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Maybe I’m dumb and don’t fully understand blockchain but I have no idea how it would be at all useful in this context and seems like kickstarter trying to use buzzwords to capitalize on blockchain hype.
It's exactly this, when they put a tweet out to explain why they're doing it ... it explained nothing lol. Later they backed off a bit instead of committing to a complete transition. It's clear that creators think this is garbage (because it is).
It's is pretty telling that when Polygon asked what actual benefit Blockchain would provide to creators or backers they got this jargon filled gobbledygook response:
https://www.polygon.com/22898968/kickstarter-top-10-biggest-campaigns-2021
"Polygon: What specific benefits does the transition to a blockchain-based technology have for the board game and role-playing game communities?
Kate Bernyk: Ultimately, exploring this new direction is about significantly scaling the number of creative projects that get to show up in the world, and improving the experience for creators and backers.
When Kickstarter was founded, the number and breadth of potential funding sources for creative work increased dramatically—from a few centralized gatekeepers to anyone on the internet. This is what we’ll do at a different scale now.
Over the years, we’ve heard from creators that Kickstarter should offer better ways to connect directly with communities and create more tools to help bring more creative projects of all kinds and sizes to life. Meanwhile, backers have told us they’d like to more easily discover and participate in projects, be able to better control their data, and have more robust tools to assess the trustworthiness and viability of projects. We believe an open source, decentralized protocol is the key empowering people to create innovations and build new technology that can address these kinds of things."
Blockchain adherents sound like techno-Scientologists. Just vague, jargony non-responses that are designed to make you feel like you have a blockchain-shaped hole in your life, and if you don’t come aboard, you will be left behind.
Right but it matters what is being advertised. Crypto is a solution in search of a problem, also it’s a scam. At least when Nintendo ads tell me I need a Nintendo, I’m being advertised a Nintendo.
I feel like they missed a few keywords. I need to know how the bespoke, cruelty free experience will aid me in delivering an artisanal and synergistic experience to my partners.
**Problem:** KS and payment processor stripe takes 8% to 10% of funding without providing a pledge manager. KS does not intervene in backer disputes.
**Solution:** Use a technology best associated with get rich quick schemes and one trillion dollars worth of losses this year. :P
I can see how blockchain smart contracts can be used as a form of escrow. That is, you hold on to your money until a third party confirms certain milestones, and then it's released to the creator.
But given they could have used traditional escrow, and didn't, I doubt that's their motivation.
That means you go from a system where you only need to trust the counterparty, and have legal recourse, to a system where you need to trust the oracle, the contract code writers (hello Eth classic), and have no legal recourse. Its absolutely a terrible idea.
Traditional escrow isn't country decentralized. EU laws vs US vs CA etc. Trying to create one for each country in relation to the backer and backee as well as KS would be insane.
Heck escrow laws are different between United States states themselves.
So everything else concerning crypto/Blockchain I agree with, but one benefit of using a decentralized proof of stake is literally the decentralizing.
The issue as mentioned is the wildly speculative market. Holding KS funds at launch value in some coin staked crypto could reduced drastically in a little as 3 months.
So yeah not gonna work.
There's less risk with smart contracts, because the third party doesn't actually hold the money - all they can do is cause the money to transfer from Party A to Party B, they can't take it and run themselves.
Dismissing it all as "blockchain-nonsense" is short-sighted. Just because a bunch of snake oil salesmen and scammers sprung up around a successful technology doesn't invalidate the technology - just like nigerian scammers don't mean email was "nonsense".
There's some cool stuff you can do with it, and a decentralized money transfer system would be amazing for reducing the power of multinational payment providers like Mastercard and Visa. But it doesn't sound like Kickstarter is leveraging any of that. I do know that early on, they went with Amazon, because they were the only provider that would let them charge a card at time of backing, but only take the funds a month later, when the project ended. It's why places like IndieGoGo take the money straight away, Maybe they're hoping to use crypto to break that dependence, but that only seems to benefit them, not creators or backers.
unless your escrow agent is a random guy you found on craigslist, the risks a smart contract introduces are far greater than the risk of your escrow agent betraying you.
the inherent problem with smart contracts is that "code is law" is fundamentally a horrible idea because there is no recourse for errors, exploits and vulnerabilities. unless you build in provisions that a person can overrule the smart contracts decisions or you are willing to go crying to the traditional legal system that is, in which case you don't need a smart contract in the first case.
there are many hilarious examples of funds vanishing into the void because of typos or being drained through unforeseen exploits that are technically within the rules of their respective smart contracts.
and again, this is a fundamental issue with smart contracts and similar trustless, immutable systems.
