his company makes the closed source financial infrastructure for digitising cash for multinational corporations, that is made useless by crypto becoming popular.
of course he doesnt mention this when writing hit pieces on crypto culture.
Uh, that's the worse citation source I've ever seen? It's a speculative twitter post?
Also, what you said is like saying someone working at Stripe felt threatened by crypto. He's still not selling you a product (anywhere I can find in his online presence!)
A full decade later, crypto still isn't used for payments except in PR puff pieces, like the El Salvador fiasco. No one working in serious online payments feels threatened by crypto. Some want to ride the crypto PR mania into popularity, however.
hes not selling me anything, but hes selling to companys who have a choice of the stuff hes making or the stuff others are making as FOSS, and the stuff other people are making is being adopted more than his stuff. I guess that would be annoying.
I do notice how a decade in, the goalposts continue to shift. The millions of users are still nothing, the daily volume of transferred value is nothing, the hundreds of daos and communities are nothing, twitter discord reddit ycombinator, all of them delusional. yes its all just scammers and people being scammed. thats the true reality.
> First time large protests happened against Bukele in light of this law
Hold up, it's a fiasco because some people protested??
> Adoption is low
Generally when a new thing is introduced, adoption tends to be low, it doesn't immediately blow up. However, I would like to know how you concluded that adoption is low, where are you getting your metrics?
> DUI fraud is through the roof
Driving Under the Influence? What's the implication here? I don't understand how it's related to bitcoin.
It feels like you're reaching to conclude that it was a "fiasco", if large protests and disapprovals are a measure, the US is a fiasco (election protests, capitol storming, whatever is happening right now), does this mean that the US/Dollar is a fiasco?
“Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive....That tension will not go away” - Stuart Brand
Think about the whole quote and NFTs will make more sense to you.
NFT != DRM
go wild, right click and torrent. i'll send you my nft images myself if you want them.
the signatures and the economic security of that signature taking place is valuable. there is no scarcity of information in NFTs.
these takes are getting so bad, misunderstanding the point so much im not sure how we get people aligned in the discussion at this point. but in the words of satoshi “If you don’t believe it or don’t get it, I don’t have the time to try to convince you, sorry.”
> the signatures and the economic security of that signature taking place is valuable
Except, it isn't. What is the point in having a certificate of ownership of a resource so un-scare that it is practically free?
We have achieved post-scarcity of information, and people are desperately trying to cram scarcity-based economics back into it because that's all our society knows how to deal with. We should instead be working to remake society around the new reality, in my opinion.
> but in the words of satoshi “If you don’t believe it or don’t get it, I don’t have the time to try to convince you, sorry.”
Yeah, that's what scam artists say. Tell everybody you have a miracle, instill some FOMO, and when people poke at the holes tell them you don't have time to explain it to them or it is too complicated, but trust me it's great.
People need to be paid to do the work, so they can eat and pay rent. We dont actually live in a post scarcity star trek world. So we find a way that people can be paid yet the information and content can remain free to everyone. It seems like lots of people like this. For some reason some people really really hate that other people are willing to pay to make content freely available to them. The people buying NFTs are footing the bill for you to have that free information. Sure thats a social/cultural status game with a side of speculation, but in turn we have art that is permeating culture rapidly.
As he is quoting a distortion of Stuart Brand, maybe we should see what he would think? well here he is at the ethereum devcon in 2018 talking about this stuff.
> People need to be paid to do the work, so they can eat and pay rent.
Yes, this is the part about reshaping society I was talking about. Artists do contribute value to the world and need a way to be supported, but the way we support them should not be to burn the gift of post-scarcity.
> We dont actually live in a post scarcity star trek world.
When it comes to information we really, really do. I have every single game ever made for every console generation from 1978 through 2002. This cost me next to nothing, because we live in the information age.
> So we find a way that people can be paid yet the information and content can remain free to everyone
We already have several mechanisms for that. I don't see how NFTs bring anything new to the table other than providing speculation-based scams to flourish, which doesn't really benefit the artists in any way.
> Sure thats a social/cultural status game with a side of speculation, but in turn we have art that is permeating culture rapidly.
I wasn't aware that there was a problem with this. Indeed, the non-scarcity of information has allowed art and culture to proliferate at ludicrous speed. We've seen someone's fanfiction become a big budget film series (with some IP changes), someone's basement-developed game became so big a company bought him out for billions of dollars, and a korean TV series become a smash hit in the west.
