The Billion-Dollar Torrent

November 18, 2021 5:37 PM

All of the images referred to by non-fungible tokens (NFTs) (previously, previously, previously, previously) in the Ethereum and Solana blockchains have been made available in a single 20TB downloadable file. "[T]his handy torrent contains all of the NFT’s so that future generations can study this generation’s tulip mania and collectively go…'WTF? We destroyed our planet for this?!'"
posted by clawsoon (172 comments total)

Sigh. If only that day were today.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 5:44 PM on November 18, 2021 [9 favorites]

any bids on haha.gif?
posted by lalochezia at 6:14 PM on November 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

Blown away there is 20TB of this stuff.
posted by Mitheral at 6:18 PM on November 18, 2021 [9 favorites]

15 terabytes compressed, but that's still a massive D/L.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 6:27 PM on November 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

but can we put this torrent on the blockchain
posted by lalochezia at 6:29 PM on November 18, 2021 [14 favorites]

Recall that NFTs just encode a URI that points to an image. The image itself isn’t on the blockchain. I dream of a future where all the images hosted at those URIs are, one by one, replaced with goatse.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 6:50 PM on November 18, 2021 [54 favorites]

Now that this torrent is famous, you could mint the torrent URL as a NFT and do pretty well.
posted by credulous at 6:51 PM on November 18, 2021 [16 favorites]

this generation’s tulip mania

I have been fascinated for a long time about how fundamentally confusing it is to think about any of this stuff, because it's so obvious everyone who disagrees, disagrees about what the basics of reality are. I don't think it's right to describe what's going on here as a new form of tulip mania, because ordinary bubbles—the tulips, or South Sea shares, or 19thC railways, or dot coms—are errors of judging value, when lots of people think a thing is much more valuable than it has any right to be. The disagreement is just about price.

What's going on here with NFTs, and other ideas that claim to substitute for money or currency or for value itself, is a deeper disagreement about what value is, about criticising the human metaphor of cash-as-a-store and money-as-medium, as though treating money as a programmable object could endow it with even more magical properties than it ordinarily has; which is far weirder, and from my point of view, wronger.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 6:55 PM on November 18, 2021 [68 favorites]

This is some banksy-level sublime beauty right here

I mean, conmen are still gonna make shloads of cash off this particular scam

But you gotta love a certain way a finger can be stuck in an eye
posted by armoir from antproof case at 6:57 PM on November 18, 2021 [7 favorites]

Energy consumption by crypto is overblown.

Ethereum is going to sidestep the whole "crypto uses too much energy" issue when they transition from proof of work to proof of stake, hopefully next year (yeah yeah, people will point to the continual delays to proof of stake, but this shit is hard and doing it right takes time).
posted by kuroikenshi at 7:38 PM on November 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

I believe!
posted by Wood at 7:41 PM on November 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

I know of only one person, at all, who is genuinely excited about NFTs, and he (of course it's a he) is working on making a way to mint some himself. Literally everyone else sees them as the snake oil they is. I'm amazed anyone who doesn't want to make them work wants anything to do with them. It feels entirely like a manufactured craze, from the ground up, and anyone I've heard expressing an interest in them has taken a massive credibility hit with me.

Energy consumption by crypto is overblown.

A little, but it's still very large, and the thing is, if it does take off mainstream, it'll increase vastly. And proof of stake has its own variety of problems. I refer you to this article on the awfulness of the whole terrible scheme.
posted by JHarris at 7:48 PM on November 18, 2021 [29 favorites]

Ethereum is going to sidestep the whole "crypto uses too much energy"

So how much energy is too much?
posted by Dr. Twist at 7:48 PM on November 18, 2021 [6 favorites]

Ethereum is going to…

Is going to, or cryptobros claim they’re going to?
posted by aramaic at 7:50 PM on November 18, 2021 [24 favorites]

So let me get this straight, if I buy an NFT I'm just getting a unique code that points to a PUBLIC URL THAT ANYONE COULD VISIT? So anyone who downloads that Torrent gets the same content as me but for free, and all I've done is spend money for a fancy version of a tinyurl.com address?

Are drugs and private islands not cool anymore? Is that why the billionaires have to spend money on this?
posted by mmoncur at 7:54 PM on November 18, 2021 [18 favorites]

a ban on cryptocurrency transactions might seem irrelevant, considering they account for just 1.1 percent of China's power consumption. However, as a Rystad Energy report from July this year details in absolute numbers, this 1.1 percent translates to 86 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electrical power, roughly the amount of energy countries like Finland or Chile consume in a year, or 84 of the world's lowest electricity consuming countries combined would need for a year,

The whole world is on fire because we can't stop burning fossil fuels, but hey, what's the equivalent of a few extra countries? Especially when you consider the benefits of cryptocurrency--like tax evasion, money laundering, and NFTs.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 7:54 PM on November 18, 2021 [57 favorites]

Mmoncur, drugs and private islands are still cool, but the billionaires … less so
posted by armoir from antproof case at 8:06 PM on November 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

The best analogy I've seen on NFTs is that they're like autographed photos - they're functionally identical to an un-autographed photo, but the extra touch is worth more for some people. Nearly all of the worth of NFTs right now is speculative, though. But that and the environmental problems aside, I think NFT art is, at worst, a very silly hobby.

I also can see the value of an easy-to-use, widely recognized registry of "ownership". Yes, there are a ton of weaknesses, and you could replicate a lot of NFT functionality by printing certificates with fancy holographic stickers, but all solutions have weaknesses, and there's value in not having to roll your own. Again, environmental concerns aside, I wouldn't write off the utility of NFTs entirely, even though the current iteration is absurd.
posted by airmail at 8:56 PM on November 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

This is a small nitpick compared to bigger issues like energy consumption, but: I hate how the NFT craze has made artists' Twitter accounts incredibly dull. One respected digital artist used to post works-in-progress, insights about his tools and process, and various interesting glimpses into his work and non-work life. Now, it's just 10 tweets previewing / announcing / re-announcing / "last call"-ing about a sketch he minted, then repeat. I had to unfollow.
posted by shortfuse at 8:59 PM on November 18, 2021 [17 favorites]

Energy consumption by crypto is overblown.

No, it isn't. And proof of stake is the cryptocurrency equivalent of AI in ten years for the past fifty years.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 9:03 PM on November 18, 2021 [35 favorites]

The best analogy I've seen on NFTs is that they're like autographed photos - they're functionally identical to an un-autographed photo, but the extra touch is worth more for some people.

It's like believing my autographed ZZ Top concert ticket is gonna be worth something someday, even though ZZ Top themselves could just sell autographed tickets identical to the one I've got if there was ever actually a demand for them.

It might have sentimental value to me and I might be pleased that I helped support a band I liked by paying extra for the autographed ticket, but the idea that someone's gonna want to buy it from me someday is ridiculous.
posted by straight at 9:10 PM on November 18, 2021 [10 favorites]

I am fascinated by cryptocurrency and the seemingly mass hallucination that it has any value (but not enough to buy any). But, I still can’t wrap my head around it having any value, as opposed to governmental currencies, which have value because guys with guns and bombs say it has value.

I guess it just comes down to the one we’ve been hallucinating longer? And the guns, bombs, etc.?

I swear I am only an idiot sometimes, not all the time.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 9:15 PM on November 18, 2021 [5 favorites]

Every time I hear about NFTs I think
posted by gottabefunky at 9:15 PM on November 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

I think of NFT’s on SNL, which doesn’t really help, but at least is amusing.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 9:20 PM on November 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

But that and the environmental problems aside, I think NFT art is, at worst, a very silly hobby.

Please understand that the investing public is full of dumb, greedy motherfuckers and a lot of people have to work hard to (try to) keep them from gleefully presenting their life savings to scammers. Not a single new iteration of this phenomenon is needed.

I also can see the value of an easy-to-use, widely recognized registry of "ownership".

Ownership of an NFT doesn't confer ownership of anything else at all.
posted by praemunire at 9:22 PM on November 18, 2021 [22 favorites]

governmental currencies, which have value because guys with guns and bombs say it has value.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. Watch out if guys with guns and bombs start getting paid in pictures of weird looking apes.
posted by credulous at 9:36 PM on November 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

governmental currencies, which have value because guys with guns and bombs say it has value

So this is where it gets very interesting and where you get paradox after paradox. That's one interpretation of fiat currencies, that they're valuable because States create and support them as means of paying taxes and providing services; but there's more to them—it's very well known that people on opposite sides of wars can, and do, trade with each other in those same currencies; even if it's against the law and condemned by everyone, the notes have value because people agree that they do, and without any more reason than that.

Cash has a use that tends to escape the use of power, as Kaufman's recent book suggests, it's because it's a metaphor, not a thing at all. The interesting thing about cryptographic substitutes is they start in the other direction: with attempting to escape the use of power, and with lots of bold claims about solving social problems, but because they're a technology not a metaphor, they just haven't so far, ever worked very well.

It's easy-to-use, widely-recognised registries of ownership, in another paradox, that really do exist now, in almost every kind of society and political system, in formal provenance registers for actual artworks, but even more in the form of land title; they're hundreds of years old, they work very reliably, and there's a world of very well-tested infrastructures of regulation and law around them. They don't depend on anyone caring how much a parcel of land costs, they're purely a very long ledger of numbers referring to space and the owners.

But to keep going: in my colonial country this was a thing that was established only at gunpoint and supported only through ultimate power of the State. It's Aboriginal people who quite fairly say, the British just made the whole thing up, and critique the whole arrangement as an absurd, environmentally harmful, scam.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 9:43 PM on November 18, 2021 [22 favorites]

But, I still can’t wrap my head around it having any value, as opposed to governmental currencies, which have value because guys with guns and bombs say it has value.

Fundamentally, any currency lives and dies by the trust we collectively hold in its value. Meaning, I know that the currency you give me today will be happily accepted by someone else tomorrow. That’s it. No money has any underlying value beyond we all agree it does.

This is the fundamental insight of the crypto bros — there is nothing stopping any group of people from collectively deciding what is valuable. That’s why Beanie Babies were so damned popular in the late 90s; a group of crazed collectors said so.

They forget, however, that those folks with guns and bombs (more accurately, the people who control the folks with guns and bombs) perform an important function by stabilizing expectations and keeping the scammers (somewhat) at bay. Their job is to make the currency stable and predictable, so you and I won’t have any trouble getting spending our currency tomorrow.

In cryptocurrency, the only thing performing that function is the invisible hand of the market, which, I’m sure you know those problems so I won’t rehash them here.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 9:45 PM on November 18, 2021 [11 favorites]

more accurately, the people who control the folks with guns and bombs

lol
posted by credulous at 9:49 PM on November 18, 2021

getting paid in pictures of weird looking apes.

They're right there on the bills!
posted by Jon Mitchell at 10:37 PM on November 18, 2021 [20 favorites]

Also... one of the articles says "NFTs are booming," but are they really or are there just gameable measurements that claim they're booming? The current episode of the podcast Worst Year Ever mentions there have been some cases where very rich people have bought an NFT, then transferred the money back to themselves, which they can do because there's no oversight, they're basically unregulated securities with fewer taxes than normal securities. Which is changing it seems, the Build Back Better bill requires that taxes be paid on NFT transactions. So, maybe all of this will be ending soon. I can only hope.
posted by JHarris at 11:22 PM on November 18, 2021 [7 favorites]

I kinda... "like?" the essentially mystical word magic crypto bros surround themselves with. There is a set number of phrases they reply with to any criticism, but at the same time never manage to follow up with anything like data or facts. There are a number of set sentences that they utter almost mechanically. "Proof of stake" is one of them. The standard libertarian "freedom from government regulation" is another. It's like they believe that uttering "proof of stake" and similar are like magic spells which automatically dispel any doubt. Meanwhile they think they are convincing others, but it's mostly for convincing themselves.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 11:41 PM on November 18, 2021 [9 favorites]

don't overthink it. this is just a basic scam. used to be, things of high cultural value--fancy paintings, jewelry, heirlooms--were really hard or impossible to copy. so who had the actual thing mattered. but now, things held in highest cultural regard--digital images, music--are super easy to copy. so, to make money, people try to tokenize one of many copies to make it seem unique. but the fundamental experience they are trying to recreate is still uniqueness. except the only unique part of the particular copy they are selling--as opposed to any of the free copies you can get--is just the token placard. the actual thing is the same whether it's a free copy or the fancy one. that makes it totally different from the old sociocultural reason why a unique thing was valued, even though nft's are still sold as though they are the equivalent of owning the "thing" that you can brag about. but it's not, and you don't. it's a scam. it's a farce.
posted by wibari at 11:52 PM on November 18, 2021 [11 favorites]

My friend I mentioned above used the "proof of stake" thing in trying to get me to sign on to code for his project. (Say what you want about him, he's like the only person in the world who knows I can code.) But then I read the link I posted above, which obliterated any possibility in my mind that proof of stake could fix anything.
posted by JHarris at 12:02 AM on November 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

Blown away there is 20TB of this stuff.