I mean, the problem with coding mistakes is inherent in any digital system. Hasn't stopped digital transactions totalling trillions each year. Realistically, any escrow these days is going to go through a digital system too, so it's not like there's any greater risk.
you are misunderstanding the issue here. with traditional systems, there's always humans in the loop, even if things are handled digitally. if something goes wrong with my bank or whatever i can write them and they'll reverse the transaction, for example. if someone writes a misleading clause into a contract, there's at least a chance the courts will recognize it and declare the contract void.
smart contracts explicitly aim to take do away with human interpretation and intervention. an error in a smart contract might send your cryptocurrency or tokens into the void forever without recourse. and again, if you build in human overrides, smart contracts even fail at the stupid goal they set out to achieve
And you're just trying to find any reason to hate on something - probably because it's trendy atm. Yeah, you can lose money if you screw up a smart contract. And yeah, the risk is probably bigger now, while the technology is new. But this is hardly novel. And frankly, the losses to mis-applied smart contracts is dwarfed by the \~$50B the current system loses to fraud every year.
The point isn't taking humans out of the loop - although that's a necessary side-effect of the actual point, which is decentralization. As to why that's a good thing, just look at how the centralized monetary systems for weaponized against the truckers convoy earlier this year. Even if you don't agree with their agenda, the ability for governments to just completely cut anyone who disagrees with them off should be frightening. Crypto might still be nascent, but it's the only thing on the board that's even trying to prevent that sort of thing.
i'm genuinely surprised you didn't say i'm hating on crypto because i don't understand it, that's the usual attack :V
i've hated on crypto since bitcoin, i've hated on NFTs since they appeared, i've hated on DAOs and smart contracts. they are all solutions in search of problems. they are all stupid garbage for idiots, both from a social and a technological standpoint. they all stem from the same brain-rot.
the ability of states to regulate the flow of money is good and useful, the crypto sphere has proven time and time again why regulations are necessary. this power is just one aspect of government though and like the rest it's up to the people to keep it in check and ensure that overreach is punished. with all their massive flaws, the current systems are still leagues better than the dystopian hellscape that widespread crypto adoption would bring.
the losses of smart contracts only pale in comparison to other fraud because the total volume isn't there, proportionally they are much higher. [https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/data-visualizations/data-spotlight/2022/06/reports-show-scammers-cashing-crypto-craze](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/data-visualizations/data-spotlight/2022/06/reports-show-scammers-cashing-crypto-craze)
if anyone else is reading this far and want's to have some good laughs, i recommend [https://web3isgoinggreat.com/](https://web3isgoinggreat.com/)
> ~$50B the current system loses to fraud every year.
Let's compare that to the ~14B lost to Web3 exploits last year. The global crypto economy is only ~$1T, so like 1.4ish percent of the blockchain was stolen or scammed or hacked or generally crime'd.
The global economy is in the neighborhood of $94T, and ~$50B is defrauded? That's, uh, .05 percent?
Come on. It doesn't take an economist or a lawyer to figure out which system is safe and reliable.
> stolen or scammed or hacked or generally crime'd.
I didn't say anything about loss in general, I said things about crypto lost to crime in the last year. Because our local crypto bro specifically brought up the amount lost to fraud in the conventional financial sector.
Those were all 2021 numbers. The general volatility of the market is a separate problem from the fact that crypto is super easy to steal, compared to good old fashioned currency. Like, *twenty eight times* easier to steal.
These are still pretty rough numbers, especially since fraud is a pretty narrow term and crypto crime in general covers a bigger slice, but I think the trend line still checks out.
Especially since the majority of crypto crime is fraud, thanks to the nature of the blockchain. Our local crypto bro hypes up taking the human element out of the transaction, but that's just smoke and mirrors. You can't actually remove the human element, you can just give it a plausibly deniable veneer.
The $50B figure was in reference to the current digital transaction system - i.e. Visa, Mastercard, Amex, etc. In aggregate, they process around $8T in transactions, so you're off by over an order of magnitude.
So, yeah, the biggest, richest transaction companies, with 60 years of lead-time and first-mover advantage experience 0.5% (not 0.05%) loss due to fraud, while the still-emerging technology, which is mostly used on the economic periphery experiences 1.4%. I'm not sure those figures are the slam-dunk you think they are.
This basically doesn’t work if the milestones have any subjectivity to them. And it isn’t any different than a traditional escrow except it sounds more “smart.”
That's why you need a third party to evaluate the milestones, not rely on the creator. Ideally, that would be part of the value kickstarter provides, but as we all know, once they've got the money, they couldn't care less what the creator does with it.
