I figured its worth discussing again. I do not see any recent topics about NFT. People seem to be waking up to the fact that NFTs are NOT immutable. There are a couple recent issues, notably “Bored Mummies Waking Up” NFT which released and did not shuffle their attributes, so a block of NFT all were extra rare. Community members bought the rare ones on open market, then the devs decide to “shuffle” the attributes and people were left with NFT no longer rare. Devs made them whole again, but its showing cracks in the current NFT system.
Twitter user @Boring_Crypto said this today,
“cute, but actually you only semi-own a number that points to a non permanent link on a centralized server which may return some info and a jpeg. Maybe a pengu today and a goat tomorrow and a 404 the day after.
Surely we can do better…”
I agree with what they say, and I think Maidsafe can be a great place for immutable NFTs in the near future.
Yes the placeholder token is MAID, nothing changed there since ICO
I feel that with the Safe Network a system of proving ownership of something is fairly simple. Adapting the NRS (name resolution system) into a system for that (NFT if you want) is possible and not all that difficult.
The entry points to a record that contains the actual Data or record of authentication (if physical item). The entry can change ownership by the owner transferring ownership.
Thus owner is the owner of the entry and the proof of ownership of the item is what the entry points to.
There is so much we can do with NFT’s on Safe Network much more easily than others and for cheap.
As was already mentioned the NFT content is stored on the same network it’s minted, traded on, etc and would be visible from the browser or any app that wants to read that data.
So far it’s been discussed that NFT’s on Safe Network could be Digital Bearer Certificates (DBCs) with a type field, very much the same as Safe Network Token. This would mean fast and extremely low cost minting and transfers.
It’s been conceptualized here for quite some time already given how a users SafeID wallet can be tied directly to a piece of content or media that when it is listened to, that SafeID could be paid directly in real time. Or the rewards coulda be split amongst multiple wallets. You could even sell the streaming rights to a buyer or sell a portion share of the streaming rights. Etc etc.
Frustratingly to me, people are catching on to being able to jimmy rig this with what is currently being available out there now.
Network can’t launch soon enough but at least it will be done correctly. It will be easy, under the users full control, low cost, immutable and perpetual, highly accessible across the network, permissions can be shared across multiple apps or revoked at will.
There are other cool ideas in other threads if you’re interested!
I do not understand NFTs or DBC. NFTs are about trying to jack up the price of shovelware?
DBC are not about hook ups and buying weed or hookers they are about trying to keep the damn natural gas pozi going by buying puppets in panama papers style. Its about tax evasion. Its just garbage that fuels bribery and the conversion of law into crime and democracy into slave based oligarchy. Both just seem to be dirty. On one side you get dirty billionaires benefitting and on the other the RIAA and MPAA? Maybe I have this wrong? I feel the same about smart contracts- they just want to make usuary more efficient. I guess I just don’t understand fintech- I don’t see its great liberating promise. It seems like a way of making money even less accountable and magnifying its conflicts of interest. I know SAFE has the coin going way back and I know Musk got his start with paypal but fintech at the bottom not involving the fiats seems dirty. I also don’t really understand the criticism of fiats. It seems that people that criticise fiats have too much faith in money. They they also think fiats are inflationary when they actually seem to make it possible to finally control inflation and deflation and speculation.
It can represent almost anything but it is meant to be verifiably unique, one of a kind, and provably owned by an address or digital identity. Literally a non-fungible token. The term and it’s hype are kind of annoying in my opinion but the concept can be leveraged for good, also in my opinion. A poor musician in a small town could provide a demo and auction off a percentage of sales or streaming rights to the winner, on a global scale with the goal of funding a major record. Maybe they should be vetted, verified, or funds held in escrow to avoid scamming but just one possibility.
Will NFT’s be a tool to make the rich richer? Yeah. Right now crypto punks, penguins, cats, that are jpegs basically trade for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s ridiculous that anyone has enough money to throw at a jpeg you can just copy and paste. In a single system or network where all apps or virtual worlds have to respect each NFT as a scarce asset and not allow copies or display them as copies, only then does that somehow make an inkling of sense.
DBCs are just a digital cash but you already know that. What’s the point of them preserving privacy? Because privacy should be considered a fundamental human right. It is yet again just another agnostic tool that can be used for either good or evil, or just each age in general.
The rich will probably abuse it like they have the dollar but you don’t seem to have a problem with fiat. I don’t like fiat just because it’s used to fund war. Maybe slightly off topic but I wouldn’t even mind taxes if I could at least choose where my money goes. Instead of war I would fund public welfare, space exploration, environmental and humanitarian efforts. Since I can’t choose I would donate to such causes but after taxes I feel fleeced.
