Shanghai gives nod to NFT trading platforms – TechCrunch
techcrunch.com
The government of Shanghai supports "leading companies to explore building NFT exchanges." Although not national, what is trialed in Shanghai can be an example.

“Blockchain should be “deeply merged” with AI, big data and other new technologies to “empower” fintech applications, for instance” - the document says

Holy shit, blockchain merged with AI AND BIG DATA. Somebody get Softbank and Sequoia on the phone, Shanghai is going to be the first city with a quadrillion dollar market cap. How the fuck do I buy calls on Shanghai with margin

    • SpaceCowboy@lemmygrad.ml
      162·
      2 years ago

      As a former lawyer who worked with IP some and someone who has done some decent research on this stuff imo NFTs have been massively slandered by skin-deep analyses on msm and internet “journalists”. The internet sentiment machine that convinced millions covid is no big deal, that the DPRK executes generals every other day, etc has been turned on wrt blockchain. Have NFT’s been used to launder money? Yes. but that doesn’t define it’s potential application. I personally see the huge amount of money transacted via bored apes - and covered suspiciously extensively by MSM - as a straw man to make people think there is nothing interesting in this tech and that is just more crime in the crypto space (which there is a lot of). That is just more art gallery money laundering (which I personally believe is happening in many mmo’s but that is a story for another day). The idea that someone would spend that much on a jpeg is indeed laughable, but these people aren’t stupid, they have another angle and are laundering money in the open. Like Parenti said “when you think they’re stupid, you’re being stupid”. Way too many people want to jump to the conclusion that these people with tons of money at their disposal are stupid.

      There is 100% something useful in this technology for keeping track of legal documents (like deeds to a house), intellectual property, ownership, etc. Blockchain could eventually revolutionize record keeping for hospitals and healthcare (as someone who moves a lot this is really really hard to deal with). It will do the same for video game ownership. NFTs are in early days now and have 100% been used to launder money and scam people, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t good that we are getting a system that permits actual ownership of digital assets rather than a license in perpetuity. Imagine if tomorrow steam went out of business? It could happen. And you would lose your library of games. Because you don’t own them, you have a license to them for as long as steam has access to the games. This actually happens all the time with movies you 'buy" on amazon and as we speak ubisoft is pulling certain Assassin’s creed DLC from steam.

      I kind of bite my tongue on this site wrt nft but it is a bit dissappointing to see people so good at seeing through propaganda fall for the anti-blockchain propaganda. It is a nuanced situation where wall street and their scammer/hanger ons wants to use it and monopolize it before they socialize it but they also kind of fear what it could do to their grip on financial power in the stock market and the middlemen companies also fear it. Musicians, indie game developers, filmmakers, artists, etc will be able to bypass publishers, art galleries, etc.

      We are in early days but I personally think it could be massive. It is a more fair way to have market forces at work on a personal level in the modern world and could actually cut back on corruption by decreasing the opacity of legal and financial documentation.

      Maybe I am the one who is wrong, but the way in which the online sentiment has so quickly turned against it is insane to me. I’m not investing in it or anything, but I am withholding judgment.

      Also, final data point - Shanghai is the city which fumbled the lockdowns because they’re too westernized/liberalized so maybe I am totally wrong and they are falling for another western bullshit idea. But I actually think blockchain and NFTs would be helpful in a socialist society as well. It could be a great organizational tool.

      As an aside - fuck crypto mining, that’s not what I am saying at all, what I am saying is that we should parse the good tech from the not so good tech. Not just buy the corporate media’s very generalized straw man hook line and sinker.

      • electrodynamica
        101·
        2 years ago

        I have a somewhat different perspective. It seems you are starting with the axiom that intellectual property is a real and valid thing, and that it’s somehow desirable to exist. My axiom is the opposite, and I have at least anecdotal evidence to back that up.

        I don’t really care much about MSM or propaganda because I don’t ever subject myself to it.