I'm open to having my opinion changed, but I don't see any problems things like NFTs actually solve better than any existing system other than being great for scams.
> I have every single game ever made for every console generation from 1978 through 2002. This cost me next to nothing
I think you are confusing the cost of production of these things, and the cost to you personally.
There is a cost (material) and scarcity(human time) involved in making things. I think we have got away as a society with not paying artists and musicians and demanding their content be free and "post-scarcity". That really isnt helpful to people trying to live in this world.
See Gillian Welch sadly singing "Everything is free now... They figured it out, I'm gonna do it anyway even if it doesn't pay".
> which doesn't really benefit the artists in any way.
the default on most marketplaces is a 10% resale royalty paid to the artist. compare this to existing aucition houses where we get 0. or second hand record shops where we get 0%. or spotify or youtube where the ceos are billionaires and we get fractions of pennies for streams AND have our work surrounded by adverts.
when i look at https://foundation.app/collection/clsfd I see an artist i really admire finally getting paid some money for her years of work and experimentation. and retaining control in that system. The work isnt tied and locked in to this particular website like posting on instagram, the provenance is clear and royalties fair (decided by the artist).
> I think you are confusing the cost of production of these things, and the cost to you personally.
No, I'm not. The fact that artists need to be paid for their work so they can continue to exist within world of scarcity economics is orthogonal to the fact that information can be copied and disseminated for an effective zero-cost.
Let me put it this way: if, instead of minting and purchasing an NFT, the potential buyer just gave the artist money, what has changed? Everyone can still copy the art for free, the owner can still say they paid for it and prove it in any number of existing methods. Absolutely nothing about adding a cryptographically secure certificate of ownership to that is valuable as far as I can see.
So why didn't people do that? There has been the option to give artists money forever, and yet as a society, we generally haven't. NFTs are demonstrably transferring massive amounts of wealth from crypto bros with too much money to artists who need it. It's revolutionary because _it's actually happening_. Even though it was theoretically possible in the past, _people didn't actually do it_. The traditional art market doesn't care about an artist until they're dead. The value of NFTs is that a massive new market for art, from living artists, has been created ex nihilo.
So your argument isn't that this is a useful and revolutionary tool that will change the world for the better, your argument is that it is a useful way for artists to exploit idiots? A.K.A, a scam?
I'm not convinced this dialog is in good faith, but no, my argument is that it is a way for artists to get paid, at a much larger scale than they have in the past. Personally, I think artists getting paid does change the world for the better, but I suppose that's open to disagreement. I'm not sure which part of that you think is a scam - are the people buying the NFTs being misled? Is the product sold not what was claimed?
> Personally, I think artists getting paid does change the world for the better
I don't disagree, but if it weren't for NFTs there are still other ways for them to get paid. Hell, there are still other ways to scam rich idiots for that matter. Point is, it isn't the technology of NFTs getting them paid, it's the sociology around it. My contention is that the technology itself brings us nothing of value.
> I'm not sure which part of that you think is a scam - are the people buying the NFTs being misled? Is the product sold not what was claimed?
Yes. NFTs talk about "ownership" of some work, but that's the lie. No one has any ownership in any meaningful sense conferred by the technology of NFTs. I can have the exact same thing your NFT points to; hell, I can even mint my own NFT that points to it. If I bribe the artist I can probably get them to vouch for mine being the "legitimate" one. The NFT is meaningless. It's the digital equivalent of the star name registry scam. Even if we take the NFT to be backed by some legal contract entitling the "owner" to actual factual copyright, that isn't enabled by NFT tech, it's enabled by governments and treaties and has been functioning for hundreds of years without cryptographically secure anything and, in fact, depends on so many systems that are not cryptographically secure and decentralized that adding those things into the mix only makes it more difficult to work within that system.
"There are still other ways for them to get paid" is not the same thing as "they would in actuality be paid the same amount". I agreed in my message that it was always possible, and yet it wasn't happening. I don't care whether it's theoretically possible that artists could be paid, I care whether they are actually paid. NFTs are actually getting them paid. You seem to be missing, or avoiding, this point.
I am not making an argument about technology, or sociology, or any of the things you seem to be worked up over. I am strictly saying, NFTs get artists paid, in far greater amounts than they had previously, and I consider that valuable. I've yet to hear a refutation (or an acknowledgement) of this, and I consider it a strong refutation of your own quote "Absolutely nothing about adding a cryptographically secure certificate of ownership to that is valuable" - adding the certificate of ownership radically increased the size of the market, and got artists paid. QED.