For some perspective the entire indexed catalog for Napster at it's prime before shutdown was something on the order of 10 TB, and Soulseek at it's peak and prime was something like 15 TB.

15-20 TB of mostly automated script generated magic internet NFT collectible trading cards is a fuckton of... well, whatever that is.

It's like the cryptobros heard everyone else ranting at them "Hey, you don't seem to remember the Dutch Tulip craze do you?" and they replied with "Wait, you mean like this?" and created NFTs and everyone else went "Oh god damn it no what the fuck!"

Well, as horrible as this is it's been fun watching NFT buyers/traders get cluelessly bent out of shape and salty when someone right clicks on their super rare NFT they posted as a twitter profile picture and reposting it all over the place.
posted by loquacious at 12:52 AM on November 19, 2021 [9 favorites]

We have spent so long comparing NFTs to the Star Registry, to highlight the technical flaws in the very model. We thought that if we just showed the folly in the approach, it could prevent a disaster.

But no, this is not a simple vanity purchase of unfulfillable promises. This is a pyramid scheme backed by some of the most powerful people; and it works because we've been through a pretty shocking shift in how we thought about the value of a lot of information, like music and movies and news. People who felt left behind by the sudden death of newspapers and record shops and bookstores, thrilled and blindsided by the wealth of media we now drown in, feel like there has to be some way to get a step ahead of this for next time.

We saw the same thing in the 1920s: people who'd been through The Great War and The Influenza and Jazz came through with some funny lessons, one of which was "buy war bonds". You could spend money to "invest" in someone's growing business on the stock market, and now that War Is Over we can finally get on the Ploughshares Forever Economy. We all know how that ended: people went into debt, buying stock on margin, and purchasing groups drove up prices in pump-and-dump scams.

The difference is that this time there's no underlying narrative of an actual economy growing food or building appliances or anything. You hear people use the phrase "creating wealth" to describe speculating on the purest forms of abstraction. It feels like hubris to call this Peak Financialisation because I am absolutely certain we'll do it even worse next time. After all, even Ponzi's scheme was nominally about cashing in on arbitrage flaws in the international postal system rather than any actual industry.

So as with Amway or Scientology or any other pyramid structure, we're going to see a lot of debt-driven human suffering come out of this. We mock the crypto bros now, and it does feel satisfying to see a self-important white boy lose his shirt sometimes, but they will find those Greater Fools to buy their pointless "assets" on margin. What happens when local governments realise that their pension funds were all invested in Magic Beans again? How many OAPs will suddenly find themselves without the P?

And mark my words, with the amount of money keeping these eggshells inflated, the billionaires will not settle for any of their kind holding any sort of bag. They will ensure these things get dumped on all of the rest of us before the entire edifice crumbles.




I do absolutely love the 1990s IBM-graphics warez scene README file, though. Top marks for style.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 1:23 AM on November 19, 2021 [31 favorites]

I'm starting to think the real anti-funge defense of NFTs is how performatively ugly they are.
posted by Pyry at 1:29 AM on November 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

Telling (some) people something is a scam only encourages them, they think they'll be the scammers and not the rubes.
posted by subdee at 3:45 AM on November 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

they account for just 1.1 percent of China's power consumption

‘just’ doing a lot of work there.
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 3:57 AM on November 19, 2021 [18 favorites]

JHarris: and he (of course it's a he)

I was watching a bunch of Youtube videos about MLMs and the fact that they're full of various flavours of fundamentalist Christian women kept coming up, and it occurred to me that everything to do with the blockchain is kind of the equivalent for atheist men.
posted by clawsoon at 3:59 AM on November 19, 2021 [20 favorites]

(yeah yeah, people will point to the continual delays to proof of stake, but this shit is hard and doing it right takes time)

Ask yourself why Etherium jumped in with both feet and did it wrong first.
posted by Foosnark at 4:21 AM on November 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

Hei Points will soon become the dominant form of currency.
posted by johngoren at 4:41 AM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

Ethereum is going to sidestep the whole "crypto uses too much energy" issue when they transition from proof of work to proof of stake, hopefully next year

Oh, please. "Etherium transitioning from proof of work to proof of stake" is the new "Year of linux on the desktop"

.............
(yeah yeah, people will point to the continual delays to proof of stake, but this shit is hard and doing it right takes time).

You know what else is hard work? Saving the fucking environment.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:58 AM on November 19, 2021 [25 favorites]

I'm just glad we haven't had to hear the pitch for astral candela-steradians yet again.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 5:36 AM on November 19, 2021

A bunch of cryptos ARE proof of stake, right now, today. This thread is hard to read because there is a lot of disinformation and misunderstanding. I don't own any NFTs or plan on doing so, but the practical applications are obvious: car titles, house titles, ABC licenses, pilot's licenses, all sorts of manner of one-of-a-kind documents could be put on a blockchain and made available to anyone to check and authenticate instantly. A lot of you also don't seem to know that some of your financial transactions are almost surely ALREADY on a blockchain, whether you own any crypto or not; major credit cards are involved in blockchain technology.
As regards the use of energy, this is a legitimate problem, but one that incentivizes solutions for the increase of production of green energy. In the meantime, we all can question our consumption of electricity and material goods.
posted by os tuberoes at 5:59 AM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

In the meantime, we all can question our consumption of electricity and material goods
I will not ignore an entire industry burning the earth to the ground for some temporary cash. You are asking me to start feeling bad about heating my own home and buying a new computer every 5 years? That's a no from me.
posted by soelo at 6:14 AM on November 19, 2021 [11 favorites]

"car titles, house titles, ABC licenses, pilot's licenses, all sorts of manner of one-of-a-kind documents could be put on a blockchain and made available to anyone to check and authenticate instantly."

You can verify ownership of my house online right now by looking it up in my city's property tax database. If you want to make it fancier, I guess the database entry could include a copy of the deed signed by a city certificate. What would a blockchain add to that?

"A lot of you also don't seem to know that some of your financial transactions are almost surely ALREADY on a blockchain, whether you own any crypto or not; major credit cards are involved in blockchain technology."

They may be funding some R&D, but I don't believe they're actually processing my credit card transactions that way, are they? Happy to learn of any examples.
posted by floppyroofing at 6:16 AM on November 19, 2021 [15 favorites]

You can verify ownership of my house online right now by looking it up in my city's property tax database.
I don't think this is the same thing. I haven't really verified your ownership till I go to town hall. Like, if you want to take out a loan on equity on your home, the bank isn't going to go to your town's plotviewer and trusting it during underwriting. The blockchain is instantly verifiable anywhere though, meaning that everything becomes truly digital.

They may be funding some R&D, but I don't believe they're actually processing my credit card transactions that way, are they? Happy to learn of any examples.

Sure, straight from the horse's mouth. As I understand it, VISA is already implementing blockchain technology to move money between banks. That is what millions of people are doing everyday when they send remittances homes to their relatives in Central America and other parts of the third world, without going through Western Union or the traditional banking structure and paying their pound of flesh (and this can be done via proof of stake today). I don't know enough about VISA to know if your individual card swipes ever get on a blockchain, but I suspect it is a matter of time.

Crypto and blockchain technology are being massively adopted in the way the internet was in the mid 90s. There is a conversation to be had regarding crypto, its impacts on our society and environment, and what kind of smart solutions are practicable, but it doesn't seem to be happening here, which is too bad, because this is usually such a great space.
posted by os tuberoes at 6:29 AM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

As regards the use of energy, this is a legitimate problem, but one that incentivizes solutions for the increase of production of green energy.

Are you saying that using more energy incentivises the use of green energy? Or are you talking about using blockchain for potential trading, which I know a lot of people are talking about and experimenting with but I don't think anyone has started doing in anger as yet.
posted by biffa at 6:35 AM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

Are you saying that using more energy incentivises the use of green energy? Or are you talking about using blockchain for potential trading, which I know a lot of people are talking about and experimenting with but I don't think anyone has started doing in anger as yet.

I really don't want to become the ambassador of crypto on Metafilter or in this thread because I don't feel that attached to it, just to be clear.

But as I see it, as energy consumption on the planet increases as an inevitable result of growth in all domains, we are going to be forced by hook or by crook to find ways to increase our use of renewable energy sources. Since, from where I am standing, massive adoption of blockchain and crypto technology is an ongoing process (and has been for the last five years), the production of renewable energy will become more and more profitable for those who produce that energy.
posted by os tuberoes at 6:40 AM on November 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

"The blockchain is verifiable though, meaning that everything becomes truly digital."

The same is true of a signature generated with the city's public key.

I really wonder how much blockchain enthusiasm is due to people not realizing what you can already do with public key cryptography.
posted by floppyroofing at 6:41 AM on November 19, 2021 [31 favorites]

car titles, house titles, ABC licenses, pilot's licenses, all sorts of manner of one-of-a-kind documents could be put on a blockchain and made available to anyone to check and authenticate instantly.

All of those things are issued by a central authority and only have meaning because they're guaranteed and enforced by that same central authority. So the arguments for putting them into a distributed-authority database are what again?

You'll still need a central real-world authority to verify the stuff getting put onto the blockchain and to compare against what's coming out of the blockchain, lest Crazy Bob's Quitclaim Service starts randomly issuing duplicate and conflicting titles for property. So at that point, the whole blockchain-as-public-ledger becomes kind of redundant and pointless, so why bother duplicating the effort of having that central authority maintain their own database?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:49 AM on November 19, 2021 [19 favorites]

I'm pretty sure metafilter doesn't need an ambassador of crypto.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 6:50 AM on November 19, 2021 [14 favorites]

"Sure, straight from the horse's mouth."

No. Really, read that page carefully, look at that list of "crypto solutions and capabilities". It's all about selling blockchain-related services to people that want to use them. None of it is about processing day-to-day credit card transactions.
posted by floppyroofing at 6:55 AM on November 19, 2021 [12 favorites]

You'll still need a central real-world authority to verify the stuff getting put onto the blockchain and to compare against what's coming out of the blockchain, lest Crazy Bob's Quitclaim Service starts randomly issuing duplicate and conflicting titles for property This is what I mean by not understanding, this can't happen on a blockchain unless everyone agrees Crazy Bob's issuance is legitimate. All of the documents in question would still be issued by and subject to the same regulatory authorities, but instead of carrying around a piece of potentially forgeable plastic or paper to demonstrate my legal right to whatever boat I claim to own or car I claim to be able to drive, anyone anywhere can instantly check to see if that document is legitimate if it is on a blockchain.

Floppy, this is on that page and I think it is about processing day-to-day card transactions.

The principal point I want to make is that is is happening whether we like it or not, and calling it a ponzi or comparing it to Tulip mania seems disingenuous or indicative of a misunderstanding. I wouldn't object to learn that I don't understand all this quite right, but I am fairly sure that this technology is being massively adopted and isn't going away. It seems strange to dismiss it outright.
posted by os tuberoes at 7:03 AM on November 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

This is what I mean by not understanding, this can't happen on a blockchain unless everyone agrees Crazy Bob's issuance is legitimate.

And how are you going to do that?

I'm not talking about the blockchain recognizing the legitimacy of a particular transaction, I'm talking about an two separately minted NFTs representing two different titles purporting to be attached to the same property: the "real" one, and a duplicate.

Who regulates the issuance of new NFTs representing property? If only new NFTs can be created by a central authority, why do we need the blockchain to begin with?

If anyone can issue an NFT which purports to be attached to any real-world piece of property, how do you pick the "real" one on the blockchain without consulting a central authority? If you have to cross reference an NFT against a central authority's database to determine if it's the "true" NFT for a piece of property, why bother having a redundant ledger in the blockchain, since both the database of the central authority and the blockchain will have to be updated whenever something is transacted.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:13 AM on November 19, 2021 [10 favorites]

"Floppy, this is on that page and I think it is about processing day-to-day card transactions."

Looks to me like it's basically a prepaid card that you can fund with digital currency.

Hey, I don't get it either. Maybe there's something to all this that I just haven't understood yet.

But it's just not clear to me what fundamentally it can do that existing technology can't.