        Another thing is blockchains are inherently centralized. Contrary to silly con valley, capitalists, and their propaganda outlets, it is neither decentralized nor p2p. The part that is non-central is trust (¹ not really though) because it is “trustless”. This goes against the very basic wiring of the social brain, which is very intertwined with trust, even subconsciously, even when people don’t actually realize it. My theory is the reason why silly con valley and capitalists like “trustless” so much, is because they are all sociopaths, and they know that they themselves can’t be trusted, nor could their competitors/peers. So to them “trustless” is very appealing.

        As for what China wants with it, I know only about medical records. They are in a partnership with Oracle to build a medical records Blockchain since around 2015 or therabouts. Oracle has always been greedy for medical records, my suspicion is because Larry Ellison wants credit for curing some disease, he also wants to make money violating people’s privacy to benefit USA medical insurance companies. For China, to believe their chief scientists and executives involved in the project, is they want to socialize medical research: to easily identify study participant candidates, as well as potential patients in need of intervention.

        I personally believe that an open market of records custodians is a better solution to the use case you mentioned, from the patient’s perspective, as well as for the potential medical research use cases, to ensure positive consent and maintain privacy. Central blockchains fail at these things horribly. The reason why medical records are such an issue is providers like to make themselves custodians, which suffers from the same problems as blockchains for the most part.

        For artists, DLC, and such, no gatekeepers are actually necessary. Look at artists like Louis CK and his direct to consumer special. He also self-produced a movie which is out in theaters and will be available for DTC as well AFAIK. I very much disagree with the release-for-free-with-hopes-of-increased-live-performance model, however. I favor a busking style voluntary pay-what-its-worth model. People who don’t pay will never pay, and pirate quality will necessarily be poorer, therefore less desirable. It also invites the wealthy to pay a lot more. Patrons of the arts used to be a thing. The blockchain model you mentioned still requires DRM and IP, which as I mentioned, I strongly disagree with.

        ¹You are still trusting the algorithm, the programmers, and the auditors of the code

        • SpaceCowboy@lemmygrad.ml
          9·
          2 years ago

          Thanks for sharing. Very good points. I have spent enough time writing on here today but I just want to share a quick couple points.

          1. I totally agree with you on IP - it is a weapon which is used by the bourgeoisie to create barriers to entry, destroy and consolidate economies that play by their rules (biotech companies are the devil), and an intangible rentier system. The more I worked with it the more I felt it was literally just rent extraction, but that is the system we live in and unless there is a revolution in the west we are stuck with IP for a while longer.

          2. The barrier to entry for louis ck releasing his direct to consumer special is not insignificant. You say no gatekeepers are necessary but not all artists can afford the team required to monetize their videos/movies.

          3. Did not know about the oracle connection, very interesting

          4. Also, very interesting point on the provider/custodian dynamic. Huge overlap in conflict of interest I hadn’t considered. The main reason I commented the above was to push back a bit on the hate train that seems to superficially dismiss something that may have some applications if done correctly. Thank you for engaging in a discussion on the matter

          • electrodynamica
            5·
            2 years ago
            1. I think FOSS / automation could help with this a lot. Also, UBI. A videographer / editor might not require payment up front if they had UBI to rely on. After all they are artists too. They could take an equity stake instead, and ultimately maybe even get paid more for their efforts in the end.
            2. Yeah, they needed him to cut through red tape to get FDA and EU regulator approval (which they have)
            3. I actually worked on this specific issue for a few years. I even wrote software and tried to start up a custodian business at one point. Ironically I couldn’t market it because I ran out of funds, so then I tried to do it as a nonprofit, figuring the marketing would cost less and ultimately open source would be better. I went to a conference and tried to market my nonprofit but they only cared about the Chinese Blockchain and some “federated” open source project that actually sounded cool but turned out to be more of the same. I knew hospitals would see me as a competitor but I figured the MDs would want nothing to do with the records headache and would be attracted to the privacy benefits, the ease with handling caretakers and guardians, etc. Only 1 person out of 3000+ attendees was interested. He was a caretaker for an elderly relative, and although his relative had passed, he said he would’ve definitely used my product. I spent my entire marketing budget on that one conference and had to give up.😔
            • SpaceCowboy@lemmygrad.ml
              6·
              2 years ago

              Very good points again. I think the equity stake thing is a great way to get projects off the ground that otherwise wouldn’t be able to by aligning interests.

