There are reasons to be skeptical of the death of NFTs
April 13, 2025 12:58 AM Subscribe
Despite the prevailing skepticism toward non-fungible tokens, the world isn’t becoming any less digital and blockchain remains the foundation of digital art’s brave new market. It is right to acknowledge the seismic impact of NFTs on contemporary art even while they continue to enrage and inflame. The old world might be putting up resistance to the on-chain economy, but this story is far from over. from Whatever Happened to NFTs? [Right Click Save]
I don*t care if the death of NFTs is a sure thing already or not, I'm trying to speak it into existence.
posted by sohalt at 2:25 AM on April 13 [12 favorites]
posted by sohalt at 2:25 AM on April 13 [12 favorites]
Ugh, I don't even have the energy anymore to say FUCK NFTs AND CRYPTOCURRENCIES IN GENERAL. Oh wait, there it is, whew.
posted by flod at 2:30 AM on April 13 [17 favorites]
posted by flod at 2:30 AM on April 13 [17 favorites]
"blockchain remains the foundation of digital art’s brave new market" LOL
I mean we can say the Orangescu tarrif fiasco is art too, right?
posted by mayoarchitect at 2:47 AM on April 13 [3 favorites]
I mean we can say the Orangescu tarrif fiasco is art too, right?
posted by mayoarchitect at 2:47 AM on April 13 [3 favorites]
Hey wow remember them? The previous energy wasting techbro get rich quick nonsense.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 2:55 AM on April 13 [4 favorites]
posted by GallonOfAlan at 2:55 AM on April 13 [4 favorites]
they still write books about tulipmania QED skeptics!!!!!!!!
posted by lalochezia at 3:53 AM on April 13 [4 favorites]
posted by lalochezia at 3:53 AM on April 13 [4 favorites]
There does not appear to be any aspect of life that can’t be made worse by adding a blockchain.
Also, the level of activity described is really small, and likely even smaller assuming that those aren’t necessarily unique users. That’s not a healthy market that’s likely to generate massive returns.
Art has been a troubled industry for decades, and whatever its future is, betting that it won’t involve NFTs is probably safe, especially when the person telling you that really needs NFTs to be a thing.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:10 AM on April 13 [9 favorites]
Also, the level of activity described is really small, and likely even smaller assuming that those aren’t necessarily unique users. That’s not a healthy market that’s likely to generate massive returns.
Art has been a troubled industry for decades, and whatever its future is, betting that it won’t involve NFTs is probably safe, especially when the person telling you that really needs NFTs to be a thing.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:10 AM on April 13 [9 favorites]
Artists - that is to say, people involved in the art world who have a measurable output - are just not interested in NFTs because they don’t solve any problems that artists have. The people who were pushing them seem to have gone on to AI etc as they’re more interested in the process of using technology. I mean, that’s a charitable way of describing it, it just happens that everybody’s experience of NFT was uniformly terrible and fuelled by scammers trying to make a quick buck, but I’m sure there’s somebody out there using it in a non scammy way
posted by The River Ivel at 4:31 AM on April 13 [6 favorites]
posted by The River Ivel at 4:31 AM on April 13 [6 favorites]
I don*t care if the death of NFTs is a sure thing already or not, I'm trying to speak it into existence.
What you need to make it real is an NFT of the death of NFTs.
posted by srboisvert at 4:50 AM on April 13 [4 favorites]
What you need to make it real is an NFT of the death of NFTs.
posted by srboisvert at 4:50 AM on April 13 [4 favorites]
Ha, I'd completely forgotten about them and am only now reminded of my original confusion, ensuing disbelief and ultimate distancing from a handful of otherwise smart and savvy colleagues who seemingly overnight went down the NFT rabbit hole and all I could think was WFT?
posted by thecincinnatikid at 5:31 AM on April 13 [3 favorites]
posted by thecincinnatikid at 5:31 AM on April 13 [3 favorites]
blockchain remains the foundation of digital art’s brave new market
The writers provide absolutely no proof or evidence of this - the first 2/3 of the article is just a surface overview of what's been happening in the market of NFTs, then they go on to briefly and shallowly note that various renowned "old world" institutions like museums, galleries, art collectives, and auction houses are interested in digital art as digital art (and also often digitizing their collections). But they never connect the two parts of the article. The mere existence of digital art in MoMa or the Tate Modern or the fact that the Cleveland Museum of Art is digging into their collection and making pictures of many of their works freely available via the web has nothing at all to do with whether NFTs are a viable market commodity or a new form of artistic expression.