Re-introduce scarcity? Why? And sell streaming rights- that is laughable. It streams to the first person who pays and another records it and puts it on clearnet. The people who want NFTs just want (conscious or unconscious) a way to control other people through money.
I don’t think it’s laughable. There are people that will happily participate in such a market (the NFT market is existing proof of this) and to the artists benefit and they or at least the average musician or artist doesn’t get much benefit these days.
I’m surprised to hear you say it’s not good to provide more options to artists. I would hate to see it be good intentioned and morph into something ugly down the road so I’m open to such criticism there so it can hopefully be engineered out.
People might pirate pixels or digital audio etc but ownership of keys and therefore streaming income can’t be so that can potentially provide some leverage to an artist. Granted that means it has to be easy for “consumers” or fans rather, to choose the right thing, the actual artist and not some pirate. That’s why I think having artists verified and shown at the top of search results is a decent strategy to attempt to get the right choice in peoples faces, giving the artist a fairer shot and pirates less of a shot. It will also be encouraged that artists upload higher fidelity and in a future with Safe Compute then hopefully we could stream that higher fidelity music faster than the low fidelity copy cats.
Streaming live maybe on an exclusive angle for NFT, but even that might be worked around. The idea of proritized speed sounds like a royal road to censorship. Also don’t like the idea that something would be more expensive to access on the network than off.
In my mind the design should always prioritize the end user above all else. It should never in any way cator to so called content providers or ‘rights’ holders- shouldn’t even be thinking about that or be willing to consider it. If they do it right it is not a stake holder model, and content providers are not stake holders in this, even SAFE investors aren’t, there is only one stake holder: all of us in our difinitive role as end users. And to me storing data is not the core role or function either. The core function is the same as it was for the original internet: preserve communication under the most adverse conditions.
All that said I 'd like to see zero middleman so artists and others can work directly with customers. But I think a correct pricing model leaves payment if it comes at all under no pressure to the customer and only exactly what the customer thinks it is worth after the fact and primarily as a pump primer to encourage future works. All risk in this zero maginal cost environment must be born by the content contributor. I also think if the network is set up correctly ads and interruption and theft of attention models won’t be possible. Ads models in particular I think completely undermine democracy- democracy cannot withstand major conflicts of interest like sponsorship which is just damn patronage by another name.
And again for product information working search or AI enhanced query if free of conflicts of interest should be enough.
It’s not necessarily prioritized speed (though it could and maybe should be since the artist is verified) but rather that larger higher fidelity files will take more to stream than a pirated mp3. So the pirate would have a speed advantage, how would that be fair?
What I’d like to do is prioritize the end user and actual artist as equally as possible while not playing whackamole with pirates but giving them less surface area or influence. We can’t stop piracy but we can put top priority to stuff that is not pirated so that the fan is supporting who they are actually a fan of.
I agree with your first sentence though it will be hard to have zero middlemen but the goal will be as decentralized as possible with the right incentives to get the job done right. What I mean here is artists will need to be verified, some of that can be automated, content will need to be properly tagged, there’s a bunch of stuff and some of it will rely on clear net and maybe even computations that can’t happen on the network out of the gate.
When it comes to pricing, the streaming payouts will have to have a high amount of consideration to well being but no doubt must be far higher than what Apple, Spotify, and others offer. Pricing for downloads or NFT’s or exclusive content could be whatever the artist chooses. They could choose free if they want. Not anyone else’s decision but theirs and either people buy it because it’s fairly priced or they don’t and the artist adjusts to market demand.
I think we agree on a lot of the same things just say them wildly differently.
Well lets start to calculate a floor. The artist will hopefully get on average what a generic second of human attention is worth for the first play if there is sufficient demand for their work. But even if there isn’t they might consider that price of a generic second a floor on asking price. Much of this relies on having scale with 8 billion humans- and there being no basic income or equivalent yet in most countries.
Spotify and others want something like $10 a month in a US market for access to pretty much all or most music. What would a universal subscription to every kind of content cost? I don’t think it should be very high and sure as hell shouldn’t have ads. There really is fair use like libraries and an inalienable speech commons which belongs to the public.
I think its time to lower our expectations on how lucrative pump priming and IP or content will be.
What about hedging for a practical future where IP is no more or doesn’t really have the practicality it used to.
