'The Goal Of Crypto Is Not To Play Games With Million Dollar Pictures Of Monkeys': Ethereum Founder (benzinga.com) 139
An anonymous reader shares a report: Non-fungible tokens have risen in interest and value over the last year, with Bored Ape Yacht Club among the most popular and valuable collections. Here's what one of the Ethereum co-founders had to say about the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The rise of NFTs has led to a rise in Ethereum's price and use cases. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin was interviewed by TIME in a cover story, labeling him the "Prince of Crypto." In the interview, Buterin said there are increasing dangers with cryptocurrencies, including overeager investors and soaring transaction fees. "Crypto itself has a lot of dystopian potential if implemented wrong," Buterin said. The Ethereum co-founder went on to take an apparent shot at Bored Ape Yacht Club, an NFT collection that was minted on the Ethereum blockchain in April 2021.
"The peril is you have these $3 million monkeys, and it becomes a different kind of gambling." Buterin said a lot of people are buying yachts and lambos, but he hopes that in the future crypto is used for fair voting systems, urban planning and universal basic income. "If we don't exercise our voice, the only things that get built are the things that are immediately profitable." Buterin, who has openly supported Ukraine during the invasion of the country by neighbor Russia, highlighted the amount of money raised for the country through crypto, while once again mentioning Bored Apes. "One silver lining of the situation in the last three weeks is that is has reminded a lot of people in the crypto space that ultimately the goal of crypto is not to play games with million-dollar pictures of monkeys, it's to do things that accomplish meaningful effects in the real world," Buterin said in an email to TIME on Mar. 14, 2022.
"The peril is you have these $3 million monkeys, and it becomes a different kind of gambling." Buterin said a lot of people are buying yachts and lambos, but he hopes that in the future crypto is used for fair voting systems, urban planning and universal basic income. "If we don't exercise our voice, the only things that get built are the things that are immediately profitable." Buterin, who has openly supported Ukraine during the invasion of the country by neighbor Russia, highlighted the amount of money raised for the country through crypto, while once again mentioning Bored Apes. "One silver lining of the situation in the last three weeks is that is has reminded a lot of people in the crypto space that ultimately the goal of crypto is not to play games with million-dollar pictures of monkeys, it's to do things that accomplish meaningful effects in the real world," Buterin said in an email to TIME on Mar. 14, 2022.
Oh boy (Score:4, Insightful)
You're in for a big surprise then!
Re:Oh boy[, but I'm not laughing] (Score:2)
I wonder if you could have crafted a funnier joke with less time pressure to FP...
Then again, the entire NFT thing is just a sad-side joke. No way Slashdot can grant enough Funny mods to moderate it adequately.
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Wasn't even gunning for either - that was my legit first reaction.
I mean, what could i joke about here? It'd be like trying to make fun of a clown for wearing oversized shoes and a bright red nose.
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Sadly good point then, but it could still be funnier.
Then again, it is a bit of an exaggeration. there are various "goals" of cryptocurrency. But it's more like all of the dominating goals are bad. Mostly even worse ideas than NFT games.
How about this angle: NFTs are a fool's gold rush built smack dab on top of another fool's gold rush?
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The threat of insecure elections is currently being used by bad actors to put onerous, unnecessary restrictions on participation in democracy. Full stop.
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My impression of Vitalik Buterin is quite different, for what it's worth. I think he's an extremely smart, erudite but possibly naive and idealistic thinker. He genuinely thinks his crypto can enable all these positive social changes, and that's what he's in it for.
There's a lot of jerks pumping crypto in any way that can possibly enrich them personally - I don't think that's his mindset at all.
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Who is we? If you're referring to any government entity in the United States, the last two out of three . . . ha ha!
hahahahha
You serious? [youtube.com]
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A voting system? On... blockchain?!
I don't think anyone thought this one through.
Well the "hack" is in the system (Score:2)
Proof of X based voting systems essentially give more votes to X. That usually means that people with more money can buy more X and therefore vote more. This is by design, not a bug, and in my opinion not very desirable.
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Are there examples of people being "disenfranchised" because they had to show ID? I'd honestly like to know.
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Are there examples of people being "disenfranchised" because they had to show ID? I'd honestly like to know.
There's more to this than simply requiring people to show ID, there's reducing polling places, restricting polling days and hours, etc ...
