The Giant Beastcast: Episode 302

Don't mind me, just letting y'all enjoy a very expensive image that i certainly don't own or know who made it. Some guy owns it, but that could change so who cares. There's a good chance that you won't remember this picture in a week, but hopefully you fixated your eye on this free copy long enough to get some joy out of it. It's not everyday you get the chance to see something so premium after all. Google images just doesn't do it for me anymore.

Proof of work, stake,capacity,assignment or donation. It all comes down that the ones that are the deepest in it reign supreme and the more people that adopt it make the ones deep in it that more powerful. Pyramid.

I'm sorry @jeffbakalar , but being wasteful of energy for something that has no additional value to the general population, other than the ones that are already sitting on their pile of funnymoney looking to expand it into their hobby of being into internet-culture is still wasting energy. Using more and more 'green energy' doesn't mean that it's better for the world. Using a higher % of 'green' energy in proportion to 'grey' energy is comparatively better for the environment. Still harmful, but not as bad as we used to be. Switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy is an environmentally friendly practice that makes sense to pursue; Going ham on 'green' energy for the sake of going ham on 'green' energy is not.

We've all played citybuilders. Society gets into NFT's in a big way. Now we require more energy production and capacity, for which you require more land, infrastructure and construction. We need to to extract, allocate, transform and use up all kinds of resources to make it possible to increase the amount of power we can generate and store. All for the objective of making sure our name is somewhere attached to a fleeting image on the internet that we swap out for a new funny image an hour later. Oh, also those cheap energy prices? We're all going to be paying extra for it because of this sudden increase and the investments needed to deal with our increasing energy needs as we all verify owners and ownership transfers of random bullshit in the background non-stop.

If we want to make a genuine effort in keeping a decent amount of the globe habitable and prevent people from having to flee their homelands, or have access to affordable energy, we should be mindful about our consumption. Not let our 'green' energy usage go through the roof and plop down more and more plants and turbines on land that could be used to put forests or apartments on.

Like this NBA Top Shot stuff seems to essentially be an website that lets you log into your account that lets you see your 'owned' highlights and easily trade them with other Top Shot users. Why exactly does this all need to be fueled by the blockchain? It's the NBA putting clips onto a marketplace that it has full control over with every user being tied to an account to their site. It's not like they let anyone upload anything to this website and attach it to your account in the hope that you trick someone into thinking they're buying a highlight but it turns out that it's just 1 still frame. Microtransactions tied to specific accounts work; My steam-wallet doesn't leak money; I don't see a place where i can get a sick deal on or steal a full Fortnite account with everything unlocked.

We already have developed a whole toolset of security measures to make sure that we can put faith in who gets to access our digital accounts. Top shot is tied to the blockchain because it's pushed by those that are heavily invested in it. They require more and more people to jump on board to increase their value and this is an avenue where they can warm up people to it.

If these NFT-trailblazers cared about paying artists directly and bigly for exclusive items, they could have already worked out deals with them before. It's clear now that certain artists are sitting on unreleased works looking to sell or are open to collaborating with buyers on custom songs for the right price. Hash out a deal! Get your personalized gift, let the artist confirm the deal publically. Do the whole notary thing if you must, get your certificate of authenticity signed that your exclusive custom song is a genuine Grimes song that will only be played from inside your house. There's no real need to waste huge amount of energy on proving that these transactions actually happened.

What's also interesting to me, is that on one hand the system is very concerned with making sure that the right person is the actual owner of the art. At the same time, a Twitter bot is going ham and letting any random user, claim art posted on the internet as a fresh NFT. A gamedev is selling art made by others because he didn't like asking 50+ people for permission. People are straight up stealing art and claiming it for themselves. Why isn't the system putting any energy towards that gaping hole of a ownership-issue? Sounds like it only serves to benefit those that already sit firmly in the NFT market. Now we're at the point where we need to worry about others making money with the items we have put on the internet and letting a system decide that the first person that mints something is actually the true owner. We are being discouraged from putting anything on the internet, without getting involved in the NFT market. Someone else might take it otherwise and verify it as their own. I'm not a fan personally.

Not everything that happens in the physical world should necessarily have an exact digital equivalent in the name of 'going with the times' or 'evolving'. I'll be voting with a red pencil on a plain ass paper and get to watch these papers go through hands as they are tallied. If i make a fool out of myself for entertainment purposes, i do it in front of friends that don't have their cellphones out so it won't be eternally linked to me by the rest of mankind for eternity.

The ease of sharing copies has been in many cases an unique strength of digital that we're now trying to crush in favor of artificial scarcity so they can rise in value. We're making the digital realm look a bit more like the physical one in this case. Not necessarily a hallmark of evolution to me.

@depecheload:

@depecheload:im with ya. Vinny said in an ideal world the guy who created the Drew meme could attach an NFT and monetise from it. but the truth is that in the real world ANYONE can attach an NFT to it, not the creator. So you can't just go around making 'unique' jpgs. It's like selling prints of the mona lisa and calling them unique. As an artist myself I'm scared of people just making money off NFTs attached to jpgs of my work!

@perpetualoutput: Yeah this is the rotten thing. You yourself are almost being forced into the NFT market as an internet-user, just to make sure that your own stuff can't get stolen by a rando and registrated with the Blockchain first.

Why isn't this system putting any energy towards that initial gaping hole of a ownership-issue? Sounds like it only serves to benefit those that already sit firmly in the NFT market already instead of being concerned with initial ownership.

Now I want to know what Jeff listens to. Metallica is definitely mainstream now but still their last album was good same with Avenged. Also both have two of the best guitarists of all time.

Bummer that they spent so much time on NFT garbage. Jeff's argument seemed to basically boil down to "well it exists, so might as well profit from it." Nah. That doesn't justify anything. Even if you ignore all the energy consumption - which you really shouldn't, because ignoring a glaring flaw like that in order to justify something is a slippery slope - even if you do that, the concept is still dumb as hell. "Owning" a jpg or whatever is utter nonsense. You're just paying for a receipt. And who gives the slightest shit about who has a receipt? The one positive aspect you can glean from this is that artists could get paid. But perhaps they should find a way to get paid that doesn't involve destroying the environment. And then there's also the wrinkle that you don't even even need to be the original artist to profit from this crap.