I am primarily concerned with the technology's value as regards solving problems that actually exist. You know, the way nuclear fission or NVMe storage have value, not the way that Q-Ray Bracelets have the value of being effective at separating fools from their money.
If you're going to argue that Q-Ray Bracelets are valuable, then I do not believe that further discussion on this topic is possible as we live in fundamentally different realities.
Whether or not they are actually making money for artists in a profound way, as you keep asserting, is not an argument I'm willing to engage in since I haven't bothered to look in to the subject. My assertion is that even if they are[0], NFTs are still a broken-window-fallacy solution to the problem, not a real one. As the author of the original article states, this mechanism relies on a shared delusion that NFTs actually mean something and as soon as that delusion evaporates so will the "solution".
[0] I have seen no data one way or the other, so let's steelman and assume you are correct.
I think you're not wrong that some artists are actually getting paid whereas they wouldn't have were NFTs not a thing. But I think you might be wrong about the "why."
The Apple App Store got a lot of indie developers paid in the early days because Apple made payment easy and made side loading hard. There was a gold rush that is largely over now.
The question to ask is whether the NFT art market is sustainable.
My hunch is that there is a relatively small number of people with paper gains in ETH looking for something to do with it, but that the underlying demand for digital art hasn't changed much simply because there's now a new way to "prove ownership."
'people buying NFTs are footing the bill for you to have that free information'
Where? All I see is people paying for works after the fact, that no one would pay for -except- buying into the idea of an NFT.
Where are the NFTs being sold for desirable creative works -prior- to their creation and distribution? Show me a movie being shot, by names good enough that they could otherwise sell tickets, that will release freely to everyone that was funded by selling an NFT to it, say.
Retroactive sales have long been the way most art (and most stuff in general) is funded. Art is made and then sold, then the artist can keep making things. Someone makes them then sells them then they can keep making more. There is also the smaller market of commissioned work, which is popular in illustration and graphic design, but not so much in fine arts as it strips agency from the artist (you are asking them to make a particular thing). Alongside that there is funding applications via arts councils and crowdfunding, the closest for that would be projects on https://mirror.xyz/
Not really answering the question there, which was specifically in reference to "People need to be paid to do the work". Clearly, they don't. They do the work first. Maybe if they were not paid they'd not do -further- work (though "starving artist" being a thing tends to imply people create because of a desire to create, not because of how lucrative it is), but with NFTs...no one is actually paying them to do the work. There could be an NFT with no artwork attached (in fact, there is no artwork attached; there's just a link, pointing somewhere on the internet, that can be changed out at any time by the creator).
> "People need to be paid to do the work". Clearly, they don't.
im really not sure what you are arguing for here? It seems you just really dont want a person to give someone else money and that have exchange/relationship be tokenized?
because regardless of how you feel about it, clearly lots of other people do want this. many artists and musicians do want this, particularly with royalties on resales.
I make something, I put up a signed version for auction, it gets sold. That person has the version i signed, they like having that, maybe in the future they sell it again and i also get royalties from the future sales. This is a positive improvement for me selling my artwork/music, and i much prefer it to begging on patreon. Even just making/advertising a patreon account is seen negatively from my experience, people would much rather pay me for something than send me $5 a month. I guess the follow up is why crypto not paypal, and beyond the obvious dependancy/fees/region locks, well its just more fun :)
We know that people feel different when they buy things. We know that ownership brings with it a sense of care. We know the exchange of one token for another (be it crypto of pieces of paper or stones) builds relationships, builds community. And a record of those exchanges builds legitimacy. That legitimacy extends to the system, as more people use it the more accepted it becomes.
>that can be changed out at any time by the creator
that would be one quick way to destroy your legitimacy, future sales, and upset your audience, sure. not sure why you'd do that?
NFTs aren't funding art in any substantial. They are funding some people playing the NFT/status game. People making art are supported by Patreon, commissions, etc.
To be fair, some artists have started selling NFTs of their work, and seen their income explode.
That said, -they were already creating art-. They're now getting better funded, which is great, but they also have geared their art toward that funding (see Bitcoin Angel as an example), which is, I would contend, a form of selling out (but is probably not much worse than patronage), and the source of that funding is horrific for the environment and requires a collective speculative delusion, but I've yet to see any art come about because of NFTs. To be fair there, though, I don't think art for the purpose of making money is a thing; artists create because of a desire to create, and hopefully it gets suitably appreciated to make money.