Either these guys are too dumb to even conceive of digital art as anything but NFTs, or they're hoping the reader misses that they never actually make their case, and are counting on buzzword appeal to authority ("MoMa ! Art Basel ! Christie's !") to encourage the reader to assume a connection between the legit art world and NFTs that they can’t provide themselves.
Either way it's bunk.
posted by soundguy99 at 6:00 AM on April 13 [14 favorites]
The writers provide absolutely no proof or evidence of this - the first 2/3 of the article is just a surface overview of what's been happening in the market of NFTs, then they go on to briefly and shallowly note that various renowned "old world" institutions like museums, galleries, art collectives, and auction houses are interested in digital art as digital art (and also often digitizing their collections). But they never connect the two parts of the article. The mere existence of digital art in MoMa or the Tate Modern or the fact that the Cleveland Museum of Art is digging into their collection and making pictures of many of their works freely available via the web has nothing at all to do with whether NFTs are a viable market commodity or a new form of artistic expression.
Either these guys are too dumb to even conceive of digital art as anything but NFTs, or they're hoping the reader misses that they never actually make their case, and are counting on buzzword appeal to authority ("MoMa ! Art Basel ! Christie's !") to encourage the reader to assume a connection between the legit art world and NFTs that they can’t provide themselves.
Either way it's bunk.
posted by soundguy99 at 6:00 AM on April 13 [14 favorites]
This article’s analysis of the shift to digital art collection is missing, among other things, furry art commissions and adoptables, which I guarantee are bigger digital art markets than NFTs and have been for decades.
posted by brook horse at 6:03 AM on April 13 [11 favorites]
posted by brook horse at 6:03 AM on April 13 [11 favorites]
Insurance for NFTs. My god. Such a beautiful grift. Why didn’t I think of it. Isn’t the whole point of a blockchain transaction that it’s permanent for as long as you have access to the key? What could you possibly offer insurance against.
posted by dis_integration at 6:03 AM on April 13 [4 favorites]
posted by dis_integration at 6:03 AM on April 13 [4 favorites]
It is right to acknowledge the seismic impact of NFTs on contemporary art
Richter scale 3.0? Brief shake, consternation and alarm, no lasting impact whatsoever?
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 6:12 AM on April 13 [3 favorites]
Richter scale 3.0? Brief shake, consternation and alarm, no lasting impact whatsoever?
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 6:12 AM on April 13 [3 favorites]
There does not appear to be any aspect of life that can’t be made worse by adding a blockchain.
NFT scammery aside, blockchains do actually make really good ledgers for supply chains because of their cryptographically secure append only natures.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 6:17 AM on April 13 [2 favorites]
NFT scammery aside, blockchains do actually make really good ledgers for supply chains because of their cryptographically secure append only natures.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 6:17 AM on April 13 [2 favorites]
Specifically, public blockchains can be a component of systems that do that. But they're by no means the only way, nor even necessarily the best way, to implement a trustworthy append-only database.
posted by flabdablet at 6:29 AM on April 13 [7 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 6:29 AM on April 13 [7 favorites]
In fact a design like a blockchain, where the concern of information trustworthiness is not cleanly separable from that of the overall ability of the system to function, is often far less useful than it might appear to be at first glance because it completely fails to address the question of how reliable the sources of the information held in the database were.
In practice, the use cases for a record that has no possibility at all of ever being modified in any way beyond appendng additional content, not even when the case for correcting erroneous content is overwhelming, mean that some such correction facility will almost always need to be added on eventually. In the case of a blockchain this would necessarily involve implementing the act of revoking a transaction as a transaction in its own right.