And people have been making claims about killer applications for blockchains for years now. And from what I've seen the only with any modest success so far are basically selling to people who want to use the technology for its own sake.
posted by floppyroofing at 7:13 AM on November 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

I don't think this is the same thing. I haven't really verified your ownership till I go to town hall. Like, if you want to take out a loan on equity on your home, the bank isn't going to go to your town's plotviewer and trusting it during underwriting.

Land recording systems are some of the oldest centralized data systems we have. In many localities, they are entirely consultable digitally. Lenders look up NYC property on ACRIS. There's no need to layer in blockchain technology, because the entire usefulness is the single entity agreeing to recognize and enforce ownership.

this can't happen on a blockchain unless everyone agrees Crazy Bob's issuance is legitimate

Since when does everyone on a blockchain have to agree to authenticate a transaction? And if one designed a system where this was the case, why do I want RandomBigEvilMegaCorp having an independent and unconstrained vote on whether I own my house or my car?

I am fairly sure that this technology is being massively adopted

You're ... just wrong about this. It's being used with enthusiasm for speculation. Adoption for practical purposes remains relatively thin on the ground.
posted by praemunire at 7:18 AM on November 19, 2021 [20 favorites]

Since when does everyone on a blockchain have to agree to authenticate a transaction? And if one designed a system where this was the case, why do I want RandomBigEvilMegaCorp having an independent and unconstrained vote on whether I own my house or my car? You should just look up a five minute primer on blockchains, it would serve you better than I can. Blockchains are decentralzied and no one owns them.


I'll just address the very last comment about massive adoption: I've already mentioned a practical application of cryptocurrency in this thread; I appreciate the comment about property deeds.

I don't know enough about blockchain or cryptocurrency to contribute anything more than what I have already said, but I want to reiterate my original point about the quality of the discussion in this thread. Since my original post, several contentless posts have been made that literally contribute more to global warming than my own involvement with NFTs. Many people like myself come here for informed discussion on topics that are relevant to our lives, we hope and expect to learn more. The whole cryptoindustry has a market cap equivalent to that of silver, and is rapidly changing entire economies and the global financial system. To come here and see it dismissed as a ponzi scheme is disappointing.
posted by os tuberoes at 7:31 AM on November 19, 2021

os tuberoes: "the practical applications are obvious: car titles, house titles, ABC licenses, pilot's licenses, all sorts of manner of one-of-a-kind documents could be put on a blockchain and made available to anyone to check and authenticate instantly."

I'll bite. I can see how digital representations of these things could be useful, but how is blockchain better than the local DMV/land office/alcoholic beverage commission applying their digital signature to an electronic document using public-key cryptography?
posted by adamrice at 7:33 AM on November 19, 2021 [6 favorites]

I don't own any NFTs or plan on doing so, but the practical applications are obvious: car titles, house titles, ABC licenses, pilot's licenses, all sorts of manner of one-of-a-kind documents could be put on a blockchain and made available to anyone to check and authenticate instantly.

This is an incredibly common response in these discussions -- basically the first step in a sort of script that this poster also seems to be following; I see it all the time on twitter for anyone who is foolish enough to make a skeptical post about crypto without limiting replies. But also is something that remains completely unmaterialized, everyone is always promising concrete applications and they never show. (One next step after this is pointed out is to start talking about "web3", although there's some branching in the script here.) I wonder where this script comes from?

A lot of you also don't seem to know that some of your financial transactions are almost surely ALREADY on a blockchain, whether you own any crypto or not; major credit cards are involved in blockchain technology.

This is laughably false; I'm sure that private key cryptography is involved in some of my transactions, but there is 0% chance that any of my real money is converted into crypto and back on the path of any transaction, this would make no sense for them to be doing. Visa is involved in crypto, but from any concrete information I can find (including what was linked from visa in this thread if you read it with clear eyes) it's one-way transactions out of crypto, and the scale is miniscule compared to real money. There's tons of reporting about this, but here's an oldish article that isn't particularly skeptical but gives concrete numbers and descriptions of services without some of the marketing language: https://fortune.com/2021/07/15/visa-crypto-payments-fintech-cryptocurrency/.
posted by advil at 7:34 AM on November 19, 2021 [9 favorites]

Yeah, I've got no idea how title companies actually work. I imagine they do more than *just* look up an address in the public database, but I bet that's *part* of what they do. Would it really be worth it to send someone in person to inspect a paper record just to reduce the small chance that someone's hacked the city web server or corrupted their database somehow?

They're probably better off factoring that chance into the price they charge for their insurance. Though I doubt it'd be a significant factor.

"rapidly changing entire economies and the global financial system."

I understand that you believe that. That belief is no doubt based on claims you've read somewhere. I'm not seeing evidence in this thread that you've been examining such claims carefully. I would recommend doing so.
posted by floppyroofing at 7:37 AM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

Ethereum mines have little motivation to go to proof of stake, and stake systems have problems themselves. Yes, other PoS systems can host NFTs right now, but they aren't very popular. NFTs are pointers to something else and nothing more. If you've been on the net long enough and bookmarked things you like, you know how often things on the net just disappear. NFT is just a way to put a friendly easy to understandable face on technology that you wouldn't normally understand. So, it brings in more people. Flavored vaping. I think it was extremely irresponsible for auction houses to participate in NFTs when they had to know exactly what they were and were not. But, I was flipping around and landed on CNBC and they were discussing this quarters growth being largely in auction houses. They then joked with each other about what each had bought at auction--nothing.

Blockchains are useful and will be applied in useful places. That doesn't mean those applications have to have anything to do with cryptocurrencies.

Cryptocurrencies are indeed useful, and a quickly evolving technology. But, innovation is not in bitcoin or ethereum (though of course things are built on top of it that are interesting). They're too popular to innovate because change annoys people.

This NFTBay is genius. I love the question of whether what the actual value of what it 'pirates' is. I own cryptocurrencies, I think they are interesting, I understand what they are from a technical viewpoint, and I completely think NFT is exploitative and without any long lasting value. I'm sure I'm wrong, but I don't invest in things I do not understand or ethically support.

I hate that this kind of thing is just going to bring regulation until it isn't interesting at all anymore. But, you have people like Elon Musk obviously manipulating the price of things on twitter, the USDT drama, and well... that also makes me understand why regulation might be necessary. Everything good gets ruined.
posted by joelr at 7:39 AM on November 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

I understand that you believe that. That belief is no doubt based on claims you've read somewhere. I'm not seeing evidence in this thread that you've been examining such claims carefully. I would recommend doing so.

I really have to get out of this because it's just not my bag and some of the responses are getting close to insulting: but as you surely know bitcoin is now a co-official currency of a whole country. The market cap of crypto is approximately 2 trillion dollars, millions of people use it everyday, and that is what my belief is based on.
posted by os tuberoes at 7:40 AM on November 19, 2021

You should just look up a five minute primer on blockchains, it would serve you better than I can. Blockchains are decentralzied and no one owns them.

This is...completely unresponsive to my questions, and the fact that you can't explain here what you think is in fact explainable in a five-minute primer does rather suggest to me that you can't answer them. (With regard to my first question, perhaps you should google "51% attack?") Crypto bros being condescending without the knowledge to back it up is well within genre, though, so I suppose I can't complain too much.

To come here and see it dismissed as a ponzi scheme is disappointing.

The truth under the shiny claims so very often is.

Personally, I would be happy to see widespread actual useful applications for blockchain. Why not? And I have nothing against NFTs as art, any more than I have anything against, say, abstract expressionism. (Nothing for, either, but that's sort of the point.) But I'm a lawyer who's done a fair amount of work in securities and I don't see any need to reinvent the system worse and with more fraud. It may help make sure me and lawyers like me always have a job, but the world doesn't benefit from giving scammers and near-scammers more wealth and power, which eventually spills over to politics.
posted by praemunire at 7:56 AM on November 19, 2021 [12 favorites]

The market cap of crypto is approximately 2 trillion dollars

Currencies don't have market caps in the traditional sense, friend. Cryptos annexed that language to try to claim the ideas of existing assets and stability implicit in a publicly-traded corporation's market cap.
posted by praemunire at 7:58 AM on November 19, 2021 [10 favorites]

The five minute primer was not in response to your question praemunire, it was for the person asking about how blockchains are authenticated and suggesting they could be manipulated by corporations. This is the kind of basic knowledge I would expect people to have in order to have a sophisticated discussion. As I said elsewhere, my knowledge doesn't go far enough to talk about the difference between public-key-cryptography and blockchains, though that is exactly the thing I would like to read about, rather than misunderstandings and disinformation.

Regarding market cap, I'm just not sure how to respond, it seems to be a common use so ASCII shrug, friend. The essential point, in any case, was to back up my claim that cryptocurrency and blockchain technology are worth paying attention to and discussing rationally. There is no need for patronizing one's interlocutor, which is the only way I can interpret you referring to me, based on the five hundred words I have typed in this thread, as a 'cryptobro'. Have a good one.
posted by os tuberoes at 8:07 AM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

If you've been on the net long enough and bookmarked things you like, you know how often things on the net just disappear.

Oddly enough, the existence of this torrent will slightly reduce that risk, because now if the server for your NFT's media goes down, you can check if it's on the NFTBay.
posted by RobotHero at 8:08 AM on November 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

it was for the person asking about how blockchains are authenticated and suggesting they could be manipulated by corporations. This is the kind of basic knowledge I would expect people to have in order to have a sophisticated discussion. As I said elsewhere, my knowledge doesn't go far enough to talk about the difference between public-key-cryptography and blockchains, though that is exactly the thing I would like to read about, rather than misunderstandings and disinformation.

I think if you don't understand the difference between public-key cryptography and blockchains, it's probably not a great idea to keep telling other people they lack the basic knowledge for a sophisticated discussion. Especially since, as someone who does know the difference, I'm finding praemunire's comments to be fairly reasonable points.
posted by Four String Riot at 8:15 AM on November 19, 2021 [29 favorites]

The market cap of crypto is approximately 2 trillion dollars

If you believe that Tethers are exchangeable 1:1 with US dollars, which they are not. This is the base scam upon which all other crypto scams rely.
posted by subdee at 8:17 AM on November 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

I think if you don't understand the difference between public-key cryptography and blockchains, it's probably not a great idea to keep telling other people they lack the basic knowledge for a sophisticated discussion. Especially since, as someone who does know the difference, I'm finding praemunire's comments to be fairly reasonable points.

Fair enough, but it would be cool if you'd share that knowledge. I'm not really interested in being "right" or "wrong" about this, I've already said I don't have NFTs and maybe I never will.
posted by os tuberoes at 8:19 AM on November 19, 2021

I'm going to connect my MeFi account to a bot that just replies "This is the stupidest possible timeline" to absolutely everything.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:35 AM on November 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

So, has anybody solved the blockchain oracle problem yet?
posted by clawsoon at 9:02 AM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

"Crypto" is some mixture of hype, legitimate research, scams, and some just along for the ride. (If you sell financial services and a lot of your customers are buying and selling crypto, it may make sense to invest in systems that help them do that. That says it's got at least a little staying power, but it's not exactly an endorsement either.)

And claims about the future of technology are tough to judge. The idea of videoconferencing is probably a century old. How good were predictions about when it would be commonplace? Are we going to get fully self-driving cars some day, and if so, when? Why are my light bulbs running Linux now? Crypto mixes up those questions with questions about the value of the assets themselves. (There are a lot of different factors influencing the path of the price of Bitcoin, for example, and the perceived value of the underlying technology is only one of them.)

I don't like blanket statements like "crypto is a scam". But to me it still looks like just "interesting, probably worth a few people studying"--and with the level hype so far beyond that, I think it's totally reasonable that people are worrying about that disconnect causing real harm to ordinary people.
posted by floppyroofing at 9:12 AM on November 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

There is no need for patronizing one's interlocutor

Give me a break. You literally quoted me and responded to that quote by telling me to go read a "five-minute primer." This isn't a bucket shop, and you're going to be sad if you come in, make vague claims, and then keep citing back to your own authority when people make counterarguments without understanding why it's not persuasive.
posted by praemunire at 9:15 AM on November 19, 2021 [11 favorites]

And claims about the future of technology are tough to judge.

This is a perfectly fair point, but it does point out why one should treat the claims of enthusiasts with vested interests with considerable caution.
posted by praemunire at 9:15 AM on November 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

I like listening to the crypto people who insist that critics just don't understand it, only so I can waste time reading their arguments and getting up to date on their most recent rhetoric. (Ah, I miss the "it's a store of value" days.)