As I mentioned to others, remember the saying "90% of everything is shit" and make some time for the 10% maybe being legitimate, maybe having something worthwhile that is attracting all the attention.
Most people I know making art are funded by Arts Councils and government programs. Then there is the private markets, which look similar to the NFT speculation games (go watch a sotherbys auction some time, its eye opening) but with no royalties going to the artists. NFTs at a minimum have that 1 up on auction houses.
Then there is larger grants from foundations and charities, which would fund a project without expectation of ownership on any items. Philanthropists.
Then there is the smaller graphic/illustration commission artists who use paypal and patreon, interestingly they also seem to be the ones kicking up the most fuss about nfts, im not sure why though.
And it is just plainly wrong that artists arent using NFTs, and that it is just people playing status games. Its been quite widely accepted and adopted, particularly amongst those who already deal with selling their works so dont have that hesitation and fear of asking to be paid.
Sure there is abuse and scams, those are the 90% of shit. most pop music is produced by organisations making bland acceptable rhythms with a pretty teen face dancing around to make a company a bunch of money, kinda sounds scammy too. But that doesnt mean theres also good stuff going on. Its up to you if you want to engage with it, but flat out denying it is happening wont make you an expert either.
> We dont actually live in a post scarcity star trek world.
We don't have matter replicators, or fusion reactors, but we've had sufficient technology to reliably give every living human a comfortable and safe existence since the early 1960s at the latest (see Murray Bookchin's "Post-Scarcity Anarchism" (1968)). Tellingly, we (collectively) choose not to. Instead, we're getting Gibson's Jackpot.
> but in the words of satoshi “If you don’t believe it or don’t get it, I don’t have the time to try to convince you, sorry.”
This quote is funny, because the technology and cryptography is pretty understandable and doesn't require faith. What I have a qualm with is the economics. And the problem with the economics is that it's not value neutral. Sure, we could have a system where signed hyperlinks to jpegs have value, but do we want that? Who does such a system benefit? Are the incentives of such a system aligned with continued human prosperity?
Edit:
> there is no scarcity of information in NFTs.
This is contradicted by the hype around NFT gaming and "pay to earn". Every NFT gaming proposal I've seen seems geared around using NFTs to enforce artificial scarcity of digital items.
If NFTs get the economics right, then there is literally no need for any sort of IP law when it comes to digital assets. After all, the profitable thing is proof of ownership, not the good.
And yet, no one is paying (to grab a software company out of a hat) Oracle for the Oracle "name". They're paying for the software. The closest we have is paying for "proof of authenticity", because that belied a level of quality, but if we can trivially make a perfect copy, even that loses all merit.
What can you do with the proof of ownership of a digital asset if everyone else can copy it and ignore that proof of ownership? It's like starting with DRM and saying, "Oh yeah, we don't encrypt it, we just trust you not to violate our terms. Now pay up."
What would Taylor Swift do right now? I can rip all of her audio off of Spotify and use it in my movie without her permission even though she owns the music.
She would try to stop me - maybe send a cease and desist, sue, or otherwise seek remuneration for unauthorized use of her work.
Her proof of ownership is a signed contract with her recording company and any US copyright filings.
Your proof of ownership is an unambiguous cryptographic scheme (NFT), which you could use to secure a US copyright.
lol maybe today on a friday afternoon i do haha :)
but in general the conversations are getting exhausting and distracting. I feel like it is at a point where we will just keep building the things we find useful for ourselves and our communities, maybe others will join in.
hopefully he people with such extreme anti-crypto views recognise that we are human; we'll try and we'll fail and maybe we'll make some cool stuff too. maybe they dont share the same values and maybe theyre scared of what might happen, but the continual insults and accusations of everyone being scammers/scammed because we linked some metadata with some signatures is absurd and weird.
if theyre so worried about culture and society maybe they should take a moment to think of what energy they are putting out into the world and if its at all healthy.
fwiw lsd is very cheap compared to other drugs/medicines. i can get enough for a year for $30. (ten tabs as $3 a tab, 150/250u == ten strips per tab, 100 microdoses spread over the year, about twice a week).
> I am aware of the existence of Layer 2 solutions, but I'm not too sure that by making a somewhat complicated layering solution to solve scalability concerns on the network that it can achieve mass long-term adoption.
the base layers always get expensive because of demand for block space. but zkrollups get cheaper as more people use them and the share of the writing to the L1 is split between more parties.
solana has the exact same scaling strategy as eth, L2 rollups. but its harder for people to run on their own hardware for the L1. maybe thats something people care about, maybe not. time will tell.
