BLOCKCHAIN MY HEART (thread for all things blockchain)

Seems like we need a dedicated blockchain thread to keep track of all the permutations of snake oil, pyramid schemes, and whatever other ends people are attempting to put this interesting but ridiculously hyped technology toward.

e.g., in this week's news:

https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/8467928/emusic-raise-70m-new-blockchain-music-platform

And then there's blockchain-powered journalism!

http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/blockchain-journalism-startup-civil-launches-a-1-million-pot-to-support-media-startups-in-asia/

It's RESHAPING OUR ECONOMY!

https://www.forbes.com/sites/shermanlee/2018/07/31/privacy-revolution-how-blockchain-is-reshaping-our-economy/#1f3a9f131086

But wait, it's SUFFERING A SLOWDOWN!

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-blockchain-corporations-20180801-story.html

Maybe you can vote with it!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/blockchain-at-the-ballot-booth-maybe-someday-1533132001

And going back to this spring, you have my favorite bonkers business story of the year.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-mining-energy-prices-smalltown-feature-217230

Ooooh boy do I have stories to eventually share, maybe

My favorite subgenre of blockchain story is the Bitcoin Bro story. Like this:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/brock-pierce-hippie-king-of-cryptocurrency-700213/

A former employer features heavily in this story (more crypto- than blockahin-specific but you get the idea of the personalities floating around this space):

https://nypost.com/2018/05/17/inside-the-extravagant-money-and-parties-that-define-cryptocurrency-craze/

This quote is straight Silicon Valley stuff:

“Yeah, I’m cool — I’m cool with making myself super-dope rich and having awesome things and getting to enjoy visages that no one else does,” said Curtis Ingleton, CEO of Refinery, a Canadian compliance startup.

“But at the same time, man, what happens to all those poor people?” Ingleton asked, gesturing toward New Jersey. “What happens to every single one of those lights that’s across the way? What do they do? At the end of the day, man, they actually need to make their day happen to make me make my day happen, so it really is my day to make sure their lives happen. It’s a huge responsibility.”

blockchain could be immensely useful for music and music rights; and creative rights across the board. I wish people would tink of it as a cool technology and less as a get rich quick scheme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8EcrSjb85o

this was fucking with my head during the World Cup

There are definitely ppl working on potentially interesting/useful applications, but anything really impactful would likely be on the expensive side to actually build, and most of the investments in the technology are for...yep, get-rich-quick schemes (often masquerading as the former)

Then again I've met quite a few people, some of them pretty smart, who swear up and down that at the end of the day the blockchain is only really useful as the architecture for a cryptocurrency, so, shrug. It's certainly true that all the pilots and trials run by major financial institutions over the last few years seem to have gone nowhere.

xp

That HDAC ad is a good example of people just saying "blockchain" like it's magic. None of the technology it shows there depends on blockchain, though I suppose you could use blockchain to make it more secure etc.

Simple flowchart: pic.twitter.com/Q2NCyOLBTH

— vinton g cerf (@vgcerf) July 19, 2018

That HDAC ad is a good example of people just saying "blockchain" like it's magic. None of the technology it shows there depends on blockchain, though I suppose you could use blockchain to make it more secure etc.

This is kinda the whole thing. There seem to be very few worthwhile, workable use cases for doing anything other than sprinkling some fairy dust on yr stock price.

just (reluctantly tbh) decided not to apply for a copywriting position at BLOCKCHAIN INSIDER, will i regret this y/n

y, the tales you could tell about life @ BLOCKCHAIN INSIDER

I can tell you that the insights you'd have gleaned would likely not have been that interesting unless you're new to the concepts of sociopaths and/or grifters.

i have met other writers before now

It took China about 3 days of being officially interested in blockchain to make their intentions clear: transparent, panoptichain immutable social credit dystopia. https://t.co/b4mywRJIoW

— nic carter (@nic__carter) October 28, 2019

Serious q:

Has blockchain ever been used for anything, ever?

I tried to find some examples but everything was ‘proof or concept’ or old articles about how a company was ‘going to’ develop some blockchain thing

walmart used it to track lettuce iirc

well this is definitely the presidential candidate I have spent the most time listening to people yell at over the phone

I, Brock Pierce, am running for President of the United States of America. #2020 #BROCKTHEVOTE https://t.co/Ede6mABpTP pic.twitter.com/oTAmxuyOdm

— ₿rock Pierce 🦄🔱🙏🏼 (@brockpierce) July 5, 2020

yes it's used for bitcoin and people make money off that. whether they are still making the kinds of money they did in the past I dunno. my coinbase account is pretty low but I never bought very much.

is bitcoin used for anything

ever need to place a hit on someone? your best bounty hunters on the DarkWeb only take Ethereum.

