Last time I checked it was on a par with a country of 70 million people.
But still less than YouTube.
You really think that every company in the world doesn’t know, or isn’t aware of it’s quarterly utility bill?
Visa is a tiny part of a global financial network. And their quarterly bill is a tiny part of their own real cost. They will rely on numerous third parties they communicate with. Then there is the production of all the physical equipment and software they and their third parties use.
Somebody pointed out above that it can cost more to create physical coins than their actual worth. That's before they are physically moved around each respective nation and stored in secure locations, all of which required an entire supply chain to produce.
I'm sure somebody has made a stab at it, but it would be difficult to put together even a very rough, simple cost of the existing financial system. Whereas the blockchain is just that. You can download the entire thing onto your home computer, every transaction ever made, and it relies on nothing but miners.
I'm not defending the technology. I'm quite open minded and genuinely curious about the answers myself. I just think it's too easy to say it uses the power of a small nation. That in itself doesn't discredit it. That in itself doesn't mean anything, it's not a useful comparison. The current financial system could be consuming the power of 10 small nations and nobody really knows.
Also, the optimistic viewpoint would be that it could one day run on entirely clean energy, because of its simplicity.
Well I’m not concerned with the cost of servicing transactions, more about mining new coins. That’s the bit that’s always going to increase. When a central bank controls money supply, Visa’s energy consumption is not affected.
I have to admit, this is not something I fully understand: how it is sustainable in the long term.
Visa is a tiny part of a global financial network. And their quarterly bill is a tiny part of their own real cost. They will rely on numerous third parties they communicate with. Then there is the production of all the physical equipment and software they and their third parties use.
You're clutching at straws here. A single bitcoin transaction generates that 285g of e-waste. That's the ASIC's being run till they die or become unprofitable.
Think just how many conventional transactions VISA are probably doing on 285g of server every second? You can figure it out actually. A typical board in a blade server has the I/O capacity for about 256 requests/second (more if they're just pings, less if it's something really complex) and weighs about 8kg.
So by 9:00:00:03, 3 hundredths of a second into its first day it's handled more requests than would have killed it doing "simple" bitcoin work.
[gross oversimplification, there will be more requests than just transactions, most request are just one server asking another what time is it so they can keep in sync, but 3 hundredths of a second Vs the entire lifetime of a piece of equipment gives an indication of how un-simple bitcoin transaction recording is]
Also, the optimistic viewpoint would be that it could one day run on entirely clean energy, because of its simplicity.
Ermmm, the entire purpose is it's CRYPTO currency, the reason it has such a monumentally huge carbon footprint.
Well I’m not concerned with the cost of servicing transactions, more about mining new coins. That’s the bit that’s always going to increase. When a central bank controls money supply, Visa’s energy consumption is not affected.
I have to admit, this is not something I fully understand: how it is sustainable in the long term.
The mining and recording of transactions are one and the same.
In unencrypted terms the "new" blockchain after a coin is minted is a list of every transaction thus far.
In very high level terms the "proof of work" part of mining is taking that plus a challenge and finding the encryption key that matches the two together. A bit like when people say it would take the CIA however many computing hours to unencrypt an iPhone, except it's just trying to unencrypt that you bought a latte.
Ermmm, the entire purpose is it’s CRYPTO currency, the reason it has such a monumentally huge carbon
I was referring to the fact that it's a self contained technology. It doesn't rely on an immeasurable number of component parts (and I still think the visa transaction thing is being over-simplified)
Anyway, I don't want to derail the thread with a done-to-death topic. Back to NFTs.
Yeah, I'm slowly getting into physical gold thanks.
I have a suspicion that these things are all the result of central banks printing free money since 2008 and crazy low interest rates. If that ever changes they will rapidly become worthless. But I could be wrong.
Too much of this horseshit going around.
The central banks don't print free money. They issue digital money under the government's instruction for society to function.(as well as other more pointless tasks.) This money is spent into existence and is the only way money is ever created in a sovereign state. Commercial banks lend money but they are netted back to zero at some point when the loan is paid back.
They've done it for decades, and it's nothing new. And it's not responsible for inflation.
You are referring to Q/E. This is not printing money either. This is an asset swap of reserves/gilts between the bond market and the BoE. It's less than perfect and it shows how messed up things are but is just an extension of monetary operations that the BoE carried out to keep bonds in check.
Crypto people are annoyed because they look to blame their ups and downs on the fed, it's all over twitter.
Just accept it's a volatile market, influenced mostly by whales shaking you out.
If anyone wants to invest in NFTs, I've got a receipt for a bridge for sale.
The current financial system could be consuming the power of 10 small nations and nobody really knows.
Maybe but that is supporting the world's economy. Bitcoin isn't, it's just a get rich scheme for early investors.
I'm ambivalent about whether crypto currency will turn out to be a workable long term medium of exchange or a pyramid - but NFTs are a pyramid. If you make money out of NFTs, somebody has lost it - although that might be by buying something useless.
NFTs aren't a pyramid, you buy it like any other item and own it, that's that.
You just need to remember somethings only worth what someone will pay, and that like art, tastes change.