Not anonymous, team is very public. because of US law this is the practical way of actually doing it, the alternative seems to be not doing it and thatd be boring. theres been long discussions for days in the discord, if people have suggestions of a better way to do this come join in.
people are very open to how else could we do this and how it can be improved and secured.
remember this was just a joke in a group chat last week, that speed of development will have issues, but community and reputation matter, and we can lean on that as we solve the legal structure.
There are any number of other, more rational ways of doing this. The only "problem" is that they don't involve crypto because, in this case, crypto brings absolutely nothing to the table that I can discern except an increased risk of getting scammed. The most obvious would be to sell shares in a corporation or LLC. That entity could then use the money raised to buy the constitution. That way the funders would actually have something of recognized legal value (fractional ownership in an entity that owns a copy of the U.S. Constitution) instead of a largely worthless "governance token."
Under the current approach, it seems like people are being asked to contribute money so that someone else can buy a copy of the U.S. Constitution, with the funders having--at best--merely a say in how/where it is displayed. I can't imagine why anyone would want to do this, unless they are misunderstanding what they are getting in return for their ETH.
> crypto brings absolutely nothing to the table that I can discern except an increased risk of getting scammed
So you think it'd have the same chances of success if it didn't involve crypto? Of course not! Yes the point is it's crypto, it's experimenting with new ways of doing things, and that's what people want to be a part of.
But doesn't this just give the game away? It seems like you're simply agreeing that the only reason this is happening is crypto hype. There is nothing actually better about crypto for this application, it's just channeling (or taking advantage of) people's general excitement about crypto.
And, honestly, I get that. There's nothing wrong with wanting to participate in something new. But nobody should be deceived into thinking that DAOs are really creating any important new capabilities here.
> There is nothing actually better about crypto for this application
> The most obvious would be to sell shares in a corporation or LLC
Well certainly you can do it faster with crypto. How long would it take to set up the corporation / LLC? How quickly / easily could people buy shares? Could anyone buy shares?
Yes there are more risks this way, but I don't think there are zero benefits to the crypto approach.
It's true that, in theory, you can do it faster with crypto. But I don't see how that benefit is material. It's easy to set up an LLC in approx. 1 day. With crypto, I guess you could theoretically do it in seconds. But, as this project demonstrates, delay in setting up the entity isn't the limiting factor. Actually raising the funds takes much longer.
And it's not as though setting up a DAO is easier. Both require either a substantial amount of domain-specific knowledge, or trust in general purpose tools/forms.
Can we think of a a similar case where the crypto speed benefit would be meaningful?
Edit: Your question about who can buy shares raises an interesting issue. It may be true that, if you did this in the traditional way, you could only sell shares to accredited investors. (I'm not sure. But that's my hunch.) But I wouldn't be so sure that these same rules don't apply to DAOs. It may be a complex legal question, and I haven't researched it, but I would certainly not assume that these solicitation rules don't apply to soliciting contributions to DAO's. After all, the same regulatory goal applies: preventing amateur investors from getting scammed, or taking on more risk than they had intended, through private-placement style investments where there are fewer market signals to help people make informed decisions. (Of course, it's a separate question whether we should have laws like that in the first place.)
I think this is the real answer. People are just having more fun doing it this way. That's OK. But I worry they're getting scammed as a result, and that's not going to convince anyone else to use a DAO for anything important.
I can create an LLC online in an hour. Then people can Venmo me or something. The tech part is not the interesting part, its interesting that this whole effort ignores or seems to ignore the fact that people are just donating money to help someone buy something - even if its "boring", it would be more honest to admit that tokens dont connote any rights, and shares in an LLC do.
The team may be in the public, but neither on Twitter nor on their website is any imprint or personal information.
The proper way to do it, would be to set up a non-profit organization where each funding/paying member gets voting rights (no crypto needed).
It's funny as a joke and maybe the intention is good, but in the end this could just as well be a new crypto scam and funding this project is the same as gambling at a casino.
> The proper way to do it, would be to set up a non-profit organization where each funding/paying member gets voting rights (no crypto needed).
You just can’t make something like this happen in < 1 week using the “proper”/traditional methods.
Put differently: those “proper” tools have existed for decades. If they were as easy to use as you claim then why haven’t we seen them used to achieve something comparable to this project yet? (or have we?)