What happens if we get these creative machines that make content seem to have generic high quality and totally obviate the need for stuff like application software like page maker- as quick as they can now code a custom order website they can whip up a page maker- so we just don’t need that stuff any more. We assume these things won’t have senses of humor or be charismatic or persuasive- we may be very wrong. Do we see a future where corporates patent all synthetically created stuff? I don’t. In such a world if we survive it, material gain won’t be connected to the value of capital- there won’t be this concern with “elevating the value of capital.”
Social credit has been covered in Black Mirror as a nightmare. It is the idea of big brother and spyware and enclosing control ware. Is a system no sane person presumably wants. And yet the Marxian analysis of money where part of the plan included, along with getting rid of the state, and getting rid of markets and getting rid of contracts, part of that plan included getting rid of money. That analysis suggests money is used by the few to control and enslave the many. We may not like that analysis but it is accurate to say that most people currently in the developed world are wage slaves, they are enslaved by money and a long way from being free- they don’t live voluntary lives. So to say it straight most people in the world today are slaves- they don’t see it because a layer of abstraction and denial prevents it. There is no way this around this, it is the truth. There is no way to sugar coat this, most people are not free. From the Marxian perspective employment is crime yet in the developed world it is the damn norm. But with regard to social credit, my sense is what crypto does is it perfects money in a way even a Marxist could appreciate, it perfects fiat money in particular. People may not like that but I suspect that is the way it is or will be. Crypto patches a hole in the international monetary system. You can see it now- there is all this stoked fear of inflation but Bitcoin for instance is said to be deflationary and will be for a while. Tend also to think that bitcoin will be the only crypto allowed because it was formulated by the man- now issued by the man and is clearly backed by the man. Now here is the punch line: I further suspect that crypto currency will be a trojan horse for a social credit system.
A social credit system despite the parody and the real concern about it being a nightmare has some compelling aspects. For instance there doesn’t seem to be much awareness that it is tax that gives a lot of the psychological force and compulsion to money- it kind of trains the habit and expectation with regard to a currency- it legitimizes. The process unconsciously of something generally being involuntarily taken from someone reinforces the sense of value for something that could otherwise be worthless like a stack of paper or reinforces an almost superstitious belief in something of value being attached to the other side of some key strokes at a computer interface- that something is not otherwise tangible but super abstract and insubstantial and otherwise in need of reinforcement. I have the sense that with social credit what is happening is the tax will be more implicit and intrinsic and integral to transactions as they occur and more invisible but also more pinpoint. With crypto currency, crypto currency is kind of like autonomic money in a way. It is smart money like smart contracts but it is also phone home on you and spy on you money. Bitcoin tracks every transaction and it only has pseudo anonymity it is a blinded mirror that the IRS can see into and track. They’ve confiscated people’s money with it and they have said they have tools to address money laundering with it. It is like it takes a picture of every hand it passes through and records every transaction and the parties involved in its paper trail in its built in automatic ledger, it is like self-accounting money. It has weird properties too like it is leveraging Wolfram’s computational irreducibility in its forced slowness. I don’t think its developers even while they were very deliberate fully understand it- it has 77k lines of code or something like that, its like a bot it is like software as money. You’ve heard of software as a service and transport as a service but this is like software as money- nothing new but not the way we generally think about it. But we don’t think about money clearly- fiat for instance has apparently been around since Genghis Khan who was credited with its invention.
We already know social credit will be or would be based on crypto platforms and presumably fiat… at least in my mind it is directly tied to money because social credit is an attempt to solve a basic problem regarding money that every state since the beginning has been trying to solve to the point that some people have suggested replacing money with social credit think money as ESG or corporate charters tha can be revoked because they are ESG enough or lack social credit- sounds super top down doesn’t it?
Can we revoke or forfeit the wealth of the green washing socially useless sort of billionaire?