The point is that even though the specific bits recorded in a blockchain come with strong cryptographic guarantees against subsequent tampering, the meaning of those bits is always going to be mutable to an extent that suits the system's users. Meaning is a human thing, not a tech thing, and is therefore not a thing to which cryptographic guarantees can apply. Which makes the zero-trust goals and assumptions that underpin so much blockchain design deserve far more careful scrutiny than the cryptobros typically give them.
posted by flabdablet at 6:55 AM on April 13 [12 favorites]
In practice, the use cases for a record that has no possibility at all of ever being modified in any way beyond appendng additional content, not even when the case for correcting erroneous content is overwhelming, mean that some such correction facility will almost always need to be added on eventually. In the case of a blockchain this would necessarily involve implementing the act of revoking a transaction as a transaction in its own right.
The point is that even though the specific bits recorded in a blockchain come with strong cryptographic guarantees against subsequent tampering, the meaning of those bits is always going to be mutable to an extent that suits the system's users. Meaning is a human thing, not a tech thing, and is therefore not a thing to which cryptographic guarantees can apply. Which makes the zero-trust goals and assumptions that underpin so much blockchain design deserve far more careful scrutiny than the cryptobros typically give them.
posted by flabdablet at 6:55 AM on April 13 [12 favorites]
blockchains do actually make really good ledgers for supply chains because of their cryptographically secure append only natures
I disagree. If you want a distributed append-only ledger, just do that -- certificate transparency logs are a good example of a very useful one. "Blockchain" doesn't appear on that page because it's not a relevant technlogy to solving the problem.
A "blockchain" is a specific kind of distributed ledger that adds a bunch of expense and gives up a bunch of features in order to make itself harder to legally regulate. If that's not what you need you don't need a blockchain.
(Technically my argument for that is: it either uses non-permissioned verifiers with economic incentives to cooperate, which implies a preference for anti-regulability over low cost and features, a choice clearly spelled out in the original whitepaper; or it doesn't, and "blockchain" is just trendy branding for something else that already existed.)
From that definition it's obvious why every successful application for 16 years has been illegal; that's what it was designed for, advertised as, successful at, and good at. If you can't explain why you need to do illegal things then a blockchain is hitting a nail with a screwdriver.
posted by john hadron collider at 6:57 AM on April 13 [11 favorites]
I disagree. If you want a distributed append-only ledger, just do that -- certificate transparency logs are a good example of a very useful one. "Blockchain" doesn't appear on that page because it's not a relevant technlogy to solving the problem.
A "blockchain" is a specific kind of distributed ledger that adds a bunch of expense and gives up a bunch of features in order to make itself harder to legally regulate. If that's not what you need you don't need a blockchain.
(Technically my argument for that is: it either uses non-permissioned verifiers with economic incentives to cooperate, which implies a preference for anti-regulability over low cost and features, a choice clearly spelled out in the original whitepaper; or it doesn't, and "blockchain" is just trendy branding for something else that already existed.)
From that definition it's obvious why every successful application for 16 years has been illegal; that's what it was designed for, advertised as, successful at, and good at. If you can't explain why you need to do illegal things then a blockchain is hitting a nail with a screwdriver.
posted by john hadron collider at 6:57 AM on April 13 [11 favorites]
NFT scammery aside, blockchains do actually make really good ledgers for supply chains because of their cryptographically secure append only natures.
I'm going to respectfully disagree. Every time I've seen someone propose a problem that blockchain could potentially solve, it seems obvious that a normal publicly readable database would solve better at lower costs.
posted by justkevin at 6:57 AM on April 13 [8 favorites]
I'm going to respectfully disagree. Every time I've seen someone propose a problem that blockchain could potentially solve, it seems obvious that a normal publicly readable database would solve better at lower costs.
posted by justkevin at 6:57 AM on April 13 [8 favorites]
The alleged proposition of cryptocurrency was that it didn’t need the backing of the government to hold its value—a proposition proven false by the fact that crypto bros took over the government to keep the currencies from losing value.