The only kickstarters I’ve seen that are to fund just a single thing (instead of individuals each getting a product) are for funding R&D or medical bills. I haven’t seen any of those reach $30M, nor have I seen any kickstarters that intend to have open governance. And I’m doubtful many kickstarters have been quite as social as today’s DAOs either.
> which will fail in one way or another.
It might fail. That’s fine (though I’d prefer it pass). The novelty and enjoyment of it has already been worth the $.
>No, the crypto bit absolutely doesn’t do anything useful
None of this would have happened without 'the crypto bit'.
People are just annoyed that crypto is happening and theyve been betting against it. they were so focused on the 'currency' aspect they missed that groups of people can coordinate, they missed that a reddit group can become a political force, they missed that people are buying land together, the missed that coordination is the killer app.
HN and the cynics have been telling us for years that none of this would work, and when we get examples of it working we hear "you could do this without x".
yes, in theory you could have a mysql database and a company registered in deleware, and stripe processing payments, and also companies in other countries to handle international payments, and blah blah.....
> HN and the cynics have been telling us for years that none of this would work, and when we get examples of it working we hear "you could do this without x". yes, in theory you could have a mysql database and a company registered in deleware, and stripe processing payments, and also companies in other countries to handle international payments, and blah blah.....
Or just use GoFundMe?
I agree that none of this would have happened without the crypto bit, but only for the reason that its a rushed and poorly thought out idea that crypto nerds are latching onto as proof that crypto finally has a high profile use beyond speculation.
In reality this solves effectively nothing that centralized systems don't while adding the risk of there being no legal recourse if the team decides not to do what the DAO says.
> None of this would have happened without 'the crypto bit'.
In the sense that it wouldn't have happened without a bunch of people suddenly finding themselves with so much wealth that spending it on a lark is fine and a nihilistic meme culture where throwing money at jokes is a growing global activity, sure.
Wouldn't it be nicer if millions were instead spent on fighting poverty?
yes, im a big supporter of thing like proofofhumanity ubi, also $400m was donated from crypto to the india covid relief fund over the past 6 months. These initiatives are great and happy to share any you have.
This week, on the back of constituitondao, people have started making other daos for other causes like repatriation of stolen historical artifacts https://twitter.com/bronzedaotweets
i'm far from hn cynic regarding crypto, but wholy shit, some of crypto projects/ICOs/NFTs are so dumb you have to have literally no brain cells to buy into them. including the one this post is about.
It doesn't demonstrate any of that. This was pumped on Twitter, Reddit, and other centralized aggregators which defeats the entire argument about decentralized mass coordination.
fine, i cant be bothered with hn anymore. so you can say ok its discord and twitter.
but crypto is fun. people will keep having fun.
we can ignore that and write it off as has been the case for the past ten years, or we can recognise 10% of americans have coinbase app installed. that this is reality. and people can keep saying "we could do this without crypto" but it doesnt change the fact we didnt do it without crypto, we did it with crypto. and then can start to investigate why that is, or bury our heads in the sand saying "show me a real use case"
we can start to investigate why thousands of people are willing to essentially donate money towards a meme, what that sense of community and collective ownership is about, and what this means for the future, and how this tech is enabling that and how we can channel it -> there already talks of BailFundDAO and ReparationsDAO off the back of this...
I can see why you're exasperate but you can also see why sensible people don't think crypto is anything more than a toy. So far it has had no positive real world impact. Most aspects of crypto are dominated by childish memes which drives away sensible people from investing time and effort into doing something meaningful with the technology. The childish culture will have to change for the technology to have any meaningful impact.
show me how this would have happened without crypto. in less than a week going from being a joke in a group chat to a registered organisation with $25m funding and a clear mission statement to take something from private ownership into public display.
people can keep dismissing how strong a coordination and communication tool crypto, is or we can start taking it seriously.
I don't see how any feature specific to crypto contributed here? The only coordination required is to get the requisite number of people to contribute - and that's a social problem, not a technical one.
it has previously been in a private collection, and without constitutiondao would end up in another private collection.
the intention of the dao is clear, display it in a public museum with free entry.
and yes, from a joke last friday to likely suceeding in less than a week! exciting. the velocity of daos is remarkable, and i think it is a just a small hint of what is to come in the future. and it is coming quick.
(meanwhile i expect hn to continue talking about tulips or something :)
Have there been any DAOs designed for long term impact that have been successful at their intended task? Is there a DAO for nuclear fusion and fission projects or anything else that has real world relevance?