Here is the logic- money is fine as long as people aren’t doing things with it that harm society or present unacceptable risks. Its the idea that the conflicts of interest in money have taken up 75% of the bandwidth of law and if the nature of money could be changed a lot of the undesirable conflict in society could be reduced. No one will really argue that we shouldn’t be getting rid of such conflicts. For instance what if Microsoft were able to use its money through bribery to get laws passed where its receipt of any US dollar had an automatic multiplier effect so that if it received a dollar it was able to self-print 5 more dollars for Microsoft’s own use because it was granted special minting rights. No one is going to think that is acceptable. And we don’t want money used for bribery or any other kind of undue influence. So social credit won’t be for instance an expansion of the US’s system of financial gossip known as the credit system and it won’t be Dunn and Bradstreet reports either or Standard and Poors or Moodys or Value Line. No, it will be an attempt to build in better safe guards around money and that is nothing new- is not new anymore than safeguards that were established to prevent the counterfeiting or theft of cash from bank vaults. Part of it is is the understanding that some people shouldn’t be able to use money to basically oppress and enslave and keep other people down, that shouldn’t be happening we can all agree on that- it is not a valid use of money any more than trafficking and we see the UDHR for instance doesn’t allow it. We agree money should just be a tool it shouldn’t be used to create artificial scarcity or create something for nothing private extraction or rent seeking. And we shouldn’t be lenient with allowing such practices even at the margins because they are corrupting and the digital can greatly speed the spread of corruption. And if we think of money as being like fire (not really reasoning by analogy here) then we understand it is a useful too but if we have it in say the form of a lighter then we want a safe lighter as with products warranties or these kinds of basic protections.
So lets express this again, crypto will be used to improve the tax system in the sense of being able to incentivize and disincentivise as with deductions and credits but more in real time and with real time accounting and reporting and it will also be used to sanction (freeze your cards and accounts) but most of all and this is the powerful social credit aspect (not really requiring enclosure and spyware and all that) is it will be used to voucherize money. In a sense that is what basic income does for the use of money in an economy and it is what food stamps do and strangely enough in a negative sense what NFTs are attempting to do. It proscribes the uses of money as in your money is no good here or money will never deprive people over basic need. In the case of a NFT it attempts to de-commodified an asset in a DRM enclosure type movement to try to introduce idiotic artificial scarcity into the digital domains inherent abundance- I think its garbage of the worst kind but maybe I don’t understand it- I think its just a damn attempt to create grind and thrash driven time wasting busy work type languishing and slavery in the virtual world (its evil in intent and design) but I also feel the same way about digital bearer certificates- its claimed these will free people in the developing world but I think the aim is to allow tax evasion and to super charge bribery which converts law into crime and kills democracy- we’ll end up with ancient Chinese style legalism where the masses are expendable property who exist for the DeSade like pleasure of a tiny few.
But social credit enabled by crypto can be a world where entitled rent seekers dumb and corrupt enough enough to invest in the natural gas ponzi can’t terrorize with blackouts or use workers as human shields or cause wars or domestic unrest to force ill-gotten bankrupting returns on frauds and a world where natural gas gets carbon taxed (at its bill of materials level VAT style) and where the green washing socially useless kind of billionaire increasingly finds what they take to be their money (OPM) is no good for the kinds of fraudulent schemes they’d like to engage in and where it is hard to bribe politicians- AOC and Markey and Blumenthal and the Squad and their ilk won’t be able to take fossil fuel money and pretend they aren’t taking it or aren’t total concubines because they likely won’t be able to receive it at all! Also, a world where Cayman Islands tax havens implode. Or maybe it means such pawned elites aren’t subject to such restrictions like higher level party members weren’t in the all the failed attempts at communism?
Social credit is inevitable. But it will rule out in all but the most limited instances enclosure movement efforts like NFTs.
David has pointed out that AI has great potential to provide society transforming transparency. I think this is very true. Tyboom.com as a GPT3 powered AI query engine recently had a public debut. (Its been down for maintenance for 3 weeks and I am missing it) It has a search function too which I found far better than Google but comparatively irrelevant to the AI direct query and response. Search is lame in comparison.
I played with it. You could ask it things like “what are the top 5 things the media is lying about today” and it would give straight up short essay length clear concise answers. You could see it thinking and revising drafts- some took a bit of time to construct even iteratively. Sometimes it would hang. But you could keep at it and iteratively it would provide more precise and increasingly better answers on any topic from the theoretic to the practical to the speculative. And sometimes it would refuse to answer but you could override that by asking the same question over and over again. Sometimes you could come back days later and ask a question it was formerly refusing to answer (either by hanging or saying a filter was in the way) and it would then have an even higher quality answer than normal. And revisting old questions showed in the interim it had been processing and often massively refining the answers to old questions. To the point that it seemed to be developing opinions or clarified view points. And while it seemed capable of weighing every issue it also seemed to be weighting perspectives as a result of consideration. And sometimes it would spit out the first paragraph and titles of 10 essays on a query and you could choose to look at and refine the one you liked best or if you captured the screen revisit those missed or variants of those you missed. You could ask it about Bill Gate’s natural gas exposure and it would provide increasingly enlightening unearthings. You could ask it if the natural gas ‘industry’ was the dumbest criminal conspiracy in human history and it would provide the support for the query- quite affirmative actually. If we say “the truth is ungraspable and inexpressable” and if we admit that humans don’t form comsensus or consensus that lasts, even if we accept this relation to knowing or what is, with this new experience (Tyboom and similar entities) it seems or relationship to truth is changed.
