I followed a reference in that article to the article on Letter Case [0] which just blew my mind:
> The terms upper case and lower case […] originated from the common layouts of the shallow drawers called type cases used to hold the movable type for letterpress printing. Traditionally, the capital letters were stored in a separate shallow tray or "case" that was located above the case that held the small letters.
I can’t believe I’d never considered the origin of “case” in uppercase and lowercase might be an actual physical “case”.
It's similar to being "out of sorts", which today (and maybe even historically) means you're not feeling well. It came from letterpress where the case of type is collectively called a "sort" and if you were trying to put together a print run and you ran out of, say, the letter 'r', you are now "out of sorts".
> During typesetting, individual sorts are picked from a type case with the right hand, and set into a composing stick held in the left hand from left to right, and as viewed by the setter upside down. As seen in the photo of the composing stick, a lower case 'q' looks like a 'd', a lower case 'b' looks like a 'p', a lower case 'p' looks like a 'b' and a lower case 'd' looks like a 'q'. This is reputed to be the origin of the expression "mind your p's and q's". It might just as easily have been "mind your b's and d's".
You are focusing on now, it's not about now and it's not about us, it's about the species, if our ancestors gave up in the face on every obstacle we would still number about 1000 in a small valley in Africa or most likely we would be extinct. Life expands and to quote Jurassic park life finds a way.
As I have already mentioned, even a nuclear warfare-ridden Earth is much much much more habitable than anything else in the Solar system. And frankly, with current tendencies we will simply not live to see the day where living on another planet becomes a possibility, that’s just fantasy.
Also, I don’t really see how “saving” the top 100 billionaires is a good thing. Unless the spacecraft explodes with them onboard or something...
I think we can all agree that the resources on earth are finite, I think we can also all agree that our population is increasing in an exponential rate (not that it should, but that it is).
As long as we dismiss the possibility of using our technology to use resources outside of earth we will be stuck fighting for a greater share of the diminishing resources on earth.
No matter how much you recycle there is only a finite amount of everything on earth.
Living on mars is less of a fantasy now than going to the moon was just 90 years ago. We have people living for extended periods of time in orbit, we already have the technology, we just don't have the economic base.
We expand or we go extinct that's how it is, you might not like it but that's how it is.
As far as the billionaires, dude, the billionaires have it awesome here on earth i don't think they will be moving.
Even an Earth stripped of resources, with no fresh water or farmable land, hot and wrecked by global warming, and covered in radiation from nuclear fallout is more habitable than Mars. I'm a big fan of human space exploration, but let's not kid ourselves: Mars will not be even remotely habitable (without fully-enclosed structures and mostly dependent on resources shipped from Earth) for dozens of generations, best case scenario.
Let's try a test run first: Set up a fully independent and self-sustaining habitat of 100K people somewhere in the middle of Antarctica. If we can't even make that work, what makes us think we can inhabit Mars?
The risk is Earth being hit by a meteorite that kills all humans. It'll still be habitable but with nobody left to inhabit it if we don't have another colony.
A small tangent, I don't get NFTs, what's stopping me from creating a new NFT with beeples image, or if there is hashing involved with beeples image and a couple of pixels changed?
But the lack of reproducability is what makes Picassos's sketches be worth more than 0, or not? I can get a copy of those sketches for a few bucks as a high quality print, but not the original. In the NFT case, there is no original.
Things aren't given fundamental value by being an NFT so its weird to expect anything other than the value of ownership of what your NFT gives you. If people are buying NFTs thinking they have value simply because they are NFTs they are going to lose money. What an NFT provides is effectively a way to guarantee the artist - in this case. Think of it like a signed original print from an artist - what an NFT does is effectively similar.
> The token just contains a URL to the hosted image.
That sounds... just insane. Content under an URL can and does change. URLs themselves are not even under full control of the seller. I could get signing data itself, but signing a pointer?
EDIT: but the URL contains an IPFS hash, assuming it's not the mutable kind, maybe this is not completely crazy (or at least wouldn't be, if they included just the hash, without the gateway URL part)?
I know it is hard to wrap your head around, but really, the link does not fundamentally matter. Cryptopunks are just a hash of all the images. The whole point of an NFT token is to be a digital signature, essentially. It is just a shared agreement between buyer and seller to value that signature, and as long as we know that it represents the Beeple artwork, then the fact that the technical implementation points to a porn url, who cares - that is just an aide.
In fact, the original art could even be lost (as much physical art is). People could still value the signature!
I see. But to that, I can counter: described like this, it won't scale past a small group of acquaintances. The same reasoning can be applied to a verbal agreement - I can pay you for "that thing we both know", and it'll work the same... until one of us changes their mind and declares the transaction invalid. And the arguments we may have will look completely unsubstantiated to any third party we'd like to involve in it.
A lot of formalism around real laws and real money exist to make word of mouth scale. It's why people pay money accepted by everyone in their society, why they enter written contracts - of the type they can expect the court of law to treat as valid, if a dispute escalates to the point of involving third parties.
Can't shake the feeling it's just the next chapter in the story of cryptocurrencies rediscovering the hard way the last 10 000 years of social development.
Yeah, and regarding using just raw IPFS hashes there's this comment further down the thread indicating not even that is enough (I know too little of IPFS to verify but seems legit): https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1372169695277760519
I'm two years out of date on what's going on with IPFS, but assuming the core ideas didn't change: that Twitter comment is technically right, but with caveats.
IPFS, as a P2P system, only contains the files individual users are hosting. There's no fundamental obligation to rehost other people's content - but there are various incentive schemes[0]. The address itself is a hash of file contents, so if someone were to reupload the exact same (bit-level identical) file to IPFS again, it would appear on the network with the same hash. The limit to long-term availability of any given file is whether anyone who has it is willing to keep it in the network.
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[0] - For one, IIRC, there was some automated caching/mirroring of the files you pull using an IPFS client (not IPFS->HTTP gateway), to ensure popular files will get mirrored around the network for a while. Secondly, the team also started developing FileCoin, whose purpose was to create a scheme in which people could get paid for putting their spare storage on the network, which would be used to replicate files on IPFS. I don't know if they managed to get it to work.
My interest in IPFS started to diminish after I saw the team getting very involved in cryptocurrency world. I only care about IPFS for the P2P, content-addressable storage layer - and they kept talking about things related to Ethereum. So I stopped paying attention.
Moving IPFS to the crypto world has made it more of a success. I need distributed storage for an app I'm developing and I'm far more comfortable paying people to host the content instead of relying on goodwill.
