They're seriously pitching "ads get sent directly to your wallet" as a positive feature. This is so comically, tragically misguided I don't know whether to laugh or cry. This is future indeed. Because, after all, a major weakness in mere credit card transactions is you don't have a relationship with your customer. In our crypto-future, they won't have a choice! Isn't that what you want? Comforting your customer every time they have a bad breakup with an algorithmically optimized offer for some ice cream and emotional shopping? Maybe try to associate your brand with their good feelings by sending a couple messages about the smooth, refreshing taste of your soft drink at their child's football game? Without your customer offering you a contact method, how could you possibly target them so effectively and personally?
The more I learn about crypto the ickier it gets.
The first is an unobtainable, unrealistic goal that ultimately sours the idea of NFTs in the eyes of anyone that bought into them, thinking it was possible (or even viable to somehow encourage every game/world developer to put in the unpaid work to support arbitrary meshes, textures, mappings, animations, etc).
The second could have been an email, or even just a URL/code on the receipt.
While "any" is doing a lot of work, there will be a gigantic secondary market for certain brands that will certainly warrant the time to have designers create assets for certain games. Supreme / Gucci / Louis Vuitton / etc. Buy the apparel and own it for free by selling the NFT to a perpetually-online goofball with a credit card.
Assume I own a game studio and someone (say, Louis Vuitton) wants to convince me to add a purse NFT to one of my games.
Unless they pay me to do so, I'm not going to dedicate the several-person workload (between artists, shader techs, QA, and production) necessary to implement that asset into the game for a single user unless they pay me to do so. This seems like a reasonable requirement on my end (and although there may be a company or two that might warrant the "free" work, the vast majority will not).
Therefore, Louis Vuitton now has a "cost" for their otherwise-free value-add NFT -- which can now be multiplied by the number of game studios they need to convince to add their NFT(s) to their game(s). Obviously, this can't scale to "any" game in the current industry (e.g. literally thousands of incompatible engines in use during any year's new releases) and also increases in cost over time as more games come out and/or older games would get updated.
This is also also for Louis Vutton -- I'm even less incentivized to spend more and more manhours implementing NFTs for smaller and smaller brands, and every brand that requests their NFT(s) added to my game(s) is competing in a zero-sum game against eng resources being put towards, well, real work that generates ongoing revenue for the company.
In the current industry, there would be literally hundreds of thousands of manhours required (if not more) to add a single NFT to "any" game, and still a significant amount of that to add a single NFT to "some" games. The primary beneficiary of adding NFTs to a game is Louis Vutton (with a value-add on purse sales) -- not the studio that actually has to do the hard work to implement it. So... why would they?
How can Solana be the next Visa if it keeps going down every time. If this system is going down now, it certainly cannot scale when more people use it.
With regards to international transfers, [Transfer]Wise and OFX have shown the way forward (not just cost of course, but also UX), and from there it should be a race to commoditization of that model.
https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow
https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_faq.htm
https://www.frbservices.org/binaries/content/assets/crsocms/...
https://explore.fednow.org/explore-the-city?id=3&building=ne...
How is a PoW coin emitting 1 per second with no financial reward of any kind for the developers, who wrote the software from scratch, a centralised ponzi?
Oh good, that's what I want - a currency that includes spam as a feature. That was really missing from cash.
> We believe this will pave the way for a future where digital currencies are prevalent and digital money moves through the internet like data – uncensored and without intermediaries taxing every transaction.
Chargebacks and anti-money laundering rules are features. "crypto is a tax avoidance scheme" is not a sales pitch, it's conspiracy to commit a crime.
> settling immediately with costs measured in fractions of a penny
So like an intermediary party charging a tax?
> this is about a vision where all currencies – including U.S. dollars – are on-chain
Convenient for tracking people! Also terrible for the environment.
> When a customer buys something, it’s a vote of support. A merchant should reward that support with personalized offers, on-chain loyalty programs, and unique virtual goods to accompany physical purchases
I'd really settle for just getting the widget I bought and not being spammed. Really. I promise. Please stop spamming me.
> Merchants should benefit from all of the advantages that on-chain decentralized payments can provide, such as network cost savings, DeFi yield generation, zero fraud liability, instant settlement, and ownership of the customer relationship.
Merchants should have fraud liability. If you are enabling fraud and money laundering, you need to pay for that - potentially with jail time.
> Help us bring to life a decentralized payments network that will define this next era of payments.
Another clueless middleman who wants a piece of the pie by helping others commit crime and avoid liability for their actions. Adding funny new words does not make your thing not a security. Ignoring regulations does not make you immune to punishment. Lofty ideas do not make you a hero.
Solana published a report on the energy usage of their blockchain:
https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-...
"By the end of 2021, the Foundation plans to introduce a program to help make Solana’s validator network carbon neutral and offset the footprint of the ecosystem."
Does anyone know if they've accomplished this yet since the report states by the end of 2021?
https://solana.com/news/solana-foundation-carbon-neutral-202...
Can you explain the environmental critique a bit?
A Solana transaction consumes about as much energy as two Google searches. Where exactly would the environmental damage come from?
When a platform has a hard supply-side to build out (in this case, developers and apps) making the platform owner a competitor seems incredibly short-sighted. IIRC, Intel famously refused to get into end-user devices like calculators because of this exact dynamic.
I guess this project was started before discovering Solana has massive stability problems.
What comes after jumping the shark?
This leads me to wonder: Why would I want an NFT of my sneakers in a game or virtual world, rather than just, say, a representation of the sneakers themselves, minus the NFT? I suspect it's because this introduces scarcity into the virtual world. There's no technical reason why every character in the game couldn't have the same pair of sneakers modeled on a real-life sneaker. But if you need an NFT tied to a physical purchase, now that virtual pair of sneakers costs you $99, and you can walk around that virtual world knowing that your fashion can't be easily (or inexpensively) replicated. This definitely has classist implications.
As for the exclusive online community of verified sneaker-lovers, note the words "exclusive" and "verified." It's a gatekeeping method so you don't have to associate with the hoi palloi who might love sneakers just as much as you, but don't have the cash to buy enough to get into the exclusive community. And who's going to build or maintain this community? Solana is enticing you with visions of an ecosystem, but it's not actually going to build that ecosystem.
Indeed, it will only make sure to get a cut of the profits.
"A standard protocol to encode Solana transaction requests within URLs to enable payments and other use cases"
Except that this standard comes free of charge with the Pandora's box of crypto applications. Lovely.
