Open up the monthly newsletter, and there's an article about how NFTs could revolutionise the industry

mfw :pika-cousin-suffering:

  • LaBellaLotta [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Ok only time I will make this dumb ass point because while true it’s stupidly pedantic and meaningless hypothetical brain masturbation.

    As I understand the technology is intended to work it could be a fine way to digitize the work of and potentially minimize the necessity of a bureaucratic class of people working for the state tasked with keeping track of and maintaining what the government owns.

    Let’s say the government owns everyone’s houses and you are guaranteed a home as a function of the state. In Lieu of issuing deeds and keeping parallel copies, the state could issue NFT’s as a way to keep track of whose house is whose and whose account to charge and stuff. This also has the benefit of being theoretically more secure and easier to back up. And there are definitely some other benefits I’m not thinking of to digitizing the bureaucratic structures of property management and finance.

    Material maintenance of these properties is still necessary of course. And the reason this shit is so dumb to talk about is that whatever digital architecture you would need to design to carry out the kind of useful state functions that advance socialism that are being imagined would require fundamentally altering many of the properties of the kinds of systems we are seeing designed today. The end result being something entirely different. For example, all NFT platforms and wallets and whatever other bullshit is required to own an NFT are all geared towards the goal of using the NFT as a commodity asset. something you buy low and sell high to make a profit from. This is a function you would want to actively prevent in the state owned NFT home deed system i described earlier. You would still need some mechanism for people to move and perhaps trade their home to another person but all of this would be approved and managed by the state, it could actually be pretty smooth theoretically.

    Theoretically. It could just as easily be a dystopian nightmare of digital ownership where everyone is a digital landlord squatting on some valueless bullshit and demanding a rent every time a certain emoji is used. The much more likely and obvious scenario we are lurching towards today. I get finding this stuff interesting, but it’s the genuine definition of putting the cart before the horse on the question of What Is To Be Done.

    Sorry to hear your unions full of dorks comrade. I suggest tactical and constructive bullying. God speed. o7

    • Ideology [she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      There are digital signatures and p2p systems that use significantly less energy and don't require a 'currency' to function. It's extremely old tech.

      • Sphere [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Well, blockchain is sort of a new technology, but it's one that solves a problem that wouldn't be faced in a leftist future. The goal of blockchain is to create a fully decentralized system in the absence of trust between actors. But a communist has no need for decentralization; the state can act as a central authority to maintain the system. And an anarchist has no need for decentralization without trust; anarchists can simply gather together for key-exchange meetings, allowing them to know which keys represent which actors, and assign the appropriate level of trust to each.

        • ShittyWallpaper [they/them]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          :this:

          The blockchain is, at its heart, a public, immutable, decentralized, trustless data structure. If you don’t need all 4 of those properties, there are better infrastructure and design choices for any subset of combinations of them.

      • LaBellaLotta [any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Yeah exactly, whatever digitized system that could be created and used to manage a socialized form of ownership is way more likely to have more in common with the tech that presaged NFT’s than actual Tech currently behind NFT’s and crypto writ large.

      • LaBellaLotta [any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I completely agree, the only difference being the level of integration into our lives, something that has very little to do with the actual base technology. This is the real innovative push of Web 3. Do you think crypto currency’s in general could simply be understood as a sort of decentralized database that the entry’s in it take on a totemic quality for the people who obsess over them? Taking on a perceived value to them that is completely imaginary to everyone else. Like a techno lovecraftian horror story.