this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
300 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37757 readers
584 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 110 points 1 year ago (2 children)

There must be a 5% margin of error

[–] anachronist@midwest.social 20 points 1 year ago

You laugh now but you'll be crying when they build cryptoland and my blockchain hills nft goes to the moon!

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] sapo@beehaw.org 105 points 1 year ago (5 children)
[–] alyaza@beehaw.org 59 points 1 year ago (1 children)

i can only presume the remaining 5% is owned by NFTs Georg, who lives on the blockchain and is an outlier who should not have been counted

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
[–] Arotrios@kbin.social 83 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The news here is that, contrary to popular belief, 5% of NFTs actually still hold some value.

[–] jarfil@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The real question would be: how many of those 5% can be sold for more than the initial asking price.

...but NFTs were never for the buyers, they were for the creators: even if they fall to 1/1000000th the initial value, a 2.5% cut on every sale is still more than 0.

[–] festus@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 year ago

If the values fall low enough relative to transaction fees then there won't be any transactions at all for creators to collect royalties. Also values can drop to literally $0 if it isn't even worth a buyer or sellers time to deal with the NFT (i.e. seller can't find buyer at any price or doesn't bother trying).

[–] silentdon@beehaw.org 52 points 1 year ago

The other 5% are less than worthless

[–] Poggervania@kbin.social 46 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Crypto and NFTs are complete scams, change my mind.

[–] RobotToaster@mander.xyz 32 points 1 year ago (4 children)

It's sad, I remember when bitcoin was new and the people interested were actually interested in breaking the state control of money. Now >99% of crypto people are just grifters and people trying to get rich quick.

[–] bermuda@beehaw.org 12 points 1 year ago

bitcoin skyrocketed and suckered in a lot of people to the gold rush. they didn't want decentralized currency or anything. They just saw that it was ~16,000 dollars a bitcoin and wanted in.

[–] anachronist@midwest.social 10 points 1 year ago

Most people were grifters back then too. I had a friend who was a libertarian porcfest free-stater and he was against bitcoin because he was afraid everyone would lose all their money and not be able to complete the free state project.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] ComradeKhoumrag@infosec.pub 17 points 1 year ago (17 children)

I would argue 99.99% of crypto and nfts are complete scams. But Blockchain is a change in how we manage and distribute data, and can remove centralization of power from humans that we would otherwise need to trust for managing autonomous systems like the data in a banks public ledger.

[–] upstream@beehaw.org 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’s a common misconception that blockchain gives trust. If you control a majority of nodes in a Blockchain system you decide what the truth is.

This opens the door for illicit players to manipulate things their way.

Lack of trust doesn’t replace trust.

Central, provable/accountable, trust is needed for financial systems to work.

Everything else is “Wild West”.

[–] jarfil@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's also a misconception that some illicit players can take over a large enough Blockchain system.

The cost to run a 51% PoS attack on Ethereum, as of today, is $20 Billion

(current staked total of $40 Billion)... that is, $20 Billion, if you already had them. Buying that much of Ethereum, with an available liquidity of $670 Million... is just impossible, there is not enough on the market, simple as that. If you tried really hard, you could maybe convince some HODLers to part with some of their hoard for a high enough price... unless they decided to stake and try to stop you. How high would you want to go to prevent that? $200 Billion? $200 Trillion...? Then after proving you can pull a 51% attack, the price would instantly crash down to $0. How much spare cash do you have to burn?

Let's do Bitcoin

Running a 51% PoW attack on Bitcoin, would mean either hijacking half of the current 400 Million TH/s hash rate, or adding your own 400 Million TH/s to the network. The most recent and cost effective mining hardware does about 250 TH/s for $8500 (plus power), so you'd only need 1.6 Million of those at a cost of above $13 Billion. Sounds easy, until you realize there are no 1.6 Million miners on sale. If you tried to buy those many, fat chance the manufacturer wouldn't keep 50% of the production to themselves. Then comes the kicker: on a network without smart contracts, you can only double-spend your own coins, or block others from spending theirs... for how long would you be able to keep that 51% attack, before people realized what was going on and just kicked you out of the network?


Trust is trust in the inability of anyone to successfully attack a financial system.

Blockchains are absolutely provable/accountable to everyone everywhere at any time, which central systems are not.

[–] Poggervania@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Oh, don’t get me wrong - the technology behind them is something we should be embracing more than we currently are. Being able to publicly have transactions out in the open is great, and ensuring that both parties have to authenticate on both their ends helps a ton in preventing stuff like fraud.

I just think cryptocurrencies and NFTs are squandering the blockchain and the tech behind it. There are a couple of cryptocurrencies that make sense because they have something backing it (which I just personally prefer straight-up, even with fiat money), but it’s otherwise pretty much all crypto follows Bitcoin’s trend, which in turn is more akin to a stock where it just… sort of arbitrarily goes up and down. NFTs as we currently know them, on the other hand, are just a huge scam through and through lol.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (15 replies)
[–] Euphoma@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Cryptocurrency has its uses as unregulated currency, though that makes it easy to scam people with it.