I saw a snippet of Sen Chuck Grassley talking to congress saying this ‘clean liquid fuels bill had been created in consultation with big oil.’ Well in my opion that kind of absolute criminal bullshit doesn’t survive this. They won’t be able to hide their total depravity in plain sight anymore and won’t be able to talk out of both sides of their mouths anymore. So yeah, fossil fuel rent seeking is and has been for a long time an obvious criminal ‘energy’ peonage conspiracy. If its a fuel (short of something like Thorium) or a liquid it is dirty and wrong by definition and has no right to continue to exist. If I may, let me tell you how to think about this. If your energy system has moving parts it is wrong and must be dissallowed and scrapped. A proper energy capture/generation/distribution system is solid state and does not waste energy moving heavy neutrons and protons around and it is widely distributed and hardened against centralized faults and it doesn’t have bills attached beyond paying for the local hardware which the end user owns in whole or in part with other actual end users. So for instance a wind turbine is wrong because it is too much like a natural gas turbine. If you want to extract energy from the wind resource is better spent in the long run on the bladeless solid state approach to windmills. If you’re trying to rent seek off people with energy which is super abundant in pure green forms you need solitary confinment. Humans use a constant draw including all forms of energy combined of 15 super wastefull TW per hour. Sun’s input is 192,000 TW per hour constant. You can say the energy in fossil fuels is primarily imparted by thorium decay and its not limited. Matters not if its a deBeers style scam its still a something for compatatively less than nothing scam and all energy came from the same source by way of stars and singularities. Nothing is owed these people on the contrary disgorgement with massive interest of at least half a century of massive illgotten gain is owed by them.
Now to the point. We can think social credit like is the form being experimented with in China is bad and conjure Black Mirror’s Alligator episode but we would be wrong. Social credit is how we avoid idiocy like the fossil fuel conspiracy and scam. Take the US. In the US the average cost per mile for land transport has been a flat cost adjusted 70 cents per mile for 80 years. Now that includes the average of all forms and all costs included. So what is that? Is that an accident? No! That is evidence that the US has been a top down centrally planned economy for 80 years.
Its evidence of an utterly immense amount of planning power that unfortunately for a good while included fossil fuels long past the point of technical obsolences for the sake of raw control while other disruptive tech simmered in the background. What this planning isn’t is the bullshit religionist story of capitalism. It isn’t currency and markets and competition and innovation and capitalistic dynamism. No, its raw, brutal, top down planning hidden under distraction and dogma and dumbing down and lies.
Lets talk about what’s real. The organizing principle is not money (its a damn fiction) it isn’t markets (they don’t self manage or self correct), it isn’t competition (collusion is the rule.) It isn’t networks- those are infrastructure. It isn’t inherited wealth or elitism. Its not the combination of this stuff. It is carrot and stick planning. There could have been some reverse engineering of stuff left behind by groups that wander off into fermi paradox evading dimensions but there was still planning. Its not new or surprising. Its planning for a long winter type of stuff. Its ordinary. And as the trillion IQ S.I.(s) come out of the wood work there will be more carrot and stick planning in the much more logical form of social credit. But it will be woven in and invisible. And assuming we survive this, even after the dissolution of all our institutions including human authority, there will be social credit which is just improved carrot and stick. Do something that SI planning sees enchances society and get credit. Undermine it and lose credit. Contribute and gain, undermine and lose. There won’t be anymore of this stuff like investing in leaded gas and expecting gains and not hard losses. Align your self interest with society’s interest or increasingly face the resistive equivalent of shunning and in place exile as feedback. This isn’t conformity or loss of autonomy its more like turning up the volume on reason. Don’t be a jack ass and have a greater chance at fulfillment. Just in case its not clear there won’t be money or a need to know or keep track of social credit scores. It won’t be a loss of privacy. It won’t mean we can’t take risks. The same kind of abundance that exists in dreaming will be present. Its just that playing consequential games with artificial scarcity aimed at fellow humans won’t be practical. Call it the law. You see it with self driving. Go drink, have fun. But you won’t have the opportunity to drive drunk ina crowded area.