Cool idea but this makes too much sense for anyone in the crypto community to take it seriously. They mostly care about what gets the most likes and upvotes on Twitter and Reddit.
you’re criticizing this approach, but twitter and reddit matter. how do you get 10000 people to each give $2000 to a project over the course of 3 days? no startup, no matter how good their product, pulls that off without a strong marketing team. most fail even with traditional marketing.
how do you sell to the millenial/zoomer audience? memes. you make it a social experience. you create not just shared governance over a document, but an entire community around it. organize events like watch parties, etc. especially covid era, creating communities is more valuable to certain groups than is creating an incrementally better search engine.
I don't understand what you're arguing. I don't find meaning, value, and substance in memes and digital communities structured around DAOs. I'd much rather be involved in some real world community that is working towards solving some tangible problem instead of wasting my time speculating on pixelated NFTs or buying something that already belongs to every citizen of the United States.
I think you're missing the point. What if it became a meme to collectivize around a DAO that meme-ifies fighting climate change? Would that be something that interests you? A good example of someone that already altruistic things for the world and makes it fun is Mr. Beast on youtube.
For instance on a quick search I found this video of him rallying a bunch of people to clean an extremely dirty beach.
Humor and productivity don't have to be mutually exclusive. Maybe humor and fun is the way we get the average person to engage in collective action and do things that everybody thinks are impossible otherwise.
Maybe you could use your imagination a little bit to potentially think about why something like ConstitutionDAO might have larger implications than "it's just another ponzi-scheme. Or fall in line with the rest of Hacker News that fails to see how real people can benefit from an interesting technology.
Please explain to me how real people are benefiting from buying something that already belongs to them or how meme-ifying a global existential crisis is beneficial. I mentioned in another comment that I find the crypto community to be childish and seeing things like this does not convince me the community is mature or sensible enough to tackle real problems.
Madagascar is currently going through a humanitarian crisis. Millions of people are facing starvation there and are likely to perish from it [1]. Is anyone in the crypto community trying to coordinate and organize some kind of humanitarian aid for Madagascar? Because if they did that then it would prove to everyone that this technology could be used to affect meaningful change for people in the real world.
This specific copy of the constitution doesn't belong to the people, it is privately held and being auctioned. But if you are talking about the ideas of the Constitution belonging to the people, then how is that any different than the ideas of the blockchain and cryptosphere belonging to the people?
That's the beauty of ConstitutionDAO, it is quite literally proving that we have new ways in organizing and collectivizing. As a signal of that they are buying the constitution so that the people can take back what is rightfully ours. It gives people the freedom to try and solve new and complex problems in new ways.
Memes are the rallying cry of Gen-Z. DAOs are just a tool for organizing. The crypto community may not be ones to rally for Madagascar and I'm not expecting them to! But, DAOs give YOU the power to try and rally the people so we can do something. Rather than trusting you to manage the funds, the collective can trust the smart contract and vote on how they want to approach solving the problem, which professionals they want to delegate to to solve the problem and so forth.
This is so much more than trying pump shitcoins or ponzischeme. This is about allowing societies to collectivize in ways they never have before. You and your neighbors want to start a solar coop? DAO. A neighborhood is lacking the funds to support the local schools? DAO. The county wants to try and build a water treatment plant because they can't get funding from the Fed/State for clean water treatment? DAO.
DAOs will exist in all shapes and sizes and for different causes. Some will fail and some will succeed, but that's how innovation goes. While the technicals behind how these things will develop is still up in the air, this is the Netscape moment for crypto and nobody on Hackernews can come up with any other sort of justification for it not working other than it's a Ponzi Scheme.
None, but those are just a few I had the imagination to come up with. If you fail to see the value, you will at some point. As Jeff Bezos has been quoted saying, "Your margin is my opportunity." and opportunity right now is ripe.
I understand you are committed to this but you should understand that the adults in the room don't take any of it seriously. Jeff Bezos started a book store which he diligently grew to a eCommerce juggernaut. He did not start a project to buy what was rightfully his as a citizen of the United States. I'll repeat what I said previously, if you want people to take crypto seriously then the crypto community will have to start doing serious things instead of just having fun and shilling memes to buy a piece of paper at a Sotheby's auction.
Your generation is going to be faced with unimaginable hardships and the faster you folks grow up the faster you can start working on addressing real problems instead of wasting time on stuff like this.