yes good idea to use a completely trackable currency

We hope that by the time we are 94 we too will be able to muster interest in matters like blockchain, as the Queen has, writes the FT Alphaville's @jemimajoanna https://t.co/5iWLxz6KEO

— Financial Times (@FinancialTimes) November 24, 2020

I like The Queen's interested face

maybe she's just confused and thinks they are that plumbing chain from Pimlico owned by that awfully nice fellow with a hairpiece and a melted face

unblockchain

Queen was less interested when she found out it was not a peasant-torturing device.

https://niftygateway.com/collections/warnymphvolume1
everything about this shit is so fucking embarrassing and cynical it might trigger a manic episode for me idk

ok so originally NFTs were used by a game to demonstrate ownership of virtual assets, so the assets could be traded outside the game, but then used correctly within the game (because the game looked for the NFT.) not something I care very much about but at least it was doing something useful.

but now they're just being used to say "this perfectly, infinitely reproducible piece of digital art is Officially Mine". is that right?

It might be useful in this case to establish and defend copyright. If the unique identifier is reproduced multiple times without authorization the identity of the reproducer could be traced back.

i'm not sure but i'd imagine u don't need an NFT token to own a copyright or crawl the web for unauth'd duplicates. but i'm handwaving here.

this particular grimes project viscerally disgusts me for some reason.

As far as art goes I am forever aware of not wanting to be the guy sneering at Duchamp. BUT. This NFT stuff feels so simultaneously mercenary and dumb that it is hard to restrain myself. And as far as Grimes’ work specifically, it’s ugly bad art in any context.

afaics, this gives zero benefit to the buyer. and yes the art is atrocious, but that's beside the point.

As far as art goes

this isn't about art or aesthetic philosophy though, it's purely market design, as lukas's post points out

the nft thing is kind of blowing my mind. nba top shots, cryptokitties, and this shit. just boggles the mind. cool that there are communities in north america that don't have clean drinking water while there are people buying a video they could find on youtube for $$$

The dystopian storyline here is that we all end up violating unspecified copyrights of people who own NFTs, and have to pay a royalty to, like, brush our teeth.

blockchain is a non-solution in search of a non-problem

this particular grimes project viscerally disgusts me for some reason.

Grimes, a multi-hyphenate artist, is well known for her music and visual language. She has taken form as a simulation combining gamer fantasy, anime and manga, science fiction, apocalyptic omens, and anachronistic fashion among other genres. Her most recent series of artwork, WarNymph, is realized with her collaborator, Mac Boucher.

WarNymph is the Goddess of Neo-Genesis. She battles the destructive force of obsolete ideas and systemic decay that threatens the future. She embodies the power of perpetual regeneration that manifests in a state of infinite infancy where she sheds her old skin of corruption.

The first of her kind, WarNymph is a digital entity spliced from a pixel DNA of the organic human, Grimes. Merging the raw images of a photogrammetry scan, enunciating her iconic tattoos, with a retopologized mesh that was sculpted, modelled, and morphed into a variety of forms before being permanently sealed into the body of a baby angel, a cherub. She exists in the liminal state of the virtual world, a Grimes narrative universe, within an alternate history of mythology and the infinite fragments of the future. She is a pioneer in the rapidly expanding metaverse.

I think I found the reason

I miss the days when grimes was just an annoying local art brat

Grimes starting to feel like 'Bjork as a Black Mirror plot'

said it in the other thread, but this is digital beanie babies

This is much worse than digital Beanie Babies. This is even-worse Damien Hirst but grifting a wider range of rubes instead of just oligarchs.

I used to think fads like beanie babies were a bad comparison since you can't create unlimited amounts of cryptocoins. But since you can create a new currency at will, it really is beanie babies.

At least you can hold a beanie baby, and possibly use it to bring joy to a child (of any age)

Beanie babies didn’t waste as much energy and were less likely to be exchanged for fentanyl or child pornography.

I want criminals to use blockchain as currency, because it's so easy to trace back to them.

Can't believe people would buy that stuff.

FWIW I meant NFTs specifically are digital beanie babies, not blockchain generally.

So Grimes cleared $5.8m, tho it's hard not to wonder if some of the higher-end purchases were by Elon.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/grimes-sold-nft-art-1948177

almost spit out coffee @ this

Nice!! I made this NFT of Elon Musk@elonmusk 😃😃 pic.twitter.com/wV1ZSHdHun

— Alchememist 🍥 (@thealchememist) February 28, 2021

that is dumb as hell but the strawberry flamingo is pretty cool

🙏🙏🙏 thank you!!
I'll auction it in 3 days with a few other original artworks. These will be single mint gold edition NFTs on Tezos blockchain, so people will need #XTZ $XTZ to bid. Bidding is super easy through Kukai wallet+directauth - check it out at https://t.co/AgEbZVXrEL

— Alchememist 🍥 (@thealchememist) February 28, 2021

Alchemist gonna use the funds to buy three more MPC2500s as backups.

https://www.reuters.com/article/retail-trading-nfts/insight-how-a-10-second-video-clip-sold-for-6-6-million-idUKL8N2KV6X9

I was under the impression that NFTs use blockchains.