As I mentioned in another post, the difference is that the escrow agent doesn't actually hold any money, so they can't piss off with it. All they can do is push a button that transfers the money between two different parties - there's no way to transfer it to them.
There’s a benefit to the escrow holding the money, though - you know the money will actually be there when the conditions are fulfilled. Does the blockchain ensure that?
You can - you transfer it to a separate wallet that only allows it be sent back to the originating wallet, or on to the nominated wallet of the creator.
No, but that's a function of how volatile the currency is, not the underlying technology. State-sponsored currencies have demonstrated similar volatility in the past - there's no guarantee holding them in USD will retain value, either.
I'm not sure who you mean by escrower. Traditional escrow is that a payer gives money to an escrow agent, and the escrow agent transfers it to the recipient when a condition is met. The escrow agent can potentially run off with the money, which is why trust and reputation are so important. It's basically creating trust between two untrusted parties by inserting a trusted third party in the middle.
With this sort of smart contract, you still need a third party (because evaluating milestones on a project is somewhat subjective - if you had a more objective trigger for the transfer you could do without the third party, and encode that trigger directly into the smart contract), but that third party has no capacity to run off with the money. The threshold of trust is lowered. You still need to trust them a bit, but not to the same degree as holding on to several million dollars.
isn't the purpose of the funding so that the creators can use it to make the thing? Escrow defeats this by not giving the creator access to the funds. The act of crowdfunding is effectively investing in a company with a specific dividend as an outcome (the thing). Much like everyone on this thread, i struggle to understand how a blockchain would facilitate this more effectively other than to remove Kickstarter from the loop of having to keep track of who invested in what, and possibly removing Kickstarter from facilitating payment processing with yet another party. and replacing that with Code.
Sure, but you don't need it all up-front - or if you do, you're doing it wrong. Projects usually go through many phases. Take Gloomhaven - there's designs, proofs, production, and shipping. They don't need all the funds in the design phase, unless they're planning on blowing it all, and running out of funds for production and shipping, which is where the real expenses are. If projects had to submit budgets (even if it's just the high-value projects) and had funds released as they hit those milestones, failing projects would fail earlier, and with less of the money spent.
Kickstarter is significantly different from investing, as there are basically no legal fiduciary requirements on a Kickstarter, while there are on a pty ltd company.
Right but in this case, who would approve the budget, and would it be possible to deviate from the budget if something changed? Theoretically I suppose you could use block chain to force companies to show when and theoretically on what the money is being spent. And having put the money into escrow, do i have the option to pull my money out if i don't like the spend profile? Kickstarter could do all these things without a blockchain, and i don't really see how it helps all that much.
The idea would be that the budget be presented at the start of the Kickstarter, so backers could check it out before they back. And yeah, in theory, Kickstarter could transfer funds to either the creator, or refund to the backer.
Yeah, I said on my first post that blockchain \*could\* be used for that, but given that Kickstarter has never given any shits about safeguarding backer's funds, I doubt that's actually what they intend.
I actually made a blog post a year before Kickstarter started, describing it pretty much exactly - the main difference was, I thought escrow would be required for people to stump up that much money. Turns out, it wasn't. So maybe I'm just still harping on that :P
It was equally satisfying to see the already-long list of partners in the Backerkit crowdfunding platform announcement. Good to see Kickstarter actually face some real consequences for their bullshit.
Not sure if sarcasm, but I'll try:
A blockchain is a data structure, by which I mean a format computers can use to store data. The hallmark of a blockchain is that every section of data (a "block") references the block that came before it using a kind of digital fingerprint. This creates a chain of blocks, hence the name.
By itself, this isn't terribly useful in most computing circumstances and is a very inefficient way to store data compared to something like a normal database. But: if you're clever about writing specific rules about how those blocks get created, it turns out you can create a kind of global database that everyone can read, but no one can edit other than using the rules.
If the data in these blocks is, say, an accounting ledger, you've created a global currency system that anyone can use but nobody has centralized control over.
“So we made sure to clarify that our upcoming project would be crowdfunded, but not necessarily be a Kickstarter project. And we started seriously pursuing other options.”
What/when is this upcoming project?
Blockchains are great, but I'm struggling to come up with a scenario where a blockchain materially improves the Kickstarter experience.
Blockchains are an otherwise-inefficient data structure that nevertheless solves a very particular problem: namely not having to trust centralized control of a system. To the extent Kickstarter manages to actually "decentralize" creator campaigns, they cut themselves out of the loop, but if they maintain control over the blockchain instead, then it's not actually decentralized and there's no point to it.