I imagine that was a valuable lesson regarding NFTs, that right wingers’ commitment to the “logic of the market” when the market says their investment is a failure and ought to fade away and die.
posted by Jon_Evil at 7:02 AM on April 13 [10 favorites]
I imagine that was a valuable lesson regarding NFTs, that right wingers’ commitment to the “logic of the market” when the market says their investment is a failure and ought to fade away and die.
posted by Jon_Evil at 7:02 AM on April 13 [10 favorites]
Fish gotta swim. Scammers gotta scam.
If there is a way that this actually benefits society, somebody show me. Until then, IMO it's all hand-waving and graft.
posted by BlueHorse at 7:16 AM on April 13 [2 favorites]
If there is a way that this actually benefits society, somebody show me. Until then, IMO it's all hand-waving and graft.
posted by BlueHorse at 7:16 AM on April 13 [2 favorites]
proven false by the fact that crypto bros took over the government to keep the currencies from losing value
which didn't even work.
If the store-of-value function of cryptocurrencies had anywhere near as much to do with their independence from central banks and traditional economies as the spruikers are wont to claim, one would expect cryptocurrency prices to move much more independently of traditional market conditions than they do. But in fact the Crypto Fear and Greed Index simply reflects wider market sentiment most of the time, which goes to show that cryptocurrency prices are driven as much by the same groups of high-stakes traders as other prices have always been.
posted by flabdablet at 7:20 AM on April 13 [5 favorites]
which didn't even work.
If the store-of-value function of cryptocurrencies had anywhere near as much to do with their independence from central banks and traditional economies as the spruikers are wont to claim, one would expect cryptocurrency prices to move much more independently of traditional market conditions than they do. But in fact the Crypto Fear and Greed Index simply reflects wider market sentiment most of the time, which goes to show that cryptocurrency prices are driven as much by the same groups of high-stakes traders as other prices have always been.
posted by flabdablet at 7:20 AM on April 13 [5 favorites]
My apes! I have to insure my apes!
posted by SansPoint at 7:44 AM on April 13 [5 favorites]
posted by SansPoint at 7:44 AM on April 13 [5 favorites]
Remember Alf? He's back! In NFT form!
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 7:54 AM on April 13 [6 favorites]
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 7:54 AM on April 13 [6 favorites]
The mere existence of digital art in MoMa or the Tate Modern or the fact that the Cleveland Museum of Art is digging into their collection and making pictures of many of their works freely available via the web has nothing at all to do with whether NFTs are a viable market commodity or a new form of artistic expression.
Yeah, these guys can keep the name of the cultural heritage sector out of their mouths. I work in a library rather than a museum, but the issues are similar—our mission isn’t to collect paper, it’s to collect a record of human intellectual endeavor that can be recorded in lots of different forms. We will collect and preserve the raw materials of future scholarly research in electronic forms as well. There are major new challenges to doing so, but NFTs don’t solve any of them for us. They exist to solve an abundance problem for capitalists who want to monetize scarcity.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 8:12 AM on April 13 [10 favorites]
Yeah, these guys can keep the name of the cultural heritage sector out of their mouths. I work in a library rather than a museum, but the issues are similar—our mission isn’t to collect paper, it’s to collect a record of human intellectual endeavor that can be recorded in lots of different forms. We will collect and preserve the raw materials of future scholarly research in electronic forms as well. There are major new challenges to doing so, but NFTs don’t solve any of them for us. They exist to solve an abundance problem for capitalists who want to monetize scarcity.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 8:12 AM on April 13 [10 favorites]
I like to think that whoever in the eBay corporate office decided to make a big play for the NFT market gets frequently razzed about it at the water cooler.
posted by Lemkin at 9:06 AM on April 13 [3 favorites]
posted by Lemkin at 9:06 AM on April 13 [3 favorites]
Blackbird exemplifies the move toward low-cost social collecting experiences as well as the march of consumer crypto. As a restaurant loyalty app built on-chain, the platform logs patron-restaurant connections and visits, which are minted as NFTs on Base Mainnet. Patrons earn reward points in the form of $FLY that they can then redeem for cocktails, desserts, and merchandise.