[–] upstream@beehaw.org 13 points 1 year ago (17 children)

The biggest problem is people trying to peddle it as currency.

It isn’t currency, never will be. Much more alike to bonds.

It’s an investment object with a speculative value, and no tangible value. The only value it has is what the next guy is willing to pay for it.

While currency is deflationary by nature, crypto is entirely based on demand and supply, and sure, as long as people think it will be worth more tomorrow - sky’s the limit.

Like any pyramid scheme it pays out to get in early, and get out before it collapses.

Relying on crypto is high stakes gambling, and people being people is the only reason I can find for it not having collapsed totally already.

load more comments (17 replies)
[–] ours@lemmy.film 6 points 1 year ago

NFTs aren't always a scam... sometimes they are just tax fraud.

[–] jarfil@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Shitcoins and GIF NFTs are complete scams, nothing to argue there.

Also Papal Indulgences, stamp collections, carbon offsets, the USD... we can go on 🤷

load more comments (8 replies)
[–] fiah@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

many are yes, but not all. Bitcoin and Ethereum (among others) are legit, and there are a few NFT projects out there that actually try to do the right thing even if they're not worth much at all. Many other NFTs are nothing but pictures that have no meaningful value except what you assign it to, but they never pretended to be anything else so that's still not a scam in my book

[–] peter 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Bitcoin is never going to be wisely used for it's intended purpose. It's been too sold as as investment that you buy and sell rather than a currency.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 35 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] FatTony@discuss.online 11 points 1 year ago

probably a 5% error margin.

[–] lupec@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago

For those of us with even an inkling of common sense it might as well be lol

[–] ultratiem@lemmy.ca 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] snooggums@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago

5% are worth more than zero due to collector value. Like beanie babies.

[–] Sharmat@beehaw.org 24 points 1 year ago

With some more time, the other 5% will follow suit.

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This means that 79% of all NFT collections – otherwise known as almost 4 out of every 5 – have remained unsold

Anyone taking bets on how much of the remaining 21% were "sold" on paper only ie. wash traded? None of these statistics were ever reliable. Hundreds of thousands of NFT collections minted, almost all of them fishing for a single sucker to bite and make it worth the gas costs. It would probably be more useful to look only at collections officially associated with some already well-known brand/artist/celebrity.

[–] jarfil@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It would probably be more useful to look only at collections officially associated with some already well-known brand/artist/celebrity.

The Trump NFTs sold 100%... not sure how useful is that.

[–] Okkai@lemm.ee 18 points 1 year ago

I honestly love that statistic. It's like a venn diagram of Trump screwing people over, people dumb enough to buy NFTs, and Trump supporters. It looks like this 🔴

[–] cerevant@lemm.ee 19 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Along with the rest of crypto, but don’t tell them…

[–] LanternEverywhere@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago (4 children)

No, you can't paint that broad of a stroke. It's true that crypto INVESTING might be no better gambling, but crypto wasn't invented to be an investment tool, it was invented to be a financial transaction tool, and in that regard it has some real utility.

[–] davehtaylor@beehaw.org 20 points 1 year ago

But that's not how most people use it anymore. It's become almost entirely a speculation market. Plus, transaction times for payments on Bitcoin e.g. make it totally infeasible for use in any retail application.

It's just a bunch of people passing Monopoly money around to each other at this point, trying to pretend they're making bank.

[–] Banzai51@midwest.social 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

No, they made it to be an investment tool from the start. They wanted it to be a new gold standard, where the limited resource increases in value over time. Completely ignoring history on why that is a bad idea. It's was created to be the ultimate, "I got mine, so fuck you!"

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] JustSomePerson@kbin.social 15 points 1 year ago

it was invented to be a financial transaction tool

Which it failed at

[–] Kichae@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago

Negative utility is still utility, right?

load more comments (9 replies)
[–] FUCKRedditMods@lemm.ee 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

BREAKING NEWS Report “95% of water : wet”

[–] strawberry@artemis.camp 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

shit that would be breaking news if only 95% of it was wet lol

[–] Jummit@lemmy.one 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I guess really cold water isn't really "wet" per-se. What did I just write...

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Jaysyn@kbin.social 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To the surprise of absolutely no one with more than three brain cells to rub together.

[–] CrazyEddie041@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago

I'm extremely surprised that the number is only 95%.

[–] Hirom@beehaw.org 16 points 1 year ago

Always have been 🌎👨‍🚀🔫

[–] Aldehyde@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago

5% margin of error

[–] mojo@lemm.ee 12 points 1 year ago
[–] Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago

Who knew that implementing scarcity where there isn't any wouldn't work?

[–] fer0n@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago

TL;DR: A recent report reveals that the NFT market has collapsed, with 95% of NFTs being practically worthless. The hype around NFTs peaked in 2021, but since then, interest has waned, leaving many artists and investors in a tough spot. While not all NFTs are scams, the majority have lost their value, and the environmental impact of crypto remains a concern.

load more comments
view more: next ›