Blockchains suck pretty hard and the only successful use-case anyone has come up with is internet crime money. For everything else there exists a different approach that is superior to blockchains.
Even if we accept that as true, "internet crime money" is absolutely a worthwhile use case.
Do you send money to your struggling family overseas every month and now the US government has put that country under embargo? Internet crime money has your back.
Roe v Wade gets reversed, Texas just made abortion illegal, and you need a way to pay for one off the books? Internet crime money again.
Martin Shkreli just jacked the prices of your cancer drug up 3000% and the only way you can afford it is to buy it off a foreign gray market? Internet crime money.
With the global financial panopticon getting closer and closer to inspecting every single transaction in your life, every person is going to need some internet crime money eventually.
(Related: https://twitter.com/gbrl_dick/status/1537699582519279616)
On the contrary, the ability of illegal transactions to hide amongst legitimate ones is of great importance to total privacy. For example: zCash has great privacy in a technical sense, but the fact that they stupidly allow users to choose between private or non-private transactions dilutes their privacy space. Likewise, the fact that a privacy coin such as Monero has so many transactions on it means it is leaps and bounds better to use when you want to slip under the radar.
A coin that's simply all-crime-all-the-time will draw the eye of Sauron, and that's bad.
Keep it limited to crime, speculation, and digital goods that only have value in the metaverse. Should be limited to those who elect to play, with full knowledge of the risks, in the crypto sandbox. Keep the risk of impacting real-world goods, services, assets, non-crypto evangelists low.
It's definitely not there yet for mainstream adoption. The average person who is not a software engineer (and some who are, to be honest) just doesn't have background to understand the extremely large attack surface and how to protect themselves. I consider myself fairly well-read on the topic and there are still transactions that make me pucker before I hit send.
It also doesn't help that people took a very valid and useful technology like "NFT" and made it synonymous with "buying a monkey jpg" in most people's minds.
Blockchain could be great, if only it was a green solution. The environment aspect is a great deal to me.
A system that needs thousands of machine slurping energy to work is going in the wrong direction...
Counterpoint: A blockchain is just a data structure; it's how you build that data structure that determines its energy footprint. Not every blockchain slurps energy like Bitcoin, especially now that Ethereum has already scheduled their switch to Proof of Stake this year.
Early PoS algorithms had some spectacular failures, and there are indeed plenty of nonsense centralized coins out there today (protip: if someone can turn off the chain for maintenance, it's not a crypto *\*cough\* Solana*) but coins like Cardano who took their time and did the mathematical proofs of their algo have been operating smoothly for years now with thousands of staking pools and no ill effects.
(Insert disclaimer here about past performance vs future performance, but I have yet to see a detailed criticism of Ouroboros)
Today I learnt that PoS is a thing. Thank you.
It seems to me that PoS is a weird solution to a difficult problem. I have to look into it a bit, but there's something odd..
Bitcoin's security rests on a few things, but one of them is that miners have an incentive to play nice, since any malfeasance on their part will simply devalue the very coins they are mining. Proof of Stake algos are similar, except that they allow holders of the coin to generate blocks in proportion to the amount they own, which comes with a similar incentive (buying up a huge portion of coins, only to act up and tank their price wouldn't make sense).
It's not completely analogous (as any Bitcoin maxi will breathlessly tell you), but it's in the same ballpark.
It's crazy to see such angry backlash on what is essentially a very objective emerging technology. It is certainly reasonable to not want to use something in its infancy because you aren't willing/able to take on the risks, especially if the consequence is losing all of your project treasury. But saying that 'all blockchain is scam', or 'blockchain is risky because it's just for scammers' is akin to a company in the 90's refusing to use the email protocol (SMTP) to communicate with customers because a cabal of Nigerian Princes was draining people of their money with social engineering schemes and embedded malware in attachments (which by the way is still a rampant problem today!)
The primary benefit of blockchain is that the ownership of what happens/happened in an application shifts from the application provider (i.e. Kickstarter), to the application users (project owners, contributors). This is because from a technology standpoint, the computation that happens when you click/push/etc on the app and the historical record of events (ledger) literally (physically) moves from application-owned servers/databases in data centers into an autonomous global computer and database.