One or two crypto's will end up as currency. The rest will go to zero as they're fundamentally worthless
So in the same way that an original Van Gough is worth a lot more than a print, now the original picture of some meme is worth a lot more than copies of it. This wasn’t possible before as all copies were identical.
All copies are still identical I thought? With an NFT you basically have a receipt saying that your copy is the original one, even though it is identical in absolutely every respect to all the others. Or am I way out?
How do I know an NFT is the original?
The NFT isn't the thing itself, and there is only one of it, so it is kind of the original by definition I think. So the monkey picture itself is fungible - any instance of it is interchangeable with any other. But the NFT isn't. That's how I understand it anyway
EDIT I don't understand though what stops you generating another NFT for your copy of something that someone else already has an NFT for.
All copies are still identical I thought? With an NFT you basically have a receipt saying that your copy is the original one, even though it is identical in absolutely every respect to all the others. Or am I way out?
Nope, that's correct. What you've bought is not the image itself, but a kind of certificate of authenticity.
How do I know an NFT is the original?
You'd need to verify it with the artist - perhaps they have info about it on their website. Or by email. Because there's nothing to stop anyone putting up a Picasso and claiming it's the original. Buyer beware!
I've heard people suggest that NFTs could be used for gig tickets or somesuch - sounds like a more plausible use case. But it will need the current JPG / grift bubble to subside first I think...
EDIT I don’t understand though what stops you generating another NFT for your copy of something that someone else already has an NFT for.
Nothing at all - indeed as posted previously, here's a website to assist you to do exactly that: https://nftreplicas.net/
Nothing at all – indeed as posted previously, here’s a website to assist you to do exactly that: https://nftreplicas.net//blockquote >
So (thinking out loud here) how do you assign or claim any value to an NFT, without some other framework/authority to say that one is the 'real' one? Because you'd end up with two perfectly valid, genuine NFTs. Or does it all come back to the artist's say so?
EDIT just read your earlier post again which answers that exact question! Still it does seem to make the whole blockchain aspect of it redundant, if it doesn't encode authenticity?
Yeah, it's such an issue that sites like DeviantArt have launched tools to detect unauthorised NFT-ing of their users work.
There are of course legit artists selling their work as NFTs - sirromj has linked a few upthread - but at the moment, while the whole thing is a big media bubble, and people are talking about making a killing from flipping their NFTs - it's basically ripe for scams and fraud.
Almost all the expensive NFTs you'll hear of (Bored Apes, Cryptopunks etc) are not the work of 'artists as such' (although an artist was probably involved at some point, perhaps earning a couple of hundred on UpWork or Fiverr) but small companies that generate a shitload of potentially sellable pictures. The market is now flooded with others trying to do the same thing - there's not really any 'art' there, just money making schemes.
Which is a bit of a shame because there are people I respect who insist that underneath all the shit there is a kernel of a great idea there, it's just it's getting buried by all the grifters.
But personally I struggle to see how that can go away; in a truly decentralised system there's an incentive to try and rip people off, and very little to stop bad actors.
With an NFT you basically have a receipt saying that your copy is the original one, even though it is identical in absolutely every respect to all the others.
Correct AIUI. But the same is true of many things. The original print of a famous photo is identical to all subsequent prints or copies of it, isn't it? A first edition of a book is the same as other later editions (if they haven't changed the cover).
It just means that if you buy an NFT it can't be duplicated without it being obvious. What you then decide to do with that concept is up to you.
But we're taking about 8bit pictures of monkeys here, it's hardly a reprint of constables 'the hay wain'.
But we’re taking about 8bit pictures of monkeys here,
it’s hardly a reprint of constables ‘the hay wain’.
It's exactly the sort of art you'd expect from programmers and the scammers that want to make money from it frankly. ie, soulless and just a wee bit childish and needy
It’s exactly the sort of art you’d expect from programmers
What?
A first edition of a book is the same as other later editions (if they haven’t changed the cover).
Apart from the bit where it says "first edition" and gives the publication date. Also different editions may have different typographies, explanatory bits and corrections etc.
Though I think it is the underlying work that has "editions" rather than the book, as it were.
Ahh here we go, best explanation of NFTs I've seen so fa 😀
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIoZj2AVUAA6_ax?format=jpg&name=large
What?
Because all NFT "art"produced by programmers sucks. Badly. And while it's tempting to point out that everything sucks now there seems to be a particular aesthetic at play with NFT as the visual expression of both aggression and boredom, as represented by video games. which is no surprise really. Art by people who have little understanding of how art actually functions and what it's for. Like asking people who've never been outside to paint a flower
Have you seen Floydies? It's a self-described “activism platform” selling MS Paint-quality portraits of George Floyd in various costumes. It's probably healthier to think of it as misguided, rather than cynical to the point of being offensive, but It is hard to parse the reasoning that got from riots to these images. Much less the artistic sensibility of whoever might buy them. But I suspect it has nothing to do with art or sensibility at all, in the same way the way pork-bellies traders aren't particularly interested in pigs, or the hedge fund manager is not interested in why the programmer can't articulate why his flowers look like they've been drawn by someone who's never seen them, but only had them described to them.
Because all NFT “art”produced by programmers sucks.
Much Wow. Just no point trying with you is there? You've got your views and see what you want to see and discount everything else.