The adults in the room don't take it seriously because they're blind to future advances. They think the current system can be upgraded and patched, but at present, that is impossible. It is fundamentally broken. The younger generation is already faced with unimaginable hardships and because of that has a tendency to be extremely dynamic and adaptive. They see the true problem as a coordination problem and crypto opens a new door with unexplored possibilities for coordination.
Crypto and thought schools adjacent to it combine elements of Libertarianism and Socialism in ways that were unable to exist before their advent. These typically contradictory ideologies can be combined in a new way that help us overcome these systemic coordination problems and let us execute collective action faster. Find me another cause that has raised 40 million dollars in less than a week where funds are held in escrow by a computer contract.
To expand on that the field I work in is communication by nature and I'm literally planning on pitching a project to a startup DAO this evening. This project may quite well open the door for people in my field to jump start a new way of funding projects which makes sure that Consumers, project contributors and everyone involved are compensated in a fair way while also not requiring a private investor. This literally would have been impossible without a DAO.
If the pitch goes well and the project is successful it would allow me to undercut all of my potential competitors. As people who enjoy a free market might say "That's just business baby". Then on top of that, because of the nature of how it's structured, nobody is exploited and no rent is extracted from a private party.
Good point about combining markets and social aspects but that is possible without DAOs as well. You're confusing the hype with the actual underlying technology and blockchains are not necessary to have any of what you described.
Good luck with your pitch. Sounds like a cool project.
Thanks. If you're willing to expand on your thoughts about blockchains not being necessary to any of the things I described, I would like to hear it. I'm honestly looking for any reason to be wrong on this, and I have yet to find that reason.
How else could ConstitutionDAO have raised funds as quickly as they have and in a secure manor without an intermediary company/legal entity holding the pooled funds?
How is ConstitutionDAO not a legal entity? It seems like once people bought into the DAO they could not reclaim their funds so it was essentially acting as a trusted escrow service. Since they were acting as a de facto escrow service this could have been accomplished with existing financial services. Most escrow companies don't care why they're holding the money and the issue would have been convincing them that this is a reasonable thing to do. But convincing an escrow company that what you're doing is sensible in this case is a feature and not a bug because they would have immediately pointed out the obvious issues with this scheme.
In fact, going through an escrow service would have kept the amount hidden and given them an edge in actually being able to win the auction but this wasn't their goal. They wanted to show that they could hype this up and get people to sign up for it. I doubt they were ever serious about actually placing the winning bid which goes back to my original point about the crypto community not being serious about anything other than hype. I understand they're trying to grow the network of people that participate in the crypto community but shenanigans like this prove my point about them not being serious.
ConstitutionDAO exists as a smart contract on Ethereum, not a legal entity. Funds pooled in that contract are spent at the discretion of users in the DAO, by contributing to the DAO you agree to the multisig stipulation (this could vary depending on the DAO).
Because the constitution and ownership of the constitution is managed in the current legal and financial world (centralized), the DAO has to bridge out of the decentralized network to purchase it. Since no decentralized system exists in the current legal infrastructure they had to incorporate in Wyoming to make the purchase. (I don't think they would have been required to do this if Sothebys had an Ethereum Wallet)
If the DAO had won the bid and kept the constitution and managed it, nobody from the centralized world would be able to purchase the Constitution without the permission of the DAO and it's 17 thousand users (aka a buyer coming into decentralized territory). This is the purpose of the purchase, it is purely symbolic. The metaphorical possession of the DAO sets the precedent that blockchains can set a new standard for building Governance systems. What better way to demonstrate the growth of innovative governance bodies than buying the foundational document of modern day governance itself?
Moreover, it may be wrapped up in humorous memes and shitposts, but the sentiment is the same. That being the blockchain is a contender for overthrowing all current financial systems, and by proxy Governance as well. This is the whole idea behind the metaverse. Emergent and collaborative digital cities that are representative of real world communities working together to solve real problems like climate change, world hunger, poverty, education and every other problem you could think of. It breaks the shackles of the masters inside corporations and the masters inside the government.
Also, after losing the bid, do you think it is a coincidence that one of the men who stands to lose the most from the success of cryptocurrency was the person who won the auction?
-note, this is probably my last comment for this thread. I appreciate the friendly debate. I always like chatting with those who hold opposing views. I will definitely be pondering points you've brought up and do more reading.
of course he doesnt mention this when writing hit pieces on crypto culture.
https://twitter.com/TBSocialist/status/1456963980577153026?s...