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Five seconds with google: https://www.texastribune.org/2... [texastribune.org]
It's happened in the UK too: https://www.theguardian.com/po... [theguardian.com]
Tools don't have purposes (Score:2)
People using tools have purposes, which the tool they are using may be well or poorly suited to.
You Have to Sloganize It (Score:2)
People using tools have purposes, which the tool they are using may be well or poorly suited to.
"Crypto doesn't play with its monkey; people play with their monkeys."
Creators can't control the outcome (Score:2)
"I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." --Upton Sinclair.
The quote is in regard to his most famous work, The Jungle, which he desired to make people vote Socialist among other things; but everybody remembers it as an expose on the meat-packing industry. The book was instrumental in getting food inspection laws passed.
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Seems like his initial goals were intrinsically stupid. Good thing his aim was off.
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It was a forgivable goal in 1906, and may have had different implications at the time. His vision for it may have been more like what we have in Sweden. AFAIK, no country had tried yet and the Russian Revolution was 11 years away. I have a lot less patience with people who are calling for public ownership of everything *now*, after so much history.
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The main idea of the thread was about creators not being able to control how their content is used, not to compare anything on the blockchain to socialism or communism; but I'll bite.
The blockchains are public, but in theory they aren't really owned and perhaps ironically anarcho-socialist given their roots in libertarian ideology. However, the idea that they don't produce anything, and in fact are heavy consumers of energy is a point well taken. Because of that, Marx might have critiqued NFTs as a decade
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But you must consider, men like that in the early 20th century ultimately became the progenitors of so much pain, loss, and death. Forgiveness for ignorance can only go so far.
Ah, technology (Score:2)
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and the WWW still contains its core function.
"Dystopian Crypto" (Score:2)
Once you say cryptos not tied to fundamentals.. (Score:2)
I don't think you can implement it right (Score:3)
The problem is markets naturally tend to centralize. Wins compound on wins and businesses start to merge or go tits up.
Proof of Work becomes a big problem here. You end up with large, centralized pools of miners who can do 51% attacks. Normally they'd have no reason to... but you end up with big, centralized exchanges those miners depend on to move their mined currency. This means the exchanges can pressure the miners, and if there's one central body that can trigger a 51% attack that in turn means a gov't or other large organization (think Goldman Sachs or the larger banking system) can do it, just by putting pressure on.
Proof of Stake is not better, since those same market consolidation forces apply. People who's crypto businesses fail will sell off their stakes to the ones that succeed over time... and you're right back to where you started only more so.
I don't know of any way to counter act the natural tendency of markets to consolidate into "winners" and "losers" besides gov't backed anti-trust law, but that would again defeat the purpose.
This is before we talk about currency manipulation, short selling, and all the other nastiness touched on by the article, or what gov't regulation would do to the money laundering that forms the "floor" of crypto...
In short, crypto is a failed experiment. It wasn't the worst idea (still not as bad as leaded gasoline), but it's going to be one of those things that either dies young or lives long enough to become what it hates.
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> I don't know of any way to counter act the natural tendency of markets to consolidate into "winners" and "losers" besides gov't backed anti-trust law, but that would again defeat the purpose.
This is unavoidable. The solution (or mitigation) as you suggest is governance. Crypto will fail/succeed as every other market has done.
> In short, crypto is a failed experiment
Only true if governance efforts fail; and there are plenty of projects that have governance to mitigate stake concentration as an explic
yeah but if you bring the govt in (Score:2)
Or if you don't mean the actual government, what do you mean by "governance"?
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Participatory, democratic/representative, on chain governance.
Even outside of governance there are stake concentration disincentives baked into many different protocols. Have you participated in any of their communities or designs?
The problem is not everybody gets a vote (Score:2)
I haven't participated in any communities because, well, their Ponzi schemes. If you don't get in early the risk is way too high and picking one of the many many of these schemes that isn't going to implode or rug pull it's way too much risk for me. If I had that kind of money other than gambling it on cryptocurrencies I would invested in the stock market.
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Then you could participate in the developer communities and in tools building out DAOs, if you really cared that the technology wouldn't be misused. You don't have to invest a dime in a single token.
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DeFi would disagree with you. There's a lot going on away from the centralized exchanges.
It's not enough to maintain the miners (Score:2)
Using smart contracts and other software applications opens you up to a whole world of potential fraud that just doesn't exist with the centralized exchanges. Yes you probably won't constantly be def
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Why not? You honestly think the DeFi contracts can't scale to meet their needs? People use centralized exchanges because they choose to do so. And because of fees, at least in the case of DeFi happening on Ethereum. You've got to have pretty big bags to make things like UniSwap worth your time.