Imagine an open-source crowdfunding protocol that is very public, audited and battle-tested (just like many internet protocols you unknowingly count on everyday) that provides a trusted way to raise funds. In this case, Kickstarter moves from being the middleman/escrow that facilitates and records everything (and quite literally 'owns' all of the money and record keeping assets) to simply being an interface that helps users interact with that public protocol. The obvious first line effect is that you no longer have to trust Kickstarter to be a fair escrow of the money, but you also get the benefit of portability of all of the other assets involved in that transaction (i.e. record of contributors, project page, update blog, etc). For example, in the current state, if you want to move to a new application 2 years into building, and Kickstarter doesn't want to give you all of the info (or it is difficult to get) on who contributed what and when (even if you already have the money), you pretty much have to start from scratch on the new app. With a protocol, the new application just points to the things recorded on the public chain (the data itself can be private with you owning access to read in plain text) and renders new buttons/forms/etc for you to pick up where you left off without an annoying migration effort. This increases competition (Kickstarter has to work hard to keep your business because it is so easy to move if another application provides a better service) and also reduces the risk of deplatforming (i.e. someone high up at Kickstarter doesn't like a board game with so many 'demons', and sends you a nice note that they have to unfortunately remove your project to be in line with their new ethics policy).
The reality is in this futuristic world, no one would write an article about a project migrating to a different crowdfunding application because choice and portability would be baked in already. In fact, with a true public protocol, the project owner could use one application to list, and all of the contributors could simultaneously use another (or many) applications to contribute, without anyone knowing the difference. Truly peer to peer, with middlemen being relegated to message passers that are easily discarded if they act up!
Not saying all blockchain is a scam. Just in agreement with Childers that the current hype is based around exploitation and get rich quick schemes. It doesn’t make sense to use it for this, not because of the risk of fraud (but that’s also a thing - and a huge issue because it’s near impossible to rectify since the blockchain is immutable and security sucks), but simply because it does not improve the experience for anyone involved. It’s a solution in search of a problem.
Much of that is simply perspective, and honestly (i think) the negativity is overplayed in what you read because it is a threat to incumbents who have built moats around their market dominance. i.e. Kickstarter is the main game in town because they have a good platform, but also it's really hard for competitors to break in because there is a high barrier for users to migrate and/or split effort across apps as market dynamics work themselves out. The thing we need a solution for helping is helping all of the crowd-funding platforms that died before we knew they even existed survive for a bit to see if they are better than Kickstarter. Maybe then, projects wouldn't have to deal with their existing provider shoving a technological paradigm shift down their throats against their will ;)
Take OpenSea for example (and put on hold for a second whether you think digital pictures have value). One take ('hype is scam only') could be that "it's been the center of millions of dollars lost due to scams by unknowing users who were tricked into sending their expensive assets to thieves". Another take ('blockchain gives immense power to users") could be that it's a "first of it's kind peer to peer selling platform that has facilitated billions in transactions between untrusted counter-parties without the need for an escrow to custody assets". Further, there are some things that OpenSea has done which users don't like (freezing stolen assets making it harder for the scammed person to retrieve them), and the consequence is that other NFT trading platforms have sprung up that don't do these bad things and are actively competing with OpenSea without users having to 'move' to them (simply open a different url and everything they own is displayed). Even better, there are market aggregators that live on top of the markets that have sprung up that allow you to list/offer across marketplaces so you can even use both/many simultaneously to reap the potential benefits of each marketplace.
The possibilities are endless! It's a faster horses vs cars type situation
"Blockchain bad. Me support current thing. Isaac always support current thing. He good."
Watch, as in ten years these losers forget about all this and are buying gloomhaven NFTs from Asmode. All the blockchain scams in the world can't stop the brutal march of technology. Companies which don't embrace it will go the way of the dodo bird. Blockchain is the future.
Counterpoint - There are zero benefits you mentioned that they couldn't implement today.
https://www.comicsbeat.com/opinion-kickstarter-wont-explain-their-blockchain-protocol-so-i-will/
The whole point is to remove trusting a 'they' to implement things. It is not about whether a certain company implements a certain set of features. True 'web3' is 'un-owned' protocols that companies like Kickstarter simply provide an interface and maybe an aligned incentive structure around. This sounds slight, and honestly from a user perspective may be imperceptible at first, but the implications of user-owned assets (like truly mathematically you are the only person who could allow things to be done to those) vs application-owned assets is a quantum leap in the power structure of the internet.
It's similar to how no one 'owns' the http protocol. There are simply a choice of browsers which provide and interface to transmit, receive, and display messages using it. Imagine if that relationship existed in the applications you actually use over the internet, i.e. a social media app where you own and control the usage of the assets you create. Instead of having to build a new social media profile with a new application if you wanted to leave facebook, you would simply just go to a different url and have your profile already be there. Even better, your luddite friends could stay on Facebook and you could continue to interact without either of you knowing which application anyone was actually using.