The early adopters of all pyramid scams make money. An army of enthusiasts spouting the scam's moon-logic justifications is how you lure in a wider audience for a bigger score. That's how pyramid scams work and have always worked.
posted by AlSweigart at 9:17 AM on November 19, 2021 [12 favorites]

You literally quoted me and responded to that quote by telling me to go read a "five-minute primer." Ah you are right, I confused myself RE who said what. This wasn't meant to be patronizing, but what I know about blockchain is enough to suggest to me that your questions aren't really even answerable: the basic function of a blockchain is that its validated by everyone on the blockchain, and there is no way for a putative RandomBigEvilMegaCorp to have an independent vote on your ownership, unless they acquire 51% of the coins, at which point everyone abandons the chain (I believe there are real-world cases of this happening). This isn't very likely for the largest currencies, since they have "market caps" larger than most corporations. I apologize for the suggested insult, I shouldn't have said that the way I did.

But to me it still looks like just "interesting, probably worth a few people studying"--and with the level hype so far beyond that, I think it's totally reasonable that people are worrying about that disconnect causing real harm to ordinary people. I couldn't agree more with this. I first started to think seriously about crypto when El Salvador adopted bitcoin as a co-official currency; looking a little at, uh, the "cryptospace", it is a bewildering place, with people desperate to strike gold and plenty of people willing to sell them a pick-ax. It feels like the Wild West.

What I initially wanted to object to is how in this forum, which is a place for sophisticated discussion, the entire concept is dismissed almost gleefully as a scam or pyramid scheme while so much institutional money moves into the domain and an entire country adopts bitcoin as a co-official currency. Despite claims here, blockchain technology and cryptocurrency have an ever-increasing scope of practical applications (remittances are an obvious case but there are others). It reminds of the mid 90s when some people dismissed the internet.

Suggesting that this conversation is interesting (for example, how crypto will or will not be used in the future, its possible even if unrealized practical applications, what the consequences of proof-of-work are and other legitimate criticisms that can be leveled against yet another capitalist hydra-head, our own patterns of consumption in a capitalist society) and we should take some of this stuff seriously draws browbeating. It's unfortunate.
posted by os tuberoes at 9:32 AM on November 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

I've seen some speculation that NFTs are a way to obfuscate violations of the wash trading rules that cryptos will soon be subject to, but honestly don't know enough about crypto or wash trading rules to understand.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 9:35 AM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I second praemunire. os tuberos, you're the one coming across as condescending.

To try to put some info directly into the thread:

Proof of work is inherently energy consumptive. Energy consumption is the thing that makes it difficult to control. The thing that prevents one actor from controlling the currency is that no one has as much hardware and consumes as much energy as the rest. This also means, if it declines significantly, then people left holding the bag are really screwed, because if it becomes a situation where just one holdout has more mining equipment *currently in operation* than the rest of the world then they suddenly have all the marbles, marbles that could be worth a lot more than the ones they directly own.

But the problems with the alternative, proof of stake, are also fairly significant. In that, control by a single actor is prevented by the fact that it's unlikely that any single person owns more than 50% of the currency. Not only is that a lot more likely to happen, say like if one extremely rich person goes and buys a lot up, there's also if multiple entities pool their resources. It's another case of rich people potentially controlling everything, and hey doesn't that situation sound familiar?

These cases, and more, are described in the link I posted above, which I repeat here for convenience: this article. It's an excellent takedown of all this blockchain stuff in all its forms.

To get back to proof of work for a sec.... I've said for some time that one of the problems with nuclear fusion, if it ever became a viable source of energy production, is that uses for energy naturally scale up to the supply. If we had cheap clean energy, we--as a culture--would use more of it, until we reached the point where it was relatively scarce again, and whatever limits and consequences there are on the creation of that energy would become the new strictures, and one of fusion's strictures is water. The massive energy consumption of proof-of-work blockchain technology is kind of vindicating in that regard, it demonstrates what I've theorized, but I'm really concerned that, wow, here it is happening in real life. If/when green energy takes off, wouldn't it be nice if it could be put in actual productive use instead of this large fraction of it going to power a stupid distributed financial system?
posted by JHarris at 9:37 AM on November 19, 2021 [7 favorites]

I don't want to be condescending and if I can't contribute without being so then I'd do best to back out, which is what I will do.
posted by os tuberoes at 9:42 AM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

"blockchain technology and cryptocurrency have an ever-increasing scope of practical applications (remittances are an obvious case but there are others)"

People have been claiming remittances as the first killer app for cryptocurrencies for years. Again, I'd really encourage you to look back at the sources that are telling you this stuff *very* carefully.
posted by floppyroofing at 9:43 AM on November 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

Most of the images NFTs use seem to be paper-doll style portraits generated from a set of modular faces and accessories, like a 2D character creator. I wonder if it's possible to use this data to reverse-engineer the various pieces for any particular flavor of them and essentially generate endless combinations on one's own.
posted by subocoyne at 9:47 AM on November 19, 2021

os tuberoes, I wrote that before I read your most recent comment, which was a bit better (in how I perceived it anyway) than before. Thanks for recognizing my concern, though.
posted by JHarris at 9:49 AM on November 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

I know virtually nothing about this stuff, apart from a knee-jerk belief that NFTs must be some kind of scam–which does not make my belief true.

As to blockchain, dunno much about that either. I did find a 2121 Visa white paper from the link os tuberoes posted earlier somewhat interesting as a newbie, so thanks for that link.

What I gather is that Visa (and many corporations, I imagine) are doing their best to be in a place to profit if/when blockchain technologies become important. They may well become important. The fact that we do not know exactly when or exactly how doesn't rule out that possibility.

(A Visa executive once lied to me in an interview, during my former life as a journalist; I did not discover the lie until after my article was published. So also, fuck Visa both generally and specifically.)
posted by Bella Donna at 9:53 AM on November 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

I get all of my sophisticated blockchain discussion from r/Buttcoin.
posted by clawsoon at 10:02 AM on November 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

What I gather is that Visa (and many corporations, I imagine) are doing their best to be in a place to profit if/when blockchain technologies become important.

Isn't that weird, though ?

As far as I can tell the basis of this blockchain has been a way to validate monetary transactions without a central authority.

And here is a central authority, VISA, trying to wriggle into that position, again.
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 10:03 AM on November 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

I get all of my sophisticated blockchain discussion from r/Buttcoin.

had to click. not disappointed.
posted by elkevelvet at 10:05 AM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

https://www.metafilter.com/174086/Speedrunning-500-years-of-bad-economics

I have since been curious about this guy's take on spamming a blockchain to attack it. I never hear about it happening.
posted by Brian B. at 10:06 AM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

I have been fascinated for a long time about how fundamentally confusing it is to think about any of this stuff, because it's so obvious everyone who disagrees, disagrees about what the basics of reality are. I don't think it's right to describe what's going on here as a new form of tulip mania, because ordinary bubbles—the tulips, or South Sea shares, or 19thC railways, or dot coms—are errors of judging value, when lots of people think a thing is much more valuable than it has any right to be. The disagreement is just about price.

I don't this is the correct account of the boom mentality for tulips, late-1920s stocks, and perhaps the others. In both of those two cases at least, quite a lot of investors were quite aware that the market was a bubble and unmoored from values, and explicitly reasoned just as investors do today: "well, this market doesn't make much sense, but if I don't get in on it now I'll be missing out, and if it starts going bad I can always pull out." Many of these investors weren't complete dummies, and in fact because they considered themselves more savvy than the average investor, they figured they could get out if need be before the bulk of the market did. They just didn't realize, over and over, that when the market goes bad it's essentially instant, with instant lockup and no liquidity and no way to pull out no matter how savvy you think you are.
posted by chortly at 10:10 AM on November 19, 2021 [9 favorites]

subconyne, not only is that possible, but that's how they were made in the first place. The most infamous example of this are the Bored Ape Yacht Club images that seem to have become the public face of NFTs, a set of (purposely?) poorly-drawn monkey pictures. Yet people are trying to use them for actual things, like that Universal music thing, or "The Red Ape Family," a trailer for a particularly badly-animated web cartoon series.

Some other NFT-based works are the NFT cartoon series Dan Harmon is working on and whatever the hell Devo is going on about here.

It is a weird kind of mania, I assume it's something one would have to have money to understand.
posted by JHarris at 10:18 AM on November 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

Fair enough, but it would be cool if you'd share that knowledge.

Let me finish waking up and drinking my coffee and I'll drop an extinction event sized meteor of knowledge.

Hey, I've been aware of BTC and cryptocoins since 2010, and I have done an embarrassing and regrettable amount of reading and homework at this point.

Almost all of your talking points about cryptocoins have been refuted in previous threads, but if you want a giant horsepill sized archive of these go to old.reddit.com/r/buttcoin/ and dig into 10 years of posts and archives about this. Seriously, that sub is one of the only places to get the real news about this. You'll have to wade through memes and shitposts to get to it but it's there.

Further, your talking points in this thread are nearly a complete bingo card of things that people who are new to crypto say with unwarranted enthusiasm or knowledge. Telling the thread to go read a "five-minute primer" is actually really insulting. Some of us have been aware of this stuff for over ten years.

For the record I first heard about BTC when it was still possible to mine it with a CPU laptop. I once ran an experimental full node with nothing more than an unused laptop and a wifi connection borrowed from a neighborhood coffee shop that I could connect to from my apartment.

Stuff like "Major adoption is happening by financial institutions!" "A whole country is using it now!" "Read the whitepapers, it'll explain everything!" and basically everything you've said so far fits this mold of either someone just starting to discover the surfaces of this space and culture or a recent buyer and holder of coins.

Yes, the inflated prices of BTC the entire market cap of the entire cryptocurrency system is currently supported by both the inflated Tether peg and rampant speculation. That "2 trillion market cap" is not real.

Yes, El Salvador "adopted" BTC and it's been a total shit show so far and it's an example of a large scale scam with several crypto companies in cahoots with the government. There were protests against it. You know what the citizens tried to do with the air dropped "free" 25-30 dollars worth of BTC they were given to kick start the system? They mostly tried to immediately withdraw it and convert it to the local currency. Which they found was very difficult to do. They also found that it was very difficult to actually spend it at stores to buy useful goods. The companies in charge of the local networks and systems are making a tidy profit in service fees that are totally scammy and unnecessary.

Yes, every proof of work coin I've seen so far is a zero-sum game Ponzi scheme with lots of extra steps and wasted power. It would use less power if someone just started an entirely new Amway and started manufacturing cleaning products for independent sales contractors to sell to their downline. Amway might be a scammy garbage company but in theory at least you can get some cleaning supplies and a clean kitchen and bathroom out of it.

And when critics of crypto talk about zero-sum games we mean it, and we mean it in the sense that for someone might be able to get rich at the top of the pyramids a whole lot of other people have to lose their shirts, meaning that the total end value of that financial system is zero or negative. With cryptocoins this is true simply within the financial systems at hand but it's doubly true when you start adding up the environmental costs and damage costs that people will have to pay even if they didn't participate at all.

Take a really step back from the hype and promises and consider this:

Most proof of work crypto systems and their blockchains - especially BTC and its forks - can't actually be fully solved using plain old digital computing following Moore's Law because of the increasing difficulties of solving blocks. Like the energy and processing difficulty scales logarithmically and trends upwards nearly vertically from there. This is by design, and it's even in Satoshi's white paper and other papers about these systems. This is how securing a blockchain and network with proof of work actually works to try to prevent 51% attacks.

What does this mean? This means that to secure, maintain and use a blockchain like BTC for wide scale adoption and a total financial system replacement for long term use if left unchecked it will eventually consume most if not all of the available computing power we can possibly build.

We're talking like consuming entire solar systems worth of power and building planet sized computers, here. We're talking like relativistic increases in entropy and acceleration of the heat death of the universe scales to fully mine out and unlock all of 21 million BTC coins because of this ever-increasing proof of work point that secures the network.

As it is now the global adoption of all of these crypto systems combined is still tiny and some fraction of a single percentage point of the total global financial market cap in total transactions, or total transactions per day, or per second - and just the BTC blockchain and network itself is already consuming more electricity than some major and well developed European Union countries all so crypto enthusiasts can solve magic internet money encryption puzzles for the block rewards.

Here's another thing to consider, and on the surface it's somewhat paradoxical in light of the above:

Have you stopped to consider the implications of quantum computing on a financial system that solely relies on processing cryptographic keys?

Because if - well, when - quantum computing becomes useful enough to brute force cryptographic systems these blockchain systems are suddenly and instantly insecure and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down and that store of value is meaningless if someone can just brute force any and all keys.

With the quantum computing threat to traditional cryptography at best we're sparking off a major arms race of increasingly costly and power intensive ways to apply and secure traditional digital cryptography or advancing new uses of quantum cryptography.