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Sometimes it's worth it to point out why someone is wrong rather than just insulting them and walking away. Even if all they deserve is an insult.
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Nice copy/paste. Too bad it has no meaning in this context.
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Wasteful (Score:2)
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Not only that, but some of the chip shortage is caused by fabs making mining chips instead of chips that can do something useful.
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To me we its because we have run out of useful things to do in society, its just trying to entertain ourselves and do things that transfer as much wealth to ourselves as possible. Western society doesn't seem to have a real goal, apart from entertaining ourselves. So we sell dumb images for millions and convince ourselves its progress.
Re: Wasteful (Score:2)
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Only some. Most are working on the real goal: decentralized, distributed ledger consensus algorithms.
Re: Wasteful (Score:2)
"dystopian potential" (Score:2)
No matter what your endeavor, the second you feel you should begin to make a list of "don't do the following" applications, understand that 100% of the time the thing you're making will be used for the things on that list. Especially if it's really good at that thing. Just ask the synthesizer of prussic acid.
The most important thing when destroying the world (Score:2)
is to repeatedly stress that you don't intend to destroy the world.
Fair voting systems, ... (Score:2)
What do you mean "the" goal? (Score:2)
There's multiple cryptocurrencies just as there are multiple cryptosystems. They were invented for multiple purposes because they were invented by multiple people. Some people created one or the other of these things because they hoped to change the world for (in their opinion) the better, some didn't. It's ludicrous to imagine that everyone doing the same thing has the same motivation.
Further, what the creator's goal was is irrelevant. It is whatever it is, not what it was imagined to become.
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The fundamental problem is that everyone can make their own cryptocurrency, that fundamental problem started at Bitcoin.
The only fundamental difference in being first is being first, everything else is sentiment and technicality, not fundamental.
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It is what it is (Score:2)
I want a million dollar monkey hanging above my million dollar Tamagotchi collection.
They're laundering money (Score:2)
Read between the lines. They're laundering money. Crypto has been used by criminals since it's inception. Now it's being used as a hedge against government currency devaluation, which is just another way of avoiding being controlled by the government. You'd have to be thick in the head not to see that.
It Doesn't Do That (Score:2)
Except that it doesn't actually do any of that and never will. Hence the monkey pictures.
I hope in the future I hit the lottery, learn Mandarin, and date Scarlett Johansen.
Meaningful effects on the real world (Score:2)
Wasting enough energy to power all of Brazil while we are actively trying to reduce our carbon footprint objectively has a meaningful effect on the world. So ... yeah there's that.
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Does anyone really... (Score:2)
But monkeys are the perfect mascot! (Score:2)
If you don't like what is happening with your toy (Score:2)
Please do feel free to take your ball and run home.
When you make a thing, you don't get to dictate how people interact with it.
Sorry the Internet hurt your feelings - that's kind of the way it goes.
It's an economy about nothing (Score:2)
Meta-verse "real estate," NFTs, cybercurrency - it's all the same thing: nothing.
A bunch of 1s and 0s in computer storage somewhere.
These Ponzi schemes are devouring *huge* amounts of energy, right in the middle of fuel crises.
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NFT: Not F***ing Thinking (Score:3)
I've laughed myself hoarse talking to NFTbros when they try and legitimize their cult.
"It's proof of ownership!"
Okay, so you have ownership of an image. Actually, the legal ownership and a link to an image. Whatever. It's yours. Is it inherently scarce? Are you the only one with it?
"No, it's -"
So no. Anybody can get an exact perfect copy of it and make more exact perfect copies. Is it an inherently useful commodity? Can I eat it or turn it into energy?
"You're missing the point, I have ownership of it and that means -"
It means you technically own something that is neither scarce nor inherently useful as a commodity.
"It's just like art sales, those have value and -"
Because there's a limited number of originals that can't be perfectly duplicated.
"THE VALUE IS THE HAAAASH, BRO"
Your hash has no value. Bitcoin has exchange value because I can't right-click-save-as somebody's Bitcoin and copy it to my memes folder ten times. Oil and wheat have value because they are useful and demand exceeds supply. A Picasso is valuable because there is exactly one and everybody else can only have lesser copies. All of those have scarcity or inherent commodity value, usually both. Your haaaash has neither. You have ownership of something that anybody can get an exact duplicate of and make more exact duplicates of. Your NFT is literally worth less than an inflationary coin like Dogecoin because even those have velocity limits on their inflation.