              1. Damn. This is the kind of shit that pisses me off when people talk about how “capitalism promotes innovation” it literally does the opposite. It is a system that stifles any kind of meritocracy and reduces so much to “who do you know”. In my experience capitalist enterprises actually want conflicts of interest as much as possible, a lot of money to be made in zones of ambiguity.
              • electrodynamica
                5·
                2 years ago

                It’s important that the equity thing is only available to people who already have their basic needs met.

                1. I completely agree with your assessment. To expand on that “federated open source” application I mentioned, it only federated in the sense that it supported legacy protocols created when HIPAA first passed, similar to EDI with banking, where you have to be a member of an organization and pay dues to gain access to even the protocol specification, but more than that, it’s set up with all sorts of hoops you have to jump through just to be a member, which goes along with what you said “who you know”. It was also marketed to hospitals and doctors, as just a replacement for other systems that work exactly the same, with no regard to patients or their caregivers and guardians. Furthermore, I looked into the venture capitalist who funded this project. The capitalist websites all ranked him as the number one investor for medical startups locally. The 2nd place was a very distant second. He was a presenter at the conference and I explained my concept in the public Q&A and he said it sounded very promising. So after I looked him up and sent him materials and even wrote an essay on how my ideas could be incorporated into that project. On his website he has planks like a politician explaining the things he “cares about”. I made sure to address every single point in my essay. I even applied to an “incubator” he runs and made sure to check all the boxes for their rules. I got no response at all. Complete radio silence. Not even a “thanks, but we’re not interested”. I spent around 150-200 hours preparing all that stuff. I gave it chance. I met them where they’re at. They aren’t interested. Unless your idea furthers their current scams, forget it. This is why I actually think your statement that for now we’re stuck with IP is a bit naive. Yes revolution is necessary. It’s necessary for all the bits. These people are fucking evil ghouls that can’t be reasoned with. Revolution is the only option.
                • SpaceCowboy@lemmygrad.ml
                  3·
                  2 years ago

                  That sucks man. My off the cuff guess is that they don’t want your tech which will actually make complying with federal regulations easily. I have a buddy who works with utilities and it’s the same thing, compliance is viewed as something to intentionally underfund so you have plausible deniability for a fuck up. And I agree that they are evil ghouls, the utility company knows that non-compliance may result in forest fires but they know that when there is a forest fire they can get their politicians to go to bat for them and the government will bail them out.

        • SpaceCowboy@lemmygrad.ml
          9·
          2 years ago

          You’re welcome. I am not like a devout follower of crypto and NFT’s or anything but I think the online sentiment is thin on factual analysis and heavy on “it’s being used to scam people so it’s bad” literally everything in capitalism is a scam.

          • holdengreen@lemmygrad.ml
            7·
            2 years ago

            I put money in crypto. Not a bad thing to learn and experiment with using money you can stomach losing or having locked in there for a long time.

      • pinkeston@lemmygrad.ml
        OP
        5·
        2 years ago

        I’m a software engineer who has done very little research into blockchain admittedly but the issue I have with blockchain is that is it really the best solution or is it just the current hyped trend?

        It is decentralized but you can achieve similar security and resistance with a proper cloud setup with replicated databases, monitors, self healing, backups/snapshots, rollbacks, security team, etc.

        Proof of work also scales terribly, it’d be so much energy waste for a country like China or even a city like Shanghai

        Proof of stake looks good but who’s gonna provide the stake? The Chinese government? Then that just centralizes it and might as well just have a normal date store setup at that point. The Chinese citizens? Highly doubtful China would allow that since staking is risking your savings

        • SpaceCowboy@lemmygrad.ml
          3·
          2 years ago

          I think it is a technology that will be used in a variety of ways. I think the whole decentralized thing is actually just a marketing ploy to sell shitcoins to gold bugs (I did an ad hoc analysis of the customer profile they are marketing crypto to and it has really shifted from tech guys to white collar conservatives who “don’t trust the government” i find it very interesting to watch this evolution). It is a very centralized technology. But as socialists if the government uses it to improve the efficiency of the system than that is really good!