So, they wasted Terawatts of energy to recreate cardboard loyalty cards, except with 1000% more cringe.
posted by signal at 9:23 AM on April 13 [5 favorites]
So, they wasted Terawatts of energy to recreate cardboard loyalty cards, except with 1000% more cringe.
posted by signal at 9:23 AM on April 13 [5 favorites]
Insurance for NFTs. My god. Such a beautiful grift. Why didn’t I think of it. Isn’t the whole point of a blockchain transaction that it’s permanent for as long as you have access to the key? What could you possibly offer insurance against.
It looks like this service is providing essentially a hosting service for the actual jpegs, which aren't stored on blockchains because it would be too expensive. The ledger entries are just URLs, or I guess more recently, IPFS hashes which are more like BitTorrent magnet URLs, in that anyone can seed (or "pin") them. So you pay these people to host your jpegs for you, because a common nft failure mode is that whichever server is actually hosting the jpegs disappears, rendering your NFT an inert token with no aesthetic content, a URL pointing at nothing.
Yes, this is all quite silly. The first NFTs weren't even hosted on IPFS so lots of them just evaporated when the URL inevitably rotted, which is just embarrassing. Your beautiful immutable record of owning foo.com/bar.quuz.jpeg is still there, but the "NFT" is "broken" because when you try to "look at it" on a website you just see a broken image icon. You paid for a Photobucket URL. Whoops!
posted by BungaDunga at 10:56 AM on April 13 [4 favorites]
It looks like this service is providing essentially a hosting service for the actual jpegs, which aren't stored on blockchains because it would be too expensive. The ledger entries are just URLs, or I guess more recently, IPFS hashes which are more like BitTorrent magnet URLs, in that anyone can seed (or "pin") them. So you pay these people to host your jpegs for you, because a common nft failure mode is that whichever server is actually hosting the jpegs disappears, rendering your NFT an inert token with no aesthetic content, a URL pointing at nothing.
Yes, this is all quite silly. The first NFTs weren't even hosted on IPFS so lots of them just evaporated when the URL inevitably rotted, which is just embarrassing. Your beautiful immutable record of owning foo.com/bar.quuz.jpeg is still there, but the "NFT" is "broken" because when you try to "look at it" on a website you just see a broken image icon. You paid for a Photobucket URL. Whoops!
posted by BungaDunga at 10:56 AM on April 13 [4 favorites]
So, they wasted Terawatts of energy to recreate cardboard loyalty cards, except with 1000% more cringe.
Ah, but your points are immutable, which means that they are memorialized in perfect pure mathematics and cannot be abrogated. Er, unless the company goes bust. Or gets bought. Or goes bust and gets bought. Or switches to another loyalty program provider. Huh. Whoops!
posted by BungaDunga at 10:59 AM on April 13 [2 favorites]
Ah, but your points are immutable, which means that they are memorialized in perfect pure mathematics and cannot be abrogated. Er, unless the company goes bust. Or gets bought. Or goes bust and gets bought. Or switches to another loyalty program provider. Huh. Whoops!
posted by BungaDunga at 10:59 AM on April 13 [2 favorites]
I doubt bitcoin does NFTs too well, signal, so all these NFTs are being traded on proof-of-stake blockchains, so way less energy usage.
Among those chains, ethereum wastes considerable energy by having an insanely large number of validators, most of whom provide no security or even reduce securtiy. If all those validators were real, ethereum would burn maybe 1 billion watts, not a terawatt, but given how they're mostly sock puppets, ethreum probably burns like 200 million watts.
Aside from bitcoin, I've only heard two proof-of-work currencies even mentioned in the last year, zcash still does interesting work of course, and I bumped into Bram Cohen pumping his scummy garbage once. If I'd not noped out of reviewing papers, then I'd surely have written "proof of work is dead, so this paper sucks" for some reviews, but academics are always the last to learn that a topic is dead.
Anyways proof-of-work looks dead-ish, except that someone must kill bitcoin now.