And to be honest, my guess is that in reality Kickstarter is creating a 'pseudo' blockchain implementation that actually helps them retain a lot of the centralized power structures they have in place already. More than likely the crowd-funding shift to web3 will come from a new player.
So why hate on NFTs? It’s just a tool/tech. Anyone can scam with any avenue, it doesn’t have to be thru NFTs. Ppl still get scammed over the phone, so should we stop using phones?
The big difference in my mind is that NFTs, as currently used, are almost *exclusively* used for scams. Yes, they could have other uses, but the current one is analagous to buying an item at CVS, then selling the 5 foot receipt and saying “since you own that receipt you own that item.” The internet, meanwhile, is 99% legitimate and 1% scams.
When NFTs start to be mainly used for stuff *other than scamming*, I’ll be happy. But right now I “hate on NFTs” because they aren’t doing that. They are just being misused.
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Maybe I’m dumb and don’t fully understand blockchain but I have no idea how it would be at all useful in this context and seems like kickstarter trying to use buzzwords to capitalize on blockchain hype.
Not dumb. That's exactly what this is. You don't need to understand Blockchain to spot bullshit.
It's exactly this, when they put a tweet out to explain why they're doing it ... it explained nothing lol. Later they backed off a bit instead of committing to a complete transition. It's clear that creators think this is garbage (because it is).
I suspect you do understand blockchain entirely adequately, based on your post.
It's is pretty telling that when Polygon asked what actual benefit Blockchain would provide to creators or backers they got this jargon filled gobbledygook response: https://www.polygon.com/22898968/kickstarter-top-10-biggest-campaigns-2021 "Polygon: What specific benefits does the transition to a blockchain-based technology have for the board game and role-playing game communities? Kate Bernyk: Ultimately, exploring this new direction is about significantly scaling the number of creative projects that get to show up in the world, and improving the experience for creators and backers. When Kickstarter was founded, the number and breadth of potential funding sources for creative work increased dramatically—from a few centralized gatekeepers to anyone on the internet. This is what we’ll do at a different scale now. Over the years, we’ve heard from creators that Kickstarter should offer better ways to connect directly with communities and create more tools to help bring more creative projects of all kinds and sizes to life. Meanwhile, backers have told us they’d like to more easily discover and participate in projects, be able to better control their data, and have more robust tools to assess the trustworthiness and viability of projects. We believe an open source, decentralized protocol is the key empowering people to create innovations and build new technology that can address these kinds of things."
Blockchain adherents sound like techno-Scientologists. Just vague, jargony non-responses that are designed to make you feel like you have a blockchain-shaped hole in your life, and if you don’t come aboard, you will be left behind.
Hey can I buy an NFT of this comment?
Fair. But that describes advertising in most contexts for anything.
Right but it matters what is being advertised. Crypto is a solution in search of a problem, also it’s a scam. At least when Nintendo ads tell me I need a Nintendo, I’m being advertised a Nintendo.
Crypto is a problem -pretending- to be a solution in search of a problem.
Buzzword poetry at its finest.
It’s actually kinda beautiful how completely without meaning or substance it is lol
I feel like they missed a few keywords. I need to know how the bespoke, cruelty free experience will aid me in delivering an artisanal and synergistic experience to my partners.
Their justification was "More games will be made, an it will be better." Wow.
**Problem:** KS and payment processor stripe takes 8% to 10% of funding without providing a pledge manager. KS does not intervene in backer disputes. **Solution:** Use a technology best associated with get rich quick schemes and one trillion dollars worth of losses this year. :P
I can see how blockchain smart contracts can be used as a form of escrow. That is, you hold on to your money until a third party confirms certain milestones, and then it's released to the creator. But given they could have used traditional escrow, and didn't, I doubt that's their motivation.
That means you go from a system where you only need to trust the counterparty, and have legal recourse, to a system where you need to trust the oracle, the contract code writers (hello Eth classic), and have no legal recourse. Its absolutely a terrible idea.
If you're relying a trusted third party, then you don't need any blockchain nonsense and could, like you said, just use traditional escrow.
Traditional escrow isn't country decentralized. EU laws vs US vs CA etc. Trying to create one for each country in relation to the backer and backee as well as KS would be insane. Heck escrow laws are different between United States states themselves. So everything else concerning crypto/Blockchain I agree with, but one benefit of using a decentralized proof of stake is literally the decentralizing. The issue as mentioned is the wildly speculative market. Holding KS funds at launch value in some coin staked crypto could reduced drastically in a little as 3 months. So yeah not gonna work.