Last - the Tether problem and the zero sum game of these cryptocoin systems - for everyone you know or heard about who has managed to get rich or make some money - some larger amount of people lost a larger amount of value to support some other gains within that system. By and large it's been the earliest adopters or the biggest whales who have been making any money trading in this unregulated space.

If this space becomes regulated and things like high frequency automated trading or wash trading or full financial accountability become functional - you will be able to watch these market movers exiting with a quickness, extracting every value they can from their holdings and leaving all of the little people holding their bags with no exit.

Smart people have been watching for the Tether system to get rug pulled or collapse under it's own weight for a few years now. For the past few years the Tether peg of 1 USDT = 1 USD has been propped up by an insane run of unbacked tether printing, sometimes a few billion USDT at a time. It is behaving and functioning exactly like an arbitrary fiat and reserve system. This is what is floating and supporting that 2 trillion dollar (or whatever) market cap.

And it's fucking terrifying. There's going to be global financial fallout if this system collapses the same way we would see if a major mutual or hedge fund collapses and defaults. If it collapsed right now it would be pretty bad but not totally catastrophic, but it'll leave some millions of numbers of people holding the bags with no exit plan and with no value.

But let's pretend cryptocoins succeed and wide spread global adoption happens and people can actually buy things with it almost everywhere they go:

The end result is a dystopian libertarian, capitalist and neo-liberal nightmare landscape where some major percentage of our planets electricity and computing power is dedicated to supporting these decentralized financial databases with transaction rates that are so slow that they look like typos and are bad jokes. A total farce compared to how many transactions a plain old database and credit card processing system can handle with a fraction of a percent of the computing and electrical power needed for any single one of these proof of work blockchains, and there's now hundreds/thousands of these systems.

We're also talking about a currency or store of value that would be inherently dynamically unstable and highly volatile because it would pegged to things like energy costs, high frequency trading and speculation, blatant market manipulation and defending and securing the network against attacks and so on.


Yes, we can have a nuanced and detailed conversation about cryptocoins on MeFi. We've already had it in various threads. Some of our members are very well informed and the more informed you get the more likely you're going to see that they are scams - unless you're a scammer looking to work those scams.

Yes, people should be somewhat aware of these things so they can avoid them and identify them as the very harmful pyramid and Ponzi scams that they are so they can inform their friends and family that they shouldn't be buying into them and engaging in them even if they are able to get an increased return on their investments specifically because they are financially and environmentally unethical.

Yes, I even know some people who generated personal wealth from early adoption. Those positive numbers they got on their returns doesn't make it right or ethical.

I also know a bunch of people who have lost real and significant amounts of cash, most recently in the dogecoin hype. Money is really easy to put into these systems, it's a lot more difficult to get it out.


And these NFTs? They're the just the newest, most scammy layer on top of a giant birthday cake of layered scammy shit. The real world values of these things aren't in the stupid algorithmically generated collectible art but in the flexibility of wash trading. These things aren't new to the art world, the 1%ers of our financial world have been using "art" as an "investment" for money laundering and wash trading for decades already.

And a lot of the value and economic movement of NFTs is just in the service fees and exchanges of people trying to jump on the NFT minting hype. It costs a pretty significant amount of real money to create, launch and register an NFT in fees or "gas" in the case of the Ethereum network in particular.


If you (the proverbial, general you) or anyone is buying into the very real world Tulip Mania hype of cryptocoins you're actively participating in these scams.

The only thing keeping the prices going up is more flesh blood, adoption and fresh money supporting the base of the whole scammy, ecologically harmful pyramid.
posted by loquacious at 10:24 AM on November 19, 2021 [77 favorites]

you forgot: mic drop
posted by elkevelvet at 10:30 AM on November 19, 2021 [7 favorites]

Proof of work is inherently energy consumptive.

Incontrovertibly true.

But the problems with the alternative, proof of stake, are also fairly significant.

As a holder of Stellar Lumens I'm starting to get a bit salty about Proof of Stake being regularly described as the alternative to Proof of Work. Stellar relies on neither, settles transaction far faster and far more cheaply than either, consumes less energy per transaction than Visa and many orders of magnitude less in total than other popular online services whose energy consumption is almost never even brought up e.g. Netflix.
posted by flabdablet at 10:33 AM on November 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

I hope that all of us start boycotting recaptchas because of the collective energy used to select the images of crosswalks could power an entire city.
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 10:37 AM on November 19, 2021

I have suggested, from time to time, that instead of "proof of work" cryptocurrencies that involve consuming a lot of electricity, we skip the middleman and have a unit of currency that represents a certain number of watt-hours.
posted by adamrice at 10:43 AM on November 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

Visa (and many corporations, I imagine) are doing their best to be in a place to profit if/when blockchain technologies become important.

And they may well actually have something of value to offer if/when that happens.

For example, one of the strongest criticisms levelled at blockchain-based remittance systems such as Stellar is that transactions are irreversible once made. That's a thing that cannot be fixed, because it's inherent in the nature of an append-only public ledger where transactions can only ever be initiated by the holders of the secret keys that authenticate the accounts.

The tradeoff is that Stellar transactions are insanely cheap - so much less than a cent apiece that they might as well cost nothing unless you're trying to spam the network with a high frequency bot.

A Visa or Mastercard or PayPal could act as an intermediary between parties to Stellar-based remittances, much as they already do for those based on national currencies, and offer the same kind of chargeback and other buyer protections that they already do today. As a for-profit oligopoly they'd clearly charge way more for this kind of service than what they lose to fraud, just like they do already; but because the transaction costs in the underlying remittance system are so crazy low compared to SWIFT transactions they'd likely be able to do that while still charging less for a buyer protection layer added to Stellar than for what they currently offer.
posted by flabdablet at 10:50 AM on November 19, 2021

There's going to be global financial fallout if this system collapses

I would be super interested in learning more about what's going to happen when the cryptocurrency bubble collapses. It seems so disconnected from the "real" economy (unlike the subprime crisis) that I can't figure out the effects of a collapse. Do legitimate financial institutions have big liabilities in this space?
posted by Gerald Bostock at 10:53 AM on November 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

By the way, the BitTorrent info hash of The Billion Dollar Torrent is eec632b1d259165b1b8f9e58868b1cb1c3daf8e3, and if you paste that number into the URL box of pretty much any BitTorrent client it will find the torrent in the distributed hash table and start to download the associated absurd quantities of useless information without you having to visit The NFT Bay or associate your BT client with any trackers.

If you want to stick that hash value up on some blockchain that you have an account on, knock yourself out.

Amusingly enough, this is not the info hash listed on The NFT Bay itself for the torrent offered for downloading there. Pasting that info hash into a BT client makes it start downloading a bunch of albums by the band November, a mere 861MB worth of MP3s.
posted by flabdablet at 11:07 AM on November 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

I hope that all of us start boycotting recaptchas because of the collective energy used to select the images of crosswalks could power an entire city.

(incredibly tired) What? No, really, what?

It really doesn't. I get that you're making a MeFi-brand^TM throwaway joke, but it doesn't make sense. I don't have the figures in front of me, but it seems hugely unlikely that he power consumption of captchas is anywhere in the same ballpark as entire server farms spinning their wheels uselessly on blockchain computations.

I would be super interested in learning more about what's going to happen when the cryptocurrency bubble collapses.

In the end, it'll be the people who fail to get out of it before it collapses who are hurt. My friend who works at Dennys with medical issues who has been sitting on a pile of Bitcoin, watching it grow in value. I'm thinking about telling him he really needs to get out of it now while the getting is good, but while it's still valuable, it's hard to make that case to him? But there is no perfect time to get out except at the exact moment before it dies, unless I somehow get him out of it at that exact moment I'm going to look, to him, like a chump.

Then there's the infrastructure devoted to Bitcoin transactions. I know of a convenience store with a Bitcoin ATM. That couldn't have been cheap for them. I wonder if that hardware can be repurposed.
posted by JHarris at 11:12 AM on November 19, 2021 [6 favorites]

"Because if - well, when - quantum computing becomes useful enough to brute force cryptographic systems"

Huh. Quantum computing is another thing I had filed under "possibly interesting research area that the rest of us should really be ignoring".
posted by floppyroofing at 11:26 AM on November 19, 2021

Damn, loquacious, that’s a good post. Thank you for taking the time to write it.
posted by Soi-hah at 11:30 AM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

I hope that all of us start boycotting recaptchas because of the collective energy used to select the images of crosswalks could power an entire city.

I think that we can safely toss this apples-to-oranges comparison right into the compost heap even before we try to tally up the energy/cost savings earned by preventing spambots and related financial/energy frictions.

Granted they're also using ReCaptchas to offload and crowdsource the training of artificial intelligence machine vision systems for what will likely end up being malicious purposes but whatever, on balance it's tiny compared to magic internet money number puzzles.

I would be super interested in learning more about what's going to happen when the cryptocurrency bubble collapses.

Mainly there's going to be a lot of little people who lose out economically and left holding the bags and it will resemble stock market and penny stock collapses or what happens when other Ponzi schemes collapse and run out of fresh blood to feast on.


Another point I wanted to touch on is that yes, our current economic system sucks and one of the many things that cryptocurrency promises is that it might liberate people from these systems, even to the point of causing entire nation states to collapse.

It won't. If anything it's going to accelerate financial dependence and the many negative issues of the current status quo of capitalism and make it even worse.

When you peel back the many layers of this and start digging in way past the mainly libertarian talking points on this angle what we're left with is essentially the Austrian School of Economics written out as code, with code as law, and it's fucking nightmare fuel for more of the same neo-liberal and libertarian horseshit on crack and it's not going to "save" or "liberate" anyone from these systems.

Even though these decentralized systems try to talk a lot of big talk about being trustless, they also all rely on trust. Exchanges live and die by the implications of trust. Meeting people locally for the direct purchase or exchange of cryptocurrencies relies on the concept of trust. Even vendors on the black markets on the darknet like Silk Road have had to rely on trust and reputation scores of their vendors and the markets themselves being trustworthy enough to use.

At the end of it all the only real currency is trust and all functioning economic systems stem from this trust.
posted by loquacious at 11:41 AM on November 19, 2021 [10 favorites]

Huh. Quantum computing is another thing I had filed under "possibly interesting research area that the rest of us should really be ignoring".

Oh, don't misinterpret me as saying that quantum computing is a sure thing, but it's definitely something that the cryptocurrency space is willfully ignoring on purpose.

But at this point it sure looks like quantum computing as some kind of useful thing is going to happen at some level, and if so it will mean some dire things about cryptography and privacy in general even if it can only be affordable to be useful to state level powers, and this mirrors and maps nicely to the existing history of computing and how the first real Turing complete computers were insanely expensive projects undertaken by major nation states to crack wartime cryptography or other military uses of computing.

And if quantum computing is usefully applied to code breaking it's probably going to spark off an arms race of also applying quantum computing to quantum cryptography solutions and security just like non-quantum computing did.

Sure, this also implies the paradox that quantum computing and cryptography can also be applied to securing blockchain networks if there's enough of a financial reward or interest to fund that arms race just as much as it could be used to attack and crack those networks...

...but if I wanted to dive down this hairy rabbit hole of theoretical number theory and completeness again I would much rather take a heroically mind-bending dose of mushrooms and re-read Godel, Escher and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid in one go.

Which, frankly, I do not.
posted by loquacious at 11:54 AM on November 19, 2021 [6 favorites]

In the last few years in the United States there has been a recurring crisis where the Republican Party refuses to raise the “debt ceiling” for a Democratic President, threatening a default on US government obligations, a performance of political brinksmanship with the “full faith and credit” that backs the US Dollar. The world’s reserve currency, a fiat currency backed only by the strength of political institutions, is the plaything of a demented, racist Cult that rejects objective reality on election results, that is killing its own base with covid disinformation, and which is committed to killing the whole world with climate denialism.

There has not been a default yet, but before January there had not been an insurrection yet. Don’t underestimate what people now coming through the ranks of the post-Trump Republican Party are capable of. I loathe bitcoin but I would be very unsurprised if bitcoin outlasts the US Dollar given the ongoing collapse in the legitimacy of that country’s institutions. In this respect I think bitcoin is much like gold, another commodity that serves as a store of value despite its inherent worthlessness and the tremendous waste involved in its production.
posted by moorooka at 11:59 AM on November 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

There was some discussion about blockchain versus public key cryptography above. I'll give my non-expert summary of that, in the hopes it might help.

In Public Key cryptography you have a secret key - a long random string which is known only to you. This secret key has a matching public key, which is derived from your actual key. That's a one way transformation - the public key can't be used to derive your secret key, and can be shared with world.