They do, Ethereum.

That Top Shot thing from the article is ridiculous. People will do the stupidest shit with money.

I think collectible sports cards and comics are dumb but they paid my parents' rent until I was a teenager and have now paid my rent for years and stretching really hard there's a way to view the Top Shot as a contemporary version of that I guess, but a card with an edition of 40 and an unlimited number of similar editions (every time Lebron posterizes someone they can coin a new one) would never be worth more than a few bucks.

also it doesn't burn a rainforest to hand a Keith Giffen trading card to somebody

there's no real need for the NBA thing to even use blockchain tech, but i'm sure all the nonsense buzz means people are paying far more than they would otherwise

Get an Oakland A’s suite for one bitcoin, then turn a GIF taken from the window into a NFT and pay for it.

I'm reading attack of the 50 foot blockchain right now. it's funny! i did not realize that most of the early bitcoin boosters were gold standard morons.

WHERES TIPSY MOTHRA?

i did not realize that most of the early bitcoin boosters were gold standard morons.

yeah this is true of a lot of ppl in the space, not just the early boosters

WHERES TIPSY MOTHRA?

Still sitting here without a bitcoin to my name.

Out of curiosity I dug into how NFT's actually reference the media you're "buying" and my eyebrows are now orbiting the moon

— Jonty Wareing (@jonty) March 17, 2021

That $65 million NFT only referenced the URL and not the actual artwork. And this is how all NFTs operate. Most of them are already broken links.

*most, not all

Who would have thought anything could go wrong.

Saturday night mood:#dogetothemoon #DogeSlimJim pic.twitter.com/pKRiwMgQIw

— Slim Jim 🚀 (@SlimJim) March 21, 2021

according to david gerard's book, the dogecoin community is pretty chill. mostly they're just playing around with the fad. they sponsored the jamaican bobsled team to get them to the olympics one year.

https://rug.wtf/

ok lol

so is that working or is it a joke or what? i honestly can't tell.

it's a real thing, and people have spent 300k in eth on it in half a day

I hate this so much

lol so it may not be a great sign when this is your actual president:

https://foreignpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/nayib-bukele-bitcoin-city-GettyImages-1236700782.jpg

At the Latin American Bitcoin and Blockchain Conference on Nov. 20, Bukele came onstage to an animation of beaming down from a flying saucer and outlined his plans for Bitcoin City: a new charter city to be built from scratch, centered on bitcoin mining—and powered by a volcano.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/12/06/bitcoin-city-el-salvador-nayib-bukele/

Bad news folks, munchables has been compromised.

Munchables has been compromised. We are tracking movements and attempting to stop the the transactions. We will update as soon as we know more.

— Munchables (@_munchables_) March 26, 2024

all my schnibble welcome packs gone

Looking for extra ways to munch? 👀

Try your luck and spin on @insrtapp to win starter pack rewards including a free Munchables and some Schnibble Welcome Packs 🥜 https://t.co/PXS2a9BXjL

— Munchables (@_munchables_) March 25, 2024

Bloopchain your friends, and blorpchain them back

a friend asked me out for coffee, figured something was up

he asked me if I knew what our mutual friend was up to

not really, no, last time I checked he'd stopped working in tv and was trying to find freelance consulting work instead, it wasn't working too well and he was a bit depressed

turns out our mutual friend has been doing business with someone called "Ian" he encountered on Telegram, who's apparently based in Switzerland, and so he and "Ian" are creating a blockchain based AI and "Ian" just needs about $50,000 to get their prototype up and running and when that happens they'll instantly receive $5 million from a big investor, so they're right now looking for smaller investors to reach their goal and it's basically a chance to get your money back x100

blockchain and AI, what could go wrong

like most things blockchain, sounds like a scam

Did anyone get the book “Number Go Up” and read it? I heard it was good

Also still feeling bad for Michael Lewis that he fell for SBF so hard that his legacy is now 99% the moneyball guy and 1% that guy who got it completely wrong about the cryptocurrency fraudster

also also, none of my nerdy technologist buddies who were all about finding useful ways to employ blockchain 10 years ago are still talking about it, like not at all. It all has “solution in search of a problem” stamped on it plus the ransomware stank of bitcoin

now everyone just wants to talk about LLM benchmarking

yeah otm

my friend was wondering if this might be the real deal, a golden business opportunity, and I had to let them down, it's definitely a scam

hope we'll be able to convince our mutual friend to not send more crypto to his Swiss "partner"