          I think the idea of the Chinese government centralizing their system is exactly what they want to do to increase the oversight they have over the regional and municipal governments (where the corruption seems to predominate in China at this time).

        • SpaceCowboy@lemmygrad.ml
          7·
          2 years ago

          They provide a digital representation of ownership and are non fungible (means they are unique/not interchangeable) this creates a non-falsifiable, existing-by-default paper trail that removes the administrative need to show ownership of certain documents for digital transfer. So for something like a power of attorney, a NFT based legal document system could massively cut down on fraud in terms of issuing fake or multiple copies of the poa. This is why docusign was so successful in the early days of the pandemic, but their system is quite opaque and non externally verifiable (from what I understand, you just get the docusign seal of approval that this is legit) with NFT you get a paper trail which you can verify yourself quite easily.

          The Henan bank fraud - which is ongoing, where the same company leveraged their relationships with the regional banks to borrow a max amount from all the banks (I believe using the same collateral)- an NFT-based legal document system would definitely have caught that earlier. (If it comes out the way I imagine it could). It actually could put a pretty big stick in the spokes for a lot of the financial engineering that is happening in the West.

          I think non-insiders massively overestimate the sophistication of the financial world. They essentially introduced computers in 1980 and the private institutions have leveraged computers in an extremely lopsided way - their algos to exploit the market is sophisticated but the record keeping system is actually extremely archaic, and they like it that way.

          To be clear I am not in the archival/record keeping business and I have done only a little research into it but that is what I understand and I think that is more than most people who express strong opinions on the topicunderstand. The tech is still in development so that is part of why I am withholding judgment. I just know how easy it is to direct the internet hive mind and that there are some interesting non-scammy ideas within blockchain and NFTs.

          • Amicese@lemmy.ml
            2·
            2 years ago

            I just know how easy it is to direct the internet hive mind and that there are some interesting non-scammy ideas within blockchain and NFTs.

            How easy is it?

            • SpaceCowboy@lemmygrad.ml
              6·
              2 years ago

              Very easy if you have money to throw around. If MSM is for sale to corporate interests, social media is even more directly owned by them. Covid and Elon Musk have been the best examples of this imo. If you take a normal PR budget and spend it on internet culture investment you can confuse a whole bunch of people. I think the dead internet theory is partially true, that there are more bots on the internet than people. The feds and corporations throw money at online messaging like nobodies business.

              Vote/view boosting goes a LOOONG way to instilling viewer confidence that “this is legit”. Like there is no way a Fox news video gets millions of views on youtube in 24 hours, that is all manipulation which they use to instill the reactionaries with the idea that they aren’t in the minority (which they are)

  • Ratette (she/her)@lemmygrad.ml
    13·
    2 years ago

    Ngl I hoped china might be above NFTs especially given the bubble popped. Maybe they hoping to make some bob of the crypto dickheads still pushing them or maybe I’ve missed something here?

    • 201dberg@lemmygrad.ml
      41·
      2 years ago

      The issues as I understand it is that while initially NFTs have been used for the dumbest shit imaginable, tech bros buying monkey jpegs and money laundering, they have potential to be used for any electronic document or item that you don’t want to be copied or reproduced but also easily electronically transfered. I think medical files and other personal docs where a big one. Other things were applying it to any kind of electronic stock or similar credit system. Some big players that have fucked with the Chinese stock market before were making essentially fake shares and selling them. This is of course illegal but very hard to track and stop. China has banned companies and people from their market that have done this but crooks always find their way back in to any market. If said stocks were NFTs however they would essentially be impossible to make fakes of. If China wanted to have any kind of stock market etc and wanted to ensure it was more protected against this kind of fuckery then making their stock market NFT based would be one route.