If I have a piece of information that I'd like to publish, I can use my secret key to produce a signature of that information. Anyone with the public key can then verify that this piece of information was signed by the holder of the corresponding secret key. It's then a matter of trusting that I am the only person with that secret key, and you've now verified that I published that information and it hasn't been altered.

This is very useful and can form the basis of any kind of system in which you trust a central authority. If I trust Visa to say what financial transaction occurred, then Visa can maintain a ledger of those transactions, and I can obtain a copy of that ledger and verify that it came from Visa. I can transmit my personal transactions back to Visa and Visa can verify that those came from me and add them to the central ledger they maintain if they think I have the right to make those transactions.

Blockchain introduces a secure, distributed ledger. The major innovation is that new transactions are added to the ledger not by coordination with a central authority, but by the consensus of the network. Anyone can get a copy of the ledger and verify it piecewise, with the limitation that the only thing you can transact on this ledger are the digital tokens that comprise the network itself.

This is a very cool piece of technology, but one without an obvious use. We can attach a meaning outside of the system to the tokens, but doing so negates the trust-less aspects of the blockchain. If the meaning of a token is outside of itself, then we have to develop a system for trusting how that meaning was assigned.

Let's take car titles, which were mentioned above. I can create a token on a trustless blockchain which represents the title to my car. But since the blockchain is trustless, anyone else can make another token which also claims to represent title to my car. Okay, so maybe we have a central authority who we trust to create the car title tokens, and after that the blockchain takes the wheel. Anyone can still make a token that has the same claim, but we can verify that that token didn't originate with our trusted party. That could involve public key signing. What now? Well, we've re-introduced a central authority, but they don't have to maintain the ledger themselves. That might be a good thing, but it's not at all clear that it is when balanced against the other concerns going on.

You do get some other potential benefits: immutability and uniqueness among them. Those sounds good, but lead to their own problems. If my car title is a blockchain token, and that token is by fraud or accident transferred to someone else, what then? I still have the car. The central authority has washed their hands of it, and the transaction is immutable, so I can't get the token back. If the token has the force of law as my title, then I don't actually own the car anymore, and probably need to pay whatever ransom is demanded. Or maybe I can convince the central authority to issue a new token for me, and somehow declare the old one invalid. That's ideal, but now we've lost the whole point of the central authority not maintaining the ledger themselves.

That kind of brings things around to smart contracts. Smart contracts allow additional rules and stipulations to be built around future transactions involving a particular token. That sounds neat, but the same problems show up - there's very little recourse if anything goes wrong (hard fork of Eth nonwithstanding). And the truth is - we've had smart contracts for thousands of years - they're called contracts.

"Smart Contracts" are only appealing if you trust computer code over the legal system. The kinds of people developing blockchain technology are probably going to think that's a good idea, because they understand code well, and legal stuff not very well. But law and code are equally foreign to most people, and there's good reasons why the legal system is the way it is.

Ultimately there are very few to no problems that the blockchain solves. We are witnesses to a financial scam of the largest proportions, and the sooner it collapses the less people will be hurt. The sooner it collapses, the less damage will have been done to the environment. It is a moral imperative to call it out as the scam it is, and do what we can to put an end to it.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 12:22 PM on November 19, 2021 [23 favorites]

This is a very cool piece of technology, but one without an obvious use.

This has always been my impression of blockchain tech too. A distributed ledger no-one owns sounds like a cool idea, but so far every implemented use has been actively stupid or harmful and every theoretical use doesn't stand up to any scrutiny. It's a solution in search of a problem, and people are convinced that because it's a very clever solution it has to be applicable to all sorts of problems.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 12:35 PM on November 19, 2021 [7 favorites]

If the meaning of a token is outside of itself, then we have to develop a system for trusting how that meaning was assigned.

We have that. It's the decentralized system known as "trade", and what it trusts in is a general expectation that all traders are going to judge the value of what's being traded in roughly the same way.

The tradeable value of a token, then, is the outcome of a distributed process of guessing and second-guessing and second-second-guessing and so on. This is a process that's chock-a-block with all kinds of feedback loops, both positive and negative, and the result is that the assigned value is inherently chaotic.

People who think that Bitcoin is going to play Number Go Up forever are probably wrong. People who think Bitcoin is going to crash to near zero at some point soon are probably wrong as well. The simple fact is that nobody can predict, with any reasonable degree of certainty, what the market price of a Bitcoin or any other digital token will be at this time next year or any other year.

And just as with trading in any volatile commodity, the overall operation of the market results in money being continuously ratcheted from weak hands into strong hands. If you're already wealthy and well diversified enough not to have to care when your Bitcoin holding loses 60% of its nominal value in a day, you won't panic and sell it off when you see it doing that; you'll probably buy the dip instead, paying people who are panicking a fraction of what they bought their own tiny holdings for - quite possibly from you - the previous week, and at some point there will be enough big money buying the dip to put a floor under it.

Bitcoin isn't a pyramid scheme, in that it isn't funnelling most of the money paid for it toward the early adopters. It used to be that, but not any more. What it is now is an increasingly well established commodity, highly volatile by design, that funnels most of the money paid for it toward the same small group of well diversified and very wealthy speculators that everything else funnels money toward as well.
posted by flabdablet at 1:03 PM on November 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

Most all “commodities” have other uses besides value storage devices.
posted by eagles123 at 1:08 PM on November 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

If my car title is a blockchain token, and that token is by fraud or accident transferred to someone else, what then? I still have the car. The central authority has washed their hands of it, and the transaction is immutable, so I can't get the token back. If the token has the force of law as my title, then I don't actually own the car anymore, and probably need to pay whatever ransom is demanded.

Any law that would contemplate the use of NFTs as legal proof of ownership for physical assets would presumably be framed in such a way as to impose a cooling off period following the movement of any such NFT to a different account, during which refusal by any new holder of that NFT to reverse, on request, the transaction by which they acquired it would amount to breaking the law.

Most all “commodities” have other uses besides value storage devices.

Currencies don't, though, crypto or otherwise. And bullion has almost none.
posted by flabdablet at 1:15 PM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

In this respect I think bitcoin is much like gold, another commodity that serves as a store of value despite its inherent worthlessness and the tremendous waste involved in its production.

Gold is far from worthless as it is an incredibly useful engineering metal. If it was as available as say copper you'd see it everywhere.
posted by Mitheral at 1:17 PM on November 19, 2021 [8 favorites]

Gold is far from worthless as it is an incredibly useful engineering metal.

Doesn't change the fact that about 90% of the gold that's ever been mined exists in the form of store-of-value assets like jewellery and bullion, and not in stuff that takes advantage of its engineering properties.
posted by flabdablet at 1:28 PM on November 19, 2021

Most all “commodities” have other uses besides value storage devices.

In addition to *waves hands energetically* all of this I find that it's curious that we can barely even seem to ask ourselves the question the morality or ethics of speculation-driven trading and trading practices in general - about almost any trading markets, instruments or practices or the ethics of extracting financial value without creating any in return through these instruments, strategies and methods.

Trading commodities, currency and metals in particular seem particularly harmful and exploitative.

Why is it that the status quo is such that we're not even asking if this entire system of financial arbitrage and wealth extraction through trading is a net good for humanity?

How many truly terrible, exploitative things have now been done to people and our environment in the name of stock prices and returns on investment demands?


And people are buying into the idea and trusting that a bunch of very technocratic and generally libertarian new Guilded Age tech bros armed with malformed ethics routines who are running the the cryptocoin space are going to make these issues somehow better and less harmful or exploitative!?

It's all about the tech? Banking the unbanked? A store of value?

Get the fuck out of here. No. No, I'm not buying it. No way.
posted by loquacious at 1:33 PM on November 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

i'm using the blockchain in my catalytic converter
posted by clawsoon at 1:36 PM on November 19, 2021 [6 favorites]

Why is it that the status quo is such that we're not even asking if this entire system of financial arbitrage and wealth extraction through trading is a net good for humanity?

I would imagine most of the people who post on this site don't spend a lot of time asking that because we already know the answer: it isn't.

And there is no way it ever will be, unless and until every transfer of value from one entity to another, no matter where it happens on the planet, is taxed at a rate that makes obscene concentrations of wealth impossible to achieve.

Trickle-down economics is bullshit. What the world needs is spray-copiously-in-all-directions economics.
posted by flabdablet at 1:41 PM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

We have that. It's the decentralized system known as "trade", and what it trusts in is a general expectation that all traders are going to judge the value of what's being traded in roughly the same way.

That's the value of the token - when I say attaching meaning to it I mean the other uses discussed above - licensing, ticketing, ownership of off-blockchain resources, or artwork NFTs - all of these depend on a meaning being attached to the token which makes it relate to something outside of the blockchain entirely.

The meaning attached to a token may affect it's value, but attesting to the meaning requires the re-introduction of trust into the system.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 1:42 PM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

The meaning attached to a token may affect it's value, but attesting to the meaning requires the re-introduction of trust into the system.

I wonder if any decrease of trust in a system necessarily leads to higher cost. If you don't trust your shoppers to wander the aisles themselves, you have to hire enough people to serve every product to every customer. If you don't trust the neighbouring city, you have to spend a bunch on walls. If you don't trust the financial system, you have to design a blockchain with high per-transaction costs.
posted by clawsoon at 1:51 PM on November 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

attesting to the meaning requires the re-introduction of trust into the system.

Agreed. From which it follows that at some point we may well see the rise of token haven jurisdictions that operate in much the same way as today's tax havens do, where those who have no qualms about ripping off the rest of us can simply bribe and browbeat corrupt officials into providing them with ways to hide their assets - even if the rest of the world has put international agreements in place that make it illegal to transact on any blockchain used for establishing legal ownership claims without strong and provable one-to-one linkages between personal identity and account identity.
posted by flabdablet at 1:56 PM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

I like the idea of electronic money, and used ecash for some things in the '90s. There's a lot of disadvantages to current banking, for example how credit card companies pocket several percent of every transaction. I was very interested when I heard about bitcoin in 2011 and read quite a bit about it. Blockchain is an interesting idea, but it really doesn't add much to existing cryptographic or distributed database technology. However proof-of-work is the most ruinous idea that has ever come out of software engineering. Although the technology had its fascinating parts, especially related to the development of hardware mining, I decided crypto wasn't for me, and I'm glad I did.

Ethereum (where most of these NFTs are stored) is using an estimated 88 TWh of electricity per year, and has risen by 8 times over in the past year. It may be small compared to some sorts of energy consumption (e.g. worldwide aluminum production is about 1000 TWh), but it's a massive amount for something so niche. That's 180 kWh per transaction: 200,000 times more energy than a credit card transaction or 6 days of an average household's electricity usage. Bitcoin uses twice the electricity overall, and over 10x per transaction. A massive amount of resources go into making the machines themselves as well. All this computation has no end product other than the crypto itself.

Value is a strange concept, because it boils down to an agreement. It could be a custom or tradition, or it could be the newest hottest thing. Tesla has a market cap greater than Toyota, Volkswagen, Daimler, GM, BMW, Ford, Honda, Ferrari, Hyundai and Kia combined. That seems a bit overpriced to me, since Tesla made 500,000 cars last year where the rest made 44 million. Still, I'm sure there are many that would want to buy so they don't miss out. If we average everybody out, we get market value, which is probably about as good as you'll get for a generally-agreed value.

Gold has had a fairly hefty market value for a long time, seemingly well above its practical or decorative uses. We dig up mountains and soak them in arsenic to expand the amount we've got by 1% a year. It's the kind of thing we would put a stop to if we were rational, since we've got so much of it laying around. But crypto makes it look green: they dig up $200B a year worth of it using less energy than bitcoin does to "mine" $20B.
posted by netowl at 1:58 PM on November 19, 2021 [7 favorites]

Any law that would contemplate the use of NFTs as legal proof of ownership for physical assets would presumably be framed in such a way as to impose a cooling off period following the movement of any such NFT to a different account, during which refusal by any new holder of that NFT to reverse, on request, the transaction by which they acquired it would amount to breaking the law.

Ok, but what's the life cycle of that NFT? What does it even look like? Cars at least have a VIN, which I guess would be the token but what about assets which don't have a convenient identifier? Who mints the NFT? If the asset was financed, does the bank "own" the token? Who's responsible for maintaining the external database which lists the liens and the holder of those loans? If the asset is destroyed, does ownership just end? How is the NFT destroyed?

