, but still, lots of different organisations have DNS servers on lots of different places.
Not single points of failure, but a few major (AWS, GCP, Azure, Cloudflare) points of failure.
Take any one or more of these down and there are major disruptions in commerce, connectivity and communications.
Sure, there are other hosting providers, but there's far too much centralization of Internet resources on those four platforms.
Any real decentralization solution will require ubiquitous (multi-)gigabit symmetric links to/from the Internet on commercial and consumer connections.
Because if you don't have enough bandwidth, you'll need to host your content/resources in "the cloud" (read: someone else's servers). And that locks all of us into centralized platforms.
tl;dr: If you want real decentralization, you need to provide the resources to do so at all levels of the networking/application stack.
> A single point of failure (SPOF) is a part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working.
Internet doesn't have a single point of failure. People that depends on X with X being the major clouds may be considered a point of failure for your specific application, but that's just your application, not the internet itself. Internet is already decentralized by nature.
> Sure, there are other hosting providers, but there's far too much centralization of Internet resources on those four platforms.
Because it's convenient. Decentralization has a constant cost. Centralization benefits from economics of scale.
> Because if you don't have enough bandwidth, you'll need to host your content/resources in "the cloud" (read: someone else's servers). And that locks all of us into centralized platforms.
Peer-to-peer solutions work fine, and you don't need multi gigabit synchronous links for that.
What Web3 seems to be trying to do is to have the convinience of centralization with the resilience of decentralization. For example, distributed authentity and payments. That's a great and noble goal! But I wish people would come forward about that and the tradeoffs involved instead of just talking about decentralization. Internet is decentralized by nature.
Not single points of failure, but a few major
(AWS, GCP, Azure, Cloudflare) points of failure.
And I most certainly didn't say or imply that such failures would "take down the internet." Rather, I said:
Take any one or more of these down and there are
major disruptions in commerce, connectivity and
communications.
That's very different from what you appear to think I said.
>Because it's convenient. Decentralization has a constant cost. Centralization benefits from economics of scale.
But there are costs to that centralization too. Not measured in dollars, but in freedom, creativity and choice.
>Peer-to-peer solutions work fine, and you don't need multi gigabit synchronous links for that.
Do they? If that were the case, we wouldn't have these behemoth tech corporations.
Decentralized solutions exist, but aren't currently viable for a variety of reasons. I chose to pick on asymmetric network links (the asymmetric part is the important bit, not necessarily total bandwidth, although that's important too) as a blocker to decentralization.
Feel free to disagree, but decentralization needs to be about more than just distributed block chains and services hosted on centralized server plantations.
Edit: Fixed usage: Asymmetric, not asynchronous. Sorry, still drinking coffee here.
Under 10 transactions per second globally is why Bitcoin isn’t used in retail.
Micropayments and nanopayments require thousands and tens of thousands TPS. There are newer generations of crypto that can do that and with none of the energy consumption problems of Bitcoin and other Proof of Work systems.
Sphinx chat payments work exclusively on Lightning and so is the El Salvador Chico wallet. Why do people keep using the same uninformed arguments every time bitcoin is mentioned?