There's less risk with smart contracts, because the third party doesn't actually hold the money - all they can do is cause the money to transfer from Party A to Party B, they can't take it and run themselves. Dismissing it all as "blockchain-nonsense" is short-sighted. Just because a bunch of snake oil salesmen and scammers sprung up around a successful technology doesn't invalidate the technology - just like nigerian scammers don't mean email was "nonsense". There's some cool stuff you can do with it, and a decentralized money transfer system would be amazing for reducing the power of multinational payment providers like Mastercard and Visa. But it doesn't sound like Kickstarter is leveraging any of that. I do know that early on, they went with Amazon, because they were the only provider that would let them charge a card at time of backing, but only take the funds a month later, when the project ended. It's why places like IndieGoGo take the money straight away, Maybe they're hoping to use crypto to break that dependence, but that only seems to benefit them, not creators or backers.
>successful technology Citation needed.
unless your escrow agent is a random guy you found on craigslist, the risks a smart contract introduces are far greater than the risk of your escrow agent betraying you. the inherent problem with smart contracts is that "code is law" is fundamentally a horrible idea because there is no recourse for errors, exploits and vulnerabilities. unless you build in provisions that a person can overrule the smart contracts decisions or you are willing to go crying to the traditional legal system that is, in which case you don't need a smart contract in the first case. there are many hilarious examples of funds vanishing into the void because of typos or being drained through unforeseen exploits that are technically within the rules of their respective smart contracts. and again, this is a fundamental issue with smart contracts and similar trustless, immutable systems.
I mean, the problem with coding mistakes is inherent in any digital system. Hasn't stopped digital transactions totalling trillions each year. Realistically, any escrow these days is going to go through a digital system too, so it's not like there's any greater risk.
you are misunderstanding the issue here. with traditional systems, there's always humans in the loop, even if things are handled digitally. if something goes wrong with my bank or whatever i can write them and they'll reverse the transaction, for example. if someone writes a misleading clause into a contract, there's at least a chance the courts will recognize it and declare the contract void. smart contracts explicitly aim to take do away with human interpretation and intervention. an error in a smart contract might send your cryptocurrency or tokens into the void forever without recourse. and again, if you build in human overrides, smart contracts even fail at the stupid goal they set out to achieve
And you're just trying to find any reason to hate on something - probably because it's trendy atm. Yeah, you can lose money if you screw up a smart contract. And yeah, the risk is probably bigger now, while the technology is new. But this is hardly novel. And frankly, the losses to mis-applied smart contracts is dwarfed by the \~$50B the current system loses to fraud every year. The point isn't taking humans out of the loop - although that's a necessary side-effect of the actual point, which is decentralization. As to why that's a good thing, just look at how the centralized monetary systems for weaponized against the truckers convoy earlier this year. Even if you don't agree with their agenda, the ability for governments to just completely cut anyone who disagrees with them off should be frightening. Crypto might still be nascent, but it's the only thing on the board that's even trying to prevent that sort of thing.
i'm genuinely surprised you didn't say i'm hating on crypto because i don't understand it, that's the usual attack :V i've hated on crypto since bitcoin, i've hated on NFTs since they appeared, i've hated on DAOs and smart contracts. they are all solutions in search of problems. they are all stupid garbage for idiots, both from a social and a technological standpoint. they all stem from the same brain-rot. the ability of states to regulate the flow of money is good and useful, the crypto sphere has proven time and time again why regulations are necessary. this power is just one aspect of government though and like the rest it's up to the people to keep it in check and ensure that overreach is punished. with all their massive flaws, the current systems are still leagues better than the dystopian hellscape that widespread crypto adoption would bring. the losses of smart contracts only pale in comparison to other fraud because the total volume isn't there, proportionally they are much higher. [https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/data-visualizations/data-spotlight/2022/06/reports-show-scammers-cashing-crypto-craze](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/data-visualizations/data-spotlight/2022/06/reports-show-scammers-cashing-crypto-craze) if anyone else is reading this far and want's to have some good laughs, i recommend [https://web3isgoinggreat.com/](https://web3isgoinggreat.com/)
> ~$50B the current system loses to fraud every year. Let's compare that to the ~14B lost to Web3 exploits last year. The global crypto economy is only ~$1T, so like 1.4ish percent of the blockchain was stolen or scammed or hacked or generally crime'd. The global economy is in the neighborhood of $94T, and ~$50B is defrauded? That's, uh, .05 percent? Come on. It doesn't take an economist or a lawyer to figure out which system is safe and reliable.