All the cringe is real though, the cringe is always real
posted by jeffburdges at 12:54 PM on April 13 [3 favorites]
Among those chains, ethereum wastes considerable energy by having an insanely large number of validators, most of whom provide no security or even reduce securtiy. If all those validators were real, ethereum would burn maybe 1 billion watts, not a terawatt, but given how they're mostly sock puppets, ethreum probably burns like 200 million watts.
Aside from bitcoin, I've only heard two proof-of-work currencies even mentioned in the last year, zcash still does interesting work of course, and I bumped into Bram Cohen pumping his scummy garbage once. If I'd not noped out of reviewing papers, then I'd surely have written "proof of work is dead, so this paper sucks" for some reviews, but academics are always the last to learn that a topic is dead.
Anyways proof-of-work looks dead-ish, except that someone must kill bitcoin now.
All the cringe is real though, the cringe is always real
posted by jeffburdges at 12:54 PM on April 13 [3 favorites]
I am now suddenly reminded of that brief, charming moment when there were about a dozen NFT galleries here in NYC. Like, actual physical storefronts. Is there a particular German word for "commingled pity and disgust"? Anyway, they're gone now. The one near me was replaced by a Nuts Factory.
posted by phooky at 12:59 PM on April 13 [2 favorites]
posted by phooky at 12:59 PM on April 13 [2 favorites]
OK, I have yet to read this, and I will, but glancing over some of the other content I see they use the term "Web3" unironically, so I am now sure of their bias.
posted by Ayn Marx at 2:11 PM on April 13 [3 favorites]
posted by Ayn Marx at 2:11 PM on April 13 [3 favorites]
It's just unmitigated hype full of unsupported protestations about the relevance of NFTs.
posted by signal at 2:27 PM on April 13 [3 favorites]
posted by signal at 2:27 PM on April 13 [3 favorites]
I won't even bother to waste the time to type a full comment on this stupid bullsh
posted by AlSweigart at 2:41 PM on April 13 [6 favorites]
posted by AlSweigart at 2:41 PM on April 13 [6 favorites]
The blockchain doesn't do anything that a trusted institution with a database can't do better, faster and cheaper. The fact that trusted institutions are becoming harder and harder to find and that the people pushing web3, NFT and cryptocurrency are the exact same people destroying our institutions is not lost on me
posted by Skwirl at 3:30 PM on April 13 [8 favorites]
posted by Skwirl at 3:30 PM on April 13 [8 favorites]
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
Whatever happened to predictability.
The bored apes, the yachtclubs, stupid NFTs...
How did I get to living here?
Somebody tell me please!
This new world's confusing me.
With "the cloud" mean as you've ever seen
Ain't a twitter who knows your tune.
Then a Marlinspike inside you Whispers
Kid sell your dreams, get in on the pull...
Everywhere you look, everywhere you go
There's a scam (There's a scam) a rug to pull back off.
Everywhere you look, everywhere you go
There's some marks, of Somebody who feeds you.
Everywhere you look.
When Elon's lost out there and he's all alone,
A light is waiting to carry him home.
Everywhere he looks.
Everywhere he looks.
posted by symbioid at 5:24 PM on April 13 [3 favorites]
Whatever happened to predictability.
The bored apes, the yachtclubs, stupid NFTs...
How did I get to living here?
Somebody tell me please!
This new world's confusing me.
With "the cloud" mean as you've ever seen
Ain't a twitter who knows your tune.
Then a Marlinspike inside you Whispers
Kid sell your dreams, get in on the pull...
Everywhere you look, everywhere you go
There's a scam (There's a scam) a rug to pull back off.
Everywhere you look, everywhere you go
There's some marks, of Somebody who feeds you.
Everywhere you look.
When Elon's lost out there and he's all alone,
A light is waiting to carry him home.
Everywhere he looks.
