I’m an older generation and (generally) refrain from swearing myself, but seeing censored posts on Lemmy drives me fucking insane. This isn’t a preschool nor is it an advertiser-friendly place. We should keep it that way.

Horus Guard represent!

https://youtu.be/8dIdYkwWg_g

Taken a little out of context, but still funny.

If you’re suggesting something like cryptocurrency or a return to the gold standard, I challenge you to explain how that would help in this situation.

It’s 2024. It’s rude not to jam your tongue in there!

And dick?

But you couldn’t release your own projects based on this under pure MIT or Apache-2.0. Presumably you’d need to include the same restriction about selling on Atlassian’s marketplace.

A cryptocurrency without crypto is just a currency then?

Regardless of whether it’s eroding trust in cryptography today, I still assert it was a reasonable choice when the term was coined. Cryptocurrency depends fundamentally on cryptography.

just because it uses sha256 as it’s proof of work doesn’t make it crypto, as it was essentially picked out of a hat.

You could probably switch proof-of-work to use some non-cryptographic primitive with similar properties (maybe protein folding?) and it would still serve the same purpose, ignoring the economic problems. I will concede that point.

Bitcoin still cannot function without cryptography. Each UTXO is bound to a particular key pair. Each block refers to its parent using a hash. If either of those were switched to a non-cryptographic primitive, there would be no way to authenticate the owner of a UTXO, nor would there be a way to prove the ordering of blocks. Removing cryptography from cryptocurrency would make it entirely useless as a currency.

And for the signing of transactions, are we going to start calling bank checks crypto?

Banks existed for a thousand years without the existence of cryptography. If you removed cryptography from RCS, you’d still have the rest of the standard for messaging.

I hate to be that guy, but Bitcoin uses elliptic curve cryptography to sign transactions, and SHA256 is definitely in the field of cryptography. While cryptocurrency isn’t purely cryptography, it is cryptography plus economics. Borrowing the “crypto” prefix, at least in my opinion, is reasonable.

This is a government office. A government should be able to build the technical knowledge required to keep a private signing key secure.

I do agree that individual-to-individual cryptography is more difficult, but how often do you need to check the authenticity of a document from a friend or acquaintance, digital or otherwise?

Cryptography and PKI makes it pretty feasible to authenticate digital documents.

Gifs that end too soon.

Absolutely. GOG has a much better license and distribution model, but it’s still a license.

That’s not true. You still only receive a license to play the game, you do not own it. Directly from GOG’s website:

We give you and other GOG users the personal right (known legally as a ‘license’) to use GOG services and to download, access and/or stream (depending on the content) and use GOG content. This license is for your personal use. We can stop or suspend this license in some situations, which are explained later on.

Practically this means you cannot resell your GOG installer in the way you could resell a physical book.

Characterized by extreme refinement or self-indulgence, often to the point of unworldiness or decadence

Damn you meme, making me learn a new word.

The problem with copyright is that it cannot be automatically enforced. Twitter did do a trial with nft avatars, but yeah, people just got made fun of. It’s possible to tie a copyright license to an NFT if you want, but copyright and NFTs serve different goals IMO.

Anyways, I don’t want to take up more of your time. Thanks for a very reasonable discussion! It doesn’t happen often.

I’m a furry, so I’m going to use an example that is familiar to me. Apologies if you dislike furries. Also note that, as far as I am aware, the general opinion of furries is strongly against blockchain.

So, some setup:

• I have a character. I pay artists to draw art of my character.
• There is a… subgroup among furries that do not get art of their own, and instead use other people’s art as avatars/profile pictures for erotic roleplay.
• I would prefer that I am the only one using my character’s art as profile pictures (erotically or not.)
• Some furries sell their characters and associated art to other furries.

Here’s how NFTs would actually be useful:

Whenever an artist draws some art, they mint an NFT and transfer it to the character’s owner. Now that owner can prove to whatever roleplay websites that they officially have permission from the artist. The roleplay websites would need to allowlist artists for this to be effective.

You could (partially) solve this with PGP or some other non-blockchain cryptographic tool. What NFTs offer above this is that there is only one current owner. That makes it possible to safely transfer ownership of a character to someone new.

Oh, sorry, I wasn’t intending to argue against your main point. For the most part, I agree with you.

What I don’t agree with is that the value of NFTs (as a technology) is dubious. Instead I think it’s overstated.

In the same vein as “LLMs can write Python”, NFTs provide ownership information. Regardless of what some asshat pays for a picture of a monkey, the underlying technology still has merit.

I’d argue that people got way too excited about what NFTs offer. Being able to own/transfer a digital item with a standardized interface is interesting technically (and has real value, for example ENS names), but holy hell did people go all Beanie Baby on them…