What I also wanna know is what the deal is with all this community talk? Every time I see people hype some NFT it's always about this "amazing supportive community" — but what are they exactly talking about? What's the supportive community element to it besides having the same avatar and hyping crypto and web3?
As someone who is technically savvy but financially moronic, this article is pure gold. Thanks for laying it out as you did. At least I didn't have to send you ETH$ to read it.
I was thinking "company town" about one second before the sentence where you pointed out the resemblance. Between nonsense like NFTs and investors buying whole housing developments to rent out, we're on our way to complete the transformation of the USA into a company town.
Re-visiting this article and what I find particularly annoying is how many businesses particularly in consumer goods/fashion have completely bought into NFTs/Metaverse as being the "future" in their never ending quest for connecting with younger consumers. So little scrutiny on the amount of problems this space will have
You're generally correct about what's going on here, but I think your little aside, "unless enough people decide they don't want it to be"[1], did not get nearly the emphasis that it needs, because that points out the inherent contradiction in the whole system.
What those pushing the idea that "the code is the contract" want is a level of simplicity that just doesn't work in any society that also values being "fair." The CBC article calls the technique used to pull 3.6 million Ether from the DAO a "hack," and "theft." But from the viewpoint that "the code is the contract," that was not a hack or theft at all: grabbing that 3.6 million in that way was done precisely to the terms of the contract as it was written.
To you and me what happened was clearly unfair, and it's pretty clear that the majority of Etherium users thought so too. But to think that it's unfair and should not be allowed to happen is also a complete and clear denial of "the code is the contract": it's saying that we should go by what the author of the contract _meant_ to do, rather than what he really did.
And this is why contract law is as complex as it is, and why it's not at all unusual but even expected that some contracts, when taken to court, will not be enforced exactly as they are written. Societies all over the world have spent thousands of years developing systems to make contracting "fair" rather than "exactly as written, and damn the consequences" for the very good reason that not only do people not want the latter, but the former just works better for society and its members overall.
When the CBC article quotes Tapscott as saying the co-existence of two Ethereum chains "causes confusion as to which is the 'real' Ethereum, which is bad for investor and developer confidence," that's absolutely correct. But the real lack of confidence here is not a lack of confidence in Ethereum because it split: it's a lack of confidence a system where you're bound to execute every typo exactly as written, regardless of its effects. Very few people are going to have confidence in that sort of system.
What I also wanna know is what the deal is with all this community talk? Every time I see people hype some NFT it's always about this "amazing supportive community" — but what are they exactly talking about? What's the supportive community element to it besides having the same avatar and hyping crypto and web3?
Everything about the Crypto and NFT space is so annoying and the idea that this is at all innovative or different is completely hollow
As someone who is technically savvy but financially moronic, this article is pure gold. Thanks for laying it out as you did. At least I didn't have to send you ETH$ to read it.
I was thinking "company town" about one second before the sentence where you pointed out the resemblance. Between nonsense like NFTs and investors buying whole housing developments to rent out, we're on our way to complete the transformation of the USA into a company town.
Re-visiting this article and what I find particularly annoying is how many businesses particularly in consumer goods/fashion have completely bought into NFTs/Metaverse as being the "future" in their never ending quest for connecting with younger consumers. So little scrutiny on the amount of problems this space will have
You're generally correct about what's going on here, but I think your little aside, "unless enough people decide they don't want it to be"[1], did not get nearly the emphasis that it needs, because that points out the inherent contradiction in the whole system.
What those pushing the idea that "the code is the contract" want is a level of simplicity that just doesn't work in any society that also values being "fair." The CBC article calls the technique used to pull 3.6 million Ether from the DAO a "hack," and "theft." But from the viewpoint that "the code is the contract," that was not a hack or theft at all: grabbing that 3.6 million in that way was done precisely to the terms of the contract as it was written.
To you and me what happened was clearly unfair, and it's pretty clear that the majority of Etherium users thought so too. But to think that it's unfair and should not be allowed to happen is also a complete and clear denial of "the code is the contract": it's saying that we should go by what the author of the contract _meant_ to do, rather than what he really did.
And this is why contract law is as complex as it is, and why it's not at all unusual but even expected that some contracts, when taken to court, will not be enforced exactly as they are written. Societies all over the world have spent thousands of years developing systems to make contracting "fair" rather than "exactly as written, and damn the consequences" for the very good reason that not only do people not want the latter, but the former just works better for society and its members overall.
When the CBC article quotes Tapscott as saying the co-existence of two Ethereum chains "causes confusion as to which is the 'real' Ethereum, which is bad for investor and developer confidence," that's absolutely correct. But the real lack of confidence here is not a lack of confidence in Ethereum because it split: it's a lack of confidence a system where you're bound to execute every typo exactly as written, regardless of its effects. Very few people are going to have confidence in that sort of system.
[1]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/ethereum-hack-blockchain-fork-bitcoin-1.3719009
So many words about crapto. I read many of them, but its all so tiresome.