Everywhere he looks.
posted by symbioid at 5:24 PM on April 13 [3 favorites]
I'm still not sure whether NFTs or insurance is the scammiest 'industry' in existence. One thing I do know is that 'NFT Insurance' has to be approaching peak scam. Or maybe the scamminess of each cancels out?
posted by dg at 6:21 PM on April 13 [1 favorite]
posted by dg at 6:21 PM on April 13 [1 favorite]
suddenly crypto has a legit use case...
If it's crypto it's not money laundering - "It appears to be official now. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, when illicit activity is routed via crypto infrastructure, then it no longer qualifies as money laundering." (via)
posted by kliuless at 9:14 PM on April 13 [4 favorites]
If it's crypto it's not money laundering - "It appears to be official now. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, when illicit activity is routed via crypto infrastructure, then it no longer qualifies as money laundering." (via)
posted by kliuless at 9:14 PM on April 13 [4 favorites]
Anyways proof-of-work looks dead-ish, except that someone must kill bitcoin now.
Super easy, barely an inconvenience. Just shut down the internet, problem solved.
posted by neonamber at 10:46 PM on April 13 [1 favorite]
Super easy, barely an inconvenience. Just shut down the internet, problem solved.
posted by neonamber at 10:46 PM on April 13 [1 favorite]
Is that all that it would take? Maybe it's worth shutting it down then?.
I can't think of another innovation that has caused so much damage to our society as crypto.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 8:03 AM on April 14 [2 favorites]
I can't think of another innovation that has caused so much damage to our society as crypto.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 8:03 AM on April 14 [2 favorites]
I can't think of another innovation that has caused so much damage to our society as crypto.
Soon enough, it'll be AI.
posted by grubi at 11:14 AM on April 14 [4 favorites]
Soon enough, it'll be AI.
posted by grubi at 11:14 AM on April 14 [4 favorites]
American society has clearly already failed, we're just rooting around in the corpse.
posted by aspersioncast at 3:31 PM on April 14 [4 favorites]
posted by aspersioncast at 3:31 PM on April 14 [4 favorites]
"NFTs: Like being excited by pencil and paper before the eraser has been invented."
"There are reasons to be skeptical of the death of grocery receipts"
"Or maybe just a database?"
I put these pull quotes in the public domain for anyone writing a book about NFTs.
posted by chromecow at 9:45 PM on April 14 [1 favorite]
"There are reasons to be skeptical of the death of grocery receipts"
"Or maybe just a database?"
I put these pull quotes in the public domain for anyone writing a book about NFTs.
posted by chromecow at 9:45 PM on April 14 [1 favorite]
You need only split the miners badly enough so that double spending bankrupts the exchanges, bridges, etc, neonamber. Actual network disruptions would be one technique, or more simply BGP attacks, but simpler better attacks exist using selfish mining. In fact, bitcoin miners will eventually do this themselves, but one could speed this up.
posted by jeffburdges at 11:55 PM on April 14
posted by jeffburdges at 11:55 PM on April 14
That "only" is doing some very heavy lifting.
All it would achieve is a incredibly costly chain fork that gets rejected by valid nodes and miners because it immediately fails the constant validation inherent in the system, allowing the valid chain to keep chugging along. This attack might have been possible a decade ago if a superpower had orchestrated an absurdly well resourced, highly secretive Operation Overlord style surprise attack. Now though? Not happening.
There is simply too much decentralisation, robust alignment, active defences and hash rate tasked with protecting this system for an attack to succeed.
I invite you to try it regardless. Such efforts would only serve to further strengthen the protocol.
posted by neonamber at 8:36 PM on April 15
All it would achieve is a incredibly costly chain fork that gets rejected by valid nodes and miners because it immediately fails the constant validation inherent in the system, allowing the valid chain to keep chugging along. This attack might have been possible a decade ago if a superpower had orchestrated an absurdly well resourced, highly secretive Operation Overlord style surprise attack. Now though? Not happening.
There is simply too much decentralisation, robust alignment, active defences and hash rate tasked with protecting this system for an attack to succeed.
I invite you to try it regardless. Such efforts would only serve to further strengthen the protocol.
posted by neonamber at 8:36 PM on April 15
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posted by secret about box at 1:46 AM on April 13 [47 favorites]