"But bro-"
Enjoy your monkey fetish.
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Whatever. It's yours. Is it inherently scarce? Are you the only one with it?
Full disclosure: I think NFTs are pretty silly, but the answer to this question is *yes*. But the thing is, you need to define "it". If by "it" you mean the pixels that make up an image, no. But if you mean a digital certificate issued by a "reputable" source (which is what an NFT is), then yes.
I liken it to copyrights. There's no tangible item to claim ownership of, it's all intellectual. And it's certified by the U.S. Copyright Office. The degree of ownership is only as good as the respect shown to the of
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I've laughed myself hoarse talking to NFTbros when they try and legitimize their cult.
It could be worse. They could try to convince you that crypto can lead society to a better world...
Problem is, crypto can lead us to a place we don't want to go. This technology has the potential to change the old Roman law on which the legality of our Western societies is based, and replace it with code. Basically swapping lawyers and legislators for programmers and smart contracts, erasing the use cases from centuries of debugging legal problems and starting from scratch.
In other words, the new foundatio
welp (Score:2)
'The Goal Of Crypto Is Not To Play Games With Million Dollar Pictures Of Monkeys'
and yet, here we are
crypto ads now in google maps navigation (Score:2)
Today I plotted a route to a store on Google maps. Google maps made sure to show me there was a Crypto ATM along my route.
Can I register this quote as an NFT? (Score:2)
Just asking on behalf of a friend.
Video cards (Score:2)
I think it went wrong much earlier. The purpose of video cards were to play video games.
Rule #1 (Score:2)
Rule #1 of capitalism: If it can be exploited for financial gain, it will.
Lots of us techies don't understand that when we're in idealism mode.
Naive Techies. (Score:2)
Hopelessly naive Tech inventor/investor of disruptive tech complains that their ideas are being 'used wrong'.
News at 11.
Never forget... (Score:2)
The Ethereum founders premined 61.000.000 eth for themselves, early contributors and the ethereum foundation.That's about 272.000.000.000 USD worth (at nov 2021 values).
Bored Apes are peanuts compared to that.
Bitcoin has no such questionable legacy. Everybody had the chance to mine when it came out. No-one got early access.
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Opinion (Score:3)
The goal of Ethereum should be to drive consumption of that blockchain as a platform for other services in a service agnostic way. If people want to use it to claim ownership of monkey pics, so be it.
That's an easy point to miss about Ethereum. It is 1% a cryptocurrency and 99% a platform for public blockchain contract execution.
Why does it need a goal? (Score:2)
Does life have a goal?
According to who ?
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You'd think they'd be boomers; but these days it is a apparently the younger generation that are luddites.
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Cryptos total value is less than that of the total value of USD. By a very large amount I imagine.
Its a drop in the bucket cause it only touches a drop in the bucket.
Re: Million-dollar monkeys (Score:2)
However cryptocurrencies are great for pump&dump. It's the big players that can do it to increase their wealth.
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That's why stablecoins exist. USDT is shady af but DAI is much better. It's transparent about its collateralization.
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Not even remotely true. DAI on Polygon can be sent more-cheaply than USD via any major payment processor. What're you smoking?
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No, you are wrong, the purpose of social media is cat videos
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> Nope, that dude is lying out of his ass.
literally 10 minutes actually talking to him would convince you this is a total fabrication
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That's not so much a failure of Crypto as it is an indictment of the surrounding society. We can make axes and hammers and hope that people will build infrastructure but there's always idiots trying to bash people's heads in with them. Devise something that can help us explore space and watch for dangerous weather and someone will say that will be great for spying on our neighbors and we can deliver big bombs really fast now.
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So hammers, axes, rockets, and satellites are failures?
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It's a more complex mix. Also common, a peaceful technology will languish for lack of funds until the DoD sees "other" uses and funds it lavishly.
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the overall activity which is mostly pure speculation and money laundering.
Crypto money laundering is estimated to be $8 billion. Estimated money laundering per year is $800 billion-$2 Trilion. Crypto is nothing when it comes to money laundering and I suspect it is not a very effective way of laundering money anyway. Even with monero you can do a lot of data analysis and gather strong evidences.
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Only if:
1). Minting them is much cheaper
2). Rights to the actual artwork/object of the NFT are clearly defined at the time of sale/distribution/"air drop"