At the end of the day, NFTs are just a fancy, less-featureful wrapper for the title system we already have. So why bother duplicating the effort?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 2:12 PM on November 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

"There's a lot of disadvantages to current banking, for example how credit card companies pocket several percent of every transaction."

Maybe that's just how much it costs to process transactions?

Certainly none of the cryptocurrency people have managed to do it for cheaper yet, despite a seemingly unshakable confidence that they must be able to.
posted by floppyroofing at 2:18 PM on November 19, 2021

Absolutely not true. Stellar transactions typically cost the equivalent of around a thousandth of a cent each, a cost imposed solely to discourage massive abuse by spambots. If the network is particularly busy they might go as high as hundredths of a cent.
posted by flabdablet at 2:22 PM on November 19, 2021

Is Stellar providing a comparable service? For example, what's the equivalent to a credit card for Stellar, and what happens if I lose it?
posted by floppyroofing at 2:26 PM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

No it isn't, because Stellar is a purely peer to peer transaction mechanism; like all cryptocurrencies, it's closer to cash than credit cards in many ways. But as I mentioned above, there is no reason why a third party payment processor could not use Stellar to send and receive payments on your behalf while offering the same range of buyer protections that today's existing third party payment processors (including banks) already do.

There would certainly be a cost associated with these over and above that imposed by the underlying remittance network, to pay for such fraud as the payment processor ended up eating, exactly as already happens today; but since Stellar costs so much less per transaction than e.g. SWIFT, and is less inherently vulnerable to identity theft than credit cards are, I would expect that even such feeble competition as exists within today's payment processing oligopoly would yield lower prices for Stellar-based transactions than for those that resolve to conventional bank transfers.
posted by flabdablet at 2:34 PM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

The closest thing to a credit card number for Stellar, assuming no involvement from a payment processing middleman, is your Stellar secret key. This needs to be kept secure inside your Stellar wallet software, which all the available wallet software is designed to make easy to do.

Completely unlike a credit card number, your secret key is never revealed in the transactions recorded on the Stellar blockchain. Instead, your wallet software uses it internally to sign the payments it submits to the blockchain, which allows anybody to use your public key to verify those signatures.

Your public key is also the only one used to identify you when other people pay Stellar tokens into your wallet.
posted by flabdablet at 2:40 PM on November 19, 2021

Oh, and if you lose your Stellar secret key then all of the tokens remaining in that Stellar account are irretrievably locked forever; they can never be used without it. Wallet software will therefore typically generate a recovery passphrase of a dozen words or so, from which your secret key can be reconstituted and which you need to write down and keep secure.

This task is a natural fit for personal password management software, which everybody ought to be using as a matter of course anyway. I use and recommend KeePassXC for this job.

Of course, if you are relying on that kind of software to back up the recovery passphrases for your Stellar secret keys then you need to keep the master password for your password manager at least as secure, and its passwords database files at least as well backed up, as you'd have to keep your Stellar recovery passphrase. There's no way around that, really.
posted by flabdablet at 2:51 PM on November 19, 2021

Correct me if I'm wrong, but:

1. One cofounder of Stellar is the same guy who got dinged by the SEC for fraudulent practices related to his previous blockchain project, Ripple.
2. Stellar has completely changed its consensus algorithm after problems were discovered with the first version.
3. Transacting accounts on the stellar network are required to reserve an (admittedly small) POS to try to slow down the transaction rate against spamming attacks, raising all the similar POS questions
4. An organization called "xlmpool" received a huge amount of early Lumens created via the "inflation pool" mechanism, distributing them to members via a process criticized for being opaque, and holding back a large rake for itself. (Oh and possibly harvesting members' private keys?)

Now it does sound like there's some major backers liking Stellar, including IBM and the government of Ukraine. If it turns out to be the one true magic beans that solves the previous problems with blockchains I'd be happy to see it come to pass. But the red flags are tremendous and I for one will not be eating my hat until the promises pan out in reality.
posted by traveler_ at 3:07 PM on November 19, 2021 [10 favorites]

1: The SEC sued Ripple, its co-founder and former CEO Chris Larsen, and its current CEO Brad Garlinghouse. Jed McCaleb, another Ripple co-founder who had fallen out with Larsen and left Ripple to found Stellar seven years beforehand, was not sued. The basis of the suit was the SEC's allegation that Ripple's digital currency XRP amounted to an unregistered security rather than the commodity almost everybody else thinks it is. The case is ongoing.

2: Stellar has indeed fixed bugs in both the design and implementation of its consensus protocol since version 1. The protocol is currently at version 18 and there's a robust mechanism in place for voting on and testing out proposed updates. I don't think "completely changed" is a fair characterization of this process.

3: Anybody can create as many Stellar accounts as they want, but each account has to maintain a minimum 1 XLM balance, currently worth about 36c US, in order to be able to send funds anywhere else. This is purely to stop spam-scale bulk account creation. It's not a proof-of-stake in any way fundamental to the operation of the consensus protocol and has nothing to do with limiting the transaction rate. If the market price of XLM rises significantly I'm quite sure that the protocol will be revised to lower the minimum balance accordingly.

4: The Stellar inflation mechanism (inactivated two years ago) was designed to let Stellar users vote for other users, who would then be issued the tokens generated by the inflation mechanism in proportion to votes received once a minimum threshold was reached. Xlmpool was one of several organizations created for the sole purpose of subverting this essentially charitable mechanism: the idea was that if you voted for xlmpool as your preferred inflation target then xlmpool would return 90% of the inflation lumens it collected to you. It was made quite clear that the xlmpool founders would indeed keep the remaining 10% for themselves, and I don't understand why anybody would have been confused by this. Nobody was ever forced to vote for xlmpool, and those who did got something out of doing so for no initial outlay of their own.

Neither the inflation mechanism itself, nor the voting process, nor such repayments as xlmpool made to those who voted for it, would have required disclosure of secret keys. The only valid reasons for a Stellar secret key to leave the wallet that created it are to make the same account operable using other wallet software (perhaps on another device), or to make a disaster recovery backup. There were some proposed inflation pools available that did ask for secret keys - I have no idea what their excuse was - but as far as I know, xlmpool wasn't one of them.

There has also always been a certain amount of payment spam on Stellar, where scammers include a URL in the payment memo field and take the usual kinds of advantage of naive users who click on those, including soliciting secret keys from them. Most Stellar-compatible wallets have been entirely suppressing in-UI notifications of small incoming payments for some time now for exactly that reason. You can still get a complete record of the transactions in and out of any Stellar account, including your own (or xlmpool's, come to that), by pasting its public Stellar key into any of the many online Stellar blockchain explorers.
posted by flabdablet at 4:42 PM on November 19, 2021

Mod note: flabdablet, you're coming on pretty strong as That Guy Who Wants To Tell You About Stellar. Please let it be at this point.
posted by cortex (staff) at 5:18 PM on November 19, 2021 [10 favorites]

No problem. Sorry to have been a bore.

So I've been listening to November, and I like them. Gonna be enjoying those albums in the car for the next little while.
posted by flabdablet at 5:48 PM on November 19, 2021

Fun update: the vast bulk of this 18TB torrent is a single blank file. There's still about 10GB of stuff in there, but if you're putting aside 18TB for this file, maybe, uh, don't.
posted by phooky at 6:59 PM on November 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

But as I see it, as energy consumption on the planet increases as an inevitable result of growth in all domains, we are going to be forced by hook or by crook to find ways to increase our use of renewable energy sources. Since, from where I am standing, massive adoption of blockchain and crypto technology is an ongoing process (and has been for the last five years), the production of renewable energy will become more and more profitable for those who produce that energy.

I don't think I've ever seen AGW accelerationism before.
posted by nosewings at 7:04 PM on November 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

the vast bulk of this 18TB torrent is a single blank file

I'm really starting to like this "art project" :-)
posted by flabdablet at 2:12 AM on November 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

Why is it that the status quo is such that we're not even asking if this entire system of financial arbitrage and wealth extraction through trading is a net good for humanity?

I think it's a worst but for the others thing. Ie, we do it instead of wrestling stuff away from each other with pointy sticks. A lot of the issues with current trade practices seem to be (1) lack of competition and (2) corruption of the governing authorities...these are longstanding hard problems.

Do you have an alternative plan?
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 7:10 AM on November 20, 2021

I think it's a worst but for the others thing. Ie, we do it instead of wrestling stuff away from each other with pointy sticks. A lot of the issues with current trade practices seem to be (1) lack of competition and (2) corruption of the governing authorities...these are longstanding hard problems.

I'm not really talking about direct market trading and delivery of real world physical goods and commodities.

What I'm really talking about is arbitrage involving futures, leveraged speculation and practices like short selling as found in commodities trading where there is never any intent to receive or deliver goods, where the only goal is to exploit and extract profits while delivering no useful product other than increasing market price volatility and instability while leaving either producers or consumers paying the costs of decreased or increased spot prices.

Do you have an alternative plan?

Not really, no. And if I did I wouldn't be surprised if I ended up dead for pissing off the wrong people.

Banning the practice of trading commodities or trading with leveraged arbitrage might be a good place to start.

Or banning or taxing anything that employs the practices of trading as a career that does nothing but extract wealth from the process of arbitrage, market spreads or volatility without ever actually delivering any goods or services.

There's something morally and ethically fundamentally wrong to this idea that someone can take a pile of money, use that to secure a large loan, use that now larger pile of money or credit to drive up the price of a commodity that's food that people actually need to eat and then call that a good or smart thing that they made a even more money even though someone else now probably has to pay more money to eat and the farmer that actually produced it usually didn't get paid more to make the commodity in this process.

To me there's something very seriously wrong with this, and it's just one of the many things about our financial system that end up functionally being financial crimes against humanity.
posted by loquacious at 9:22 AM on November 20, 2021 [4 favorites]

Oh, and if you lose your Stellar secret key then all of the tokens remaining in that Stellar account are irretrievably locked forever; they can never be used without it. Wallet software will therefore typically generate a recovery passphrase of a dozen words or so, from which your secret key can be reconstituted and which you need to write down and keep secure.

Figuring a better way to handle this is going to a requirement of wide adoption of any of these schemes. People forget passwords. People either do not note a recovery phrase or don't keep it in a safe location. People's communities burn down, flood out, are destroyed by earthquakes, etc. People die with and without up to date wills. Every other wealth storage mechanism has ways of accessing the store if documentation or tokens are lost/stolen/destroyed.

The solution will probably some sort of central store of key information like a bank or government.
posted by Mitheral at 10:17 AM on November 20, 2021 [3 favorites]

The solution will probably some sort of central store of key information like a bank or government.

This is in the end the whole problem. Once you get to solving all of the problems you have trying to integrate The Blockchain into society, what you've got is the inefficiency of a crypto blockchain and the centralization of a conventional ledger -- the worst of both sides.
posted by doomsey at 10:40 AM on November 20, 2021 [3 favorites]

the vast bulk of this 18TB torrent is a single blank file

Wait, so is this thing actually a scam to convince everyone that NFTs are vastly more widespread than they actually are? My initial reaction was certainly, "Shit. There's already 20TB of this garbage?"
posted by straight at 11:01 AM on November 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

I've already seen lots of speculation that NFTs themselves are mostly a scheme to make cryptocurrency seem inevitable. Maybe this "critique" of NFTs actually has the same goal.
posted by straight at 11:04 AM on November 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

But, no, all the NFTs in the entire world take up less disk space than the pictures I've taken of my kids.
posted by straight at 11:08 AM on November 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

But, no, all the NFTs in the entire world take up less disk space than the pictures I've taken of my kids.

Especially since the NFTs are not the images, they are just URIs that point to the images.
posted by oulipian at 12:03 PM on November 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

The questions I have about the 17-TB-of-zeroes file are whether that file was in the source data, who minted that NFT and why, and why Geoff didn't compress it.
I don't particularly care to investigate, but my assumption is that some NFT performance artist actually put a URL pointing to 17 TB of zeroes on the blockchain for lulz and Geoff fully automated the downloading and torrent assembly process. As opposed to being a cryptoadvocate of cryptoart.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 12:10 PM on November 20, 2021 [3 favorites]

so is this thing actually a scam to convince everyone that NFTs are vastly more widespread than they actually are?

No, it's a beautifully constructed troll designed to induce the kind of person who thinks they're cleverer than anybody who has ever bought an NFT to sabotage their own BitTorrent seedbox by making it preallocate 20TB of disk space which it then proceeds to fill almost all of with nothing whatsoever.

It's the single most Australian thing I've ever seen put online and I can only applaud the perpetrator. As well as thanking him for introducing me to November. Well played!
posted by flabdablet at 12:19 PM on November 20, 2021 [7 favorites]

why Geoff didn't compress it

The big file is a RAR archive. If there were indeed multiple terabytes of zeroes in the stuff that was archived inside it, RAR compression would certainly have squeezed those down to nearly nothing. The fact the the overwhelming majority of a compressed archive consists of zeroes is unambiguous evidence that it was constructed that way deliberately.
posted by flabdablet at 12:22 PM on November 20, 2021 [7 favorites]

It's a dry, laconic style of trolling
posted by flabdablet at 12:39 PM on November 20, 2021

Especially since the NFTs are not the images, they are just URIs that point to the images.

Well, yes. 10GB of NFTs would be a disaster. But the idea that all the NFTs ever minted point to less than 10GB of images is kind of a relief.
posted by straight at 12:43 PM on November 20, 2021

Given that this is a multi-terabyte file consisting almost entirely of zeroes, I completely fail to understand why anybody still thinks the size of its nonzero part has any bearing whatsoever on "all the NFTs ever minted".

I'm not about to blow up my own seedbox in order to find out what else is inside that RAR, assuming it even is an actual RAR archive. I'm sure it's something delightful but I'd be pretty surprised if it is indeed nothing but a pedestrian collection of NFT-linked images.

The cake is a lie.
posted by flabdablet at 12:52 PM on November 20, 2021

Yeah, that makes more sense. And of course he's now come out celebrating someone's NFT of the torrent and started minting NFTs himself. And neatly avoided acknowledging or saying anything about the blank file.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 1:24 PM on November 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

The article says it's 15TB compressed and 20TB uncompressed, which is what I'd expect for mostly already-compressed items. Where is the 10GB number coming from?
posted by clawsoon at 1:38 PM on November 20, 2021

The .torrent file for the download contains SHA1 hashes for 582036 pieces of 32MiB each, of which all but the first 319 and the last one have the value 57b587e1bf2d09335bdac6db18902d43dfe76449, which is the SHA1 hash of a 32MiB block of zeroes. 320 pieces that aren't all zeroes, at 32MiB each, comes to 10240MiB which is 10GiB.
posted by flabdablet at 2:51 PM on November 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

Interesting. I'd expect that many zeroes to compress tremendously well, not achieve just 25% compression. And for an already-compressed file to contain mostly zeroes is... suspicious? I'm no expert on compression, but that doesn't fit with anything I do know.
posted by clawsoon at 3:44 PM on November 20, 2021

Wait, are these uncompressed? Just .tar files, not .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 or .tar.xz or .tar.whateverzyoudlike? So they built a big SSD array to serve a whole bunch of zeroes?

Okay, now I have to actually read this thread instead of just skimming it...
posted by clawsoon at 3:55 PM on November 20, 2021

No, there's one huge RAR file that accounts for most of the download. And RAR is a compressed format, and it's the RAR file itself that's got this huge range of zeroes in it. So it's likely been hand-built in some fashion.

You wouldn't need a huge SSD array to seed this thing, by the way: most modern filesystems support sparse files, which allow you to store blocks full of zeroes at no disk cost. A Raspberry Pi with an ordinary USB hard disk plugged in would be plenty, though I expect he'd actually be using some cheap commodity VM somewhere.

Also bear in mind that BitTorrent is very economical on the original publisher's upload bandwidth; having uploaded just one complete copy, the original seeder doesn't actually need to participate any further until everybody else gets sick of sharing it.
posted by flabdablet at 4:16 PM on November 20, 2021

I got the .tar stuff from the bottom of this page:

razor1911.nfo 17.3 KiB
preview.jpg 3.80 MiB
ethereum.tar 13.6 TiB
solana.tar 4.19 TiB

Where's the RAR file from? I agree that it would be super-weird for a RAR file to be full of zeroes like that.

though I expect he'd actually be using some cheap commodity VM somewhere.

The article says:

“The seedbox hosting the torrent has 4 x 10TB SATA drives configured in RAID0 and the website is humming along just fine even though the website is going insanely viral,” Geoff says.

...though who knows what to believe if it's all zeroes in there.
posted by clawsoon at 4:24 PM on November 20, 2021

The cake is a lie.
posted by flabdablet at 4:36 PM on November 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

Also, it seems I was slightly wrong about how many of the 32MiB pieces are zero: piece 444708 is nonzero as well. So it looks like ethereum.rar is pieces 0 through 444708 of which pieces 0..319 and 444708 are the only ones that aren't entirely zeroes, preview.jpg and razor1911.nfo and the start of solana.rar are in piece 444709, and solana.rar is almost all zeroes and ends at piece 582036.
posted by flabdablet at 4:44 PM on November 20, 2021

It's too bad you can't just download the first few bytes of the .rar file and see what magic number it has. (Or can you?)
posted by clawsoon at 4:47 PM on November 20, 2021

Transmission always tries to preallocate disk space for the entire download as soon as it starts writing out the first downloaded piece, and I can't be arsed installing a BT client that I can force not to do that.

It's an art piece. I have the gist. Don't really care enough to get more detail than I have.
posted by flabdablet at 4:52 PM on November 20, 2021

That same page with the lie about the tar files also lists the torrent's info hash, and I notice that he's now corrected that so it's the real one for the NFT torrent and not the one for the November albums that used to be there. I only have one thing to say about that.
posted by flabdablet at 5:08 PM on November 20, 2021

You know, every so often I think about how, back in the nineties, you could send money to a mail-order place to "buy" a star and name it whatever you wanted. They would send you back a certificate of authenticity, and you could give it to someone as a gift, so that they would know that (so long as you were to contact the holder of this particular database, and consider it an authority with any validity) they had a star named after them.

Anyway I guess what I'm saying is that unlike NFTs, at least you got a paper certificate out of that.
posted by DoctorFedora at 7:48 PM on November 21, 2021 [3 favorites]

Against my better judgement I've fiddled about a bit and am now downloading this thing onto my laptop in a way that won't clog it up.

Here are preview.jpg and razor1911.nfo. As seemed likely, solana.rar is not a RAR file at all but just 4,607,953,276,406 bytes of zeroes. So any actual content will be in the first 10GiB of ethereum.rar, which I should have a complete copy of in a few hours.
posted by flabdablet at 2:07 AM on November 22, 2021

A first sniff at ethereum.rar hints that it is also not a RAR file:

$ file ethereum.rar.part
ethereum.rar.part: Linux rev 1.0 ext4 filesystem data, UUID=75d78f02-0df6-46f0-a7c4-738beddeba3f (needs journal recovery) (extents) (64bit) (large files) (huge files)
posted by flabdablet at 2:24 AM on November 22, 2021

Still don't have enough of it to be able to mount it and look inside, but this works:

$ /sbin/tune2fs -l ethereum.rar.part
tune2fs 1.45.6 (20-Mar-2020)
Filesystem volume name:
Last mounted on: /home
Filesystem UUID: 75d78f02-0df6-46f0-a7c4-738beddeba3f
Filesystem magic number: 0xEF53
Filesystem revision #: 1 (dynamic)
Filesystem features: has_journal ext_attr dir_index filetype needs_recovery extent 64bit flex_bg sparse_super large_file huge_file dir_nlink extra_isize metadata_csum
Filesystem flags: signed_directory_hash
Default mount options: user_xattr acl
Filesystem state: clean
Errors behavior: Continue
Filesystem OS type: Linux
Inode count: 577101824
Block count: 9233625600
Reserved block count: 461681280
Overhead blocks: 37009088
Free blocks: 9196616506
Free inodes: 577101813
First block: 0
Block size: 4096
Fragment size: 4096
Group descriptor size: 64
Blocks per group: 32768
Fragments per group: 32768
Inodes per group: 2048
Inode blocks per group: 128
RAID stride: 128
RAID stripe width: 512
Flex block group size: 16
Filesystem created: Tue Nov 16 11:57:00 2021
Last mount time: Tue Nov 16 12:01:55 2021
Last write time: Tue Nov 16 12:01:55 2021
Mount count: 2
Maximum mount count: -1
Last checked: Tue Nov 16 11:57:00 2021
Check interval: 0 ()
Lifetime writes: 70 MB
Reserved blocks uid: 0 (user root)
Reserved blocks gid: 0 (group root)
First inode: 11
Inode size: 256
Required extra isize: 32
Desired extra isize: 32
Journal inode: 8
Default directory hash: half_md4
Directory Hash Seed: dc259c68-92c7-454c-a9b5-87ba5d03e04f
Journal backup: inode blocks
Checksum type: crc32c
Checksum: 0xc39163ca

The part that makes me laugh the most is "Lifetime writes: 70 MB".

Troll trolley trollery trololololol :-)
posted by flabdablet at 2:46 AM on November 22, 2021

Block count: 9233625600
Block size: 4096

That comes to 37,820,930,457,600, which is much bigger than the 14,921,943,519,817 size of ethereum.rar, so it's unlikely to become mountable without first being extended to full length even when completely downloaded.

There's also this:

Filesystem created: Tue Nov 16 11:57:00 2021
Last mount time: Tue Nov 16 12:01:55 2021
Last write time: Tue Nov 16 12:01:55 2021
Mount count: 2

So what he's done here is create this huge empty filesystem image, given ext4lazyinit five minutes to scribble enough filesystem structure into it to put at least one nonzero byte somewhere inside each of the first 320 32MiB pieces, then published it. I'll be surprised if there's any actual content inside.
posted by flabdablet at 3:05 AM on November 22, 2021 [3 favorites]

Block count: 9233625600
Overhead blocks: 37009088
Free blocks: 9196616506

9233625600 - 37009088 - 9196616506 = 6

Heh.
posted by flabdablet at 3:41 AM on November 22, 2021

I'd be laughing too if he wasn't using his fake torrent to gain publicity for his own NFT, and if his fake accomplishment of this eminently achievable goal wasn't interrupting the people who are genuinely working on it.

I also wonder how many people he's actually tricked into trying to allocate 18TB - it's an awfully ambitious up-front ask given that NFT cultists are all over "the files aren't the point, it's the ownership" or whatever and NFT critics tend to find them aesthetically bankrupt.

So like, thanks Geoff for getting "NFT" paired with "destroyed our planet" and "scam" in a few news sources, that's useful, but you get an E for execution and an F for followup.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 3:50 AM on November 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

you could send money to a mail-order place to "buy" a star

In a similar vein, I "own" a square foot of land near the Laphroaig distillery in Scotland. Legally meaningless, obviously, but I can at least go there on the distillery tour and collect my annual "rent" of a measure or two of whisky, so there's an actual tangible benefit...unlike NFTs.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 4:25 AM on November 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

you get an E for execution and an F for followup

Filesystem magic number: 0xEF53

It's like, how much more meta could this be? And the answer is none. None more meta.
posted by flabdablet at 4:38 AM on November 22, 2021

I'm actually shocked by the self-defeating actions on both sides of NFTbay "versus" cryptobros - on one side, some NFT guy with a fascist frog avatar whose process is just photoshopping the fascist frog onto more well-known artworks (and who trades under a name derived from a famous painter) sells an NFT of the NFTbay URL and/or a screenshot of it, thus further compromising their side's claim that NFTs have any value as a way of transferring ownership.
On the other, Geoff compromises his claim to be against NFT trading by promoting the above NFT and putting his own one up for sale, compromises his denunciation of cryptocurrency as a scam by saying he'll donate the proceeds to some charity, and compromises his claim that he'll donate to charity by attaching it to an NFT sale. During the scuffle, according to the cryptobros in his replies he accidentally shows a crypto wallet that he used to buy some crap dinosaur NFTs. But despite all this he really badly wants to get an interview with the New York Post about how meta his art project is. And both sides presumably clink their on-chain piss-beer NFC-chip microbrewery bottles and have a chuckle about how many GWh they just burned.

I mean the warez nfo file is interesting than pepes building a pyramid, but sheesh. Just read Foone's thread instead.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 4:57 AM on November 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

*more interesting. barely.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 5:08 AM on November 22, 2021

ghuntley/press statement.md
posted by flabdablet at 5:12 AM on November 22, 2021

Can now confirm that the only thing I could find inside the ethereum.rar filesystem image after extending it to full size, then running e2fsck against it to clean it up enough to make it mountable, was a deleted directory named ghuntley whose inode e2fsck identified as needing to be cleaned up.

I have a ~6GB tarball of the whole allegedly 20TB download if anybody else wants to poke around in there. I briefly considered seeding that and immortalizing its BitTorrent info hash in a Billion Dollar NFT Torrent Lite Edition NFT on StellarNFT, but sanity prevailed :-)
posted by flabdablet at 9:59 PM on November 22, 2021 [2 favorites]