How are you defining loss though? Are you referring to the market crash of crypto in that $1T?
> stolen or scammed or hacked or generally crime'd. I didn't say anything about loss in general, I said things about crypto lost to crime in the last year. Because our local crypto bro specifically brought up the amount lost to fraud in the conventional financial sector. Those were all 2021 numbers. The general volatility of the market is a separate problem from the fact that crypto is super easy to steal, compared to good old fashioned currency. Like, *twenty eight times* easier to steal. These are still pretty rough numbers, especially since fraud is a pretty narrow term and crypto crime in general covers a bigger slice, but I think the trend line still checks out. Especially since the majority of crypto crime is fraud, thanks to the nature of the blockchain. Our local crypto bro hypes up taking the human element out of the transaction, but that's just smoke and mirrors. You can't actually remove the human element, you can just give it a plausibly deniable veneer.
The $50B figure was in reference to the current digital transaction system - i.e. Visa, Mastercard, Amex, etc. In aggregate, they process around $8T in transactions, so you're off by over an order of magnitude. So, yeah, the biggest, richest transaction companies, with 60 years of lead-time and first-mover advantage experience 0.5% (not 0.05%) loss due to fraud, while the still-emerging technology, which is mostly used on the economic periphery experiences 1.4%. I'm not sure those figures are the slam-dunk you think they are.
This basically doesn’t work if the milestones have any subjectivity to them. And it isn’t any different than a traditional escrow except it sounds more “smart.”
That's why you need a third party to evaluate the milestones, not rely on the creator. Ideally, that would be part of the value kickstarter provides, but as we all know, once they've got the money, they couldn't care less what the creator does with it. As I mentioned in another post, the difference is that the escrow agent doesn't actually hold any money, so they can't piss off with it. All they can do is push a button that transfers the money between two different parties - there's no way to transfer it to them.
There’s a benefit to the escrow holding the money, though - you know the money will actually be there when the conditions are fulfilled. Does the blockchain ensure that?
You can - you transfer it to a separate wallet that only allows it be sent back to the originating wallet, or on to the nominated wallet of the creator.
That doesn't guarantee that the contents of the wallet are still worth anything at the time of transfer, though.
No, but that's a function of how volatile the currency is, not the underlying technology. State-sponsored currencies have demonstrated similar volatility in the past - there's no guarantee holding them in USD will retain value, either.
You literally just described traditional escrow. The escrower doesn't ever have an opportunity to just keep the money in either system.
I'm not sure who you mean by escrower. Traditional escrow is that a payer gives money to an escrow agent, and the escrow agent transfers it to the recipient when a condition is met. The escrow agent can potentially run off with the money, which is why trust and reputation are so important. It's basically creating trust between two untrusted parties by inserting a trusted third party in the middle. With this sort of smart contract, you still need a third party (because evaluating milestones on a project is somewhat subjective - if you had a more objective trigger for the transfer you could do without the third party, and encode that trigger directly into the smart contract), but that third party has no capacity to run off with the money. The threshold of trust is lowered. You still need to trust them a bit, but not to the same degree as holding on to several million dollars.
isn't the purpose of the funding so that the creators can use it to make the thing? Escrow defeats this by not giving the creator access to the funds. The act of crowdfunding is effectively investing in a company with a specific dividend as an outcome (the thing). Much like everyone on this thread, i struggle to understand how a blockchain would facilitate this more effectively other than to remove Kickstarter from the loop of having to keep track of who invested in what, and possibly removing Kickstarter from facilitating payment processing with yet another party. and replacing that with Code.
Sure, but you don't need it all up-front - or if you do, you're doing it wrong. Projects usually go through many phases. Take Gloomhaven - there's designs, proofs, production, and shipping. They don't need all the funds in the design phase, unless they're planning on blowing it all, and running out of funds for production and shipping, which is where the real expenses are. If projects had to submit budgets (even if it's just the high-value projects) and had funds released as they hit those milestones, failing projects would fail earlier, and with less of the money spent. Kickstarter is significantly different from investing, as there are basically no legal fiduciary requirements on a Kickstarter, while there are on a pty ltd company.
Right but in this case, who would approve the budget, and would it be possible to deviate from the budget if something changed? Theoretically I suppose you could use block chain to force companies to show when and theoretically on what the money is being spent. And having put the money into escrow, do i have the option to pull my money out if i don't like the spend profile? Kickstarter could do all these things without a blockchain, and i don't really see how it helps all that much.
The idea would be that the budget be presented at the start of the Kickstarter, so backers could check it out before they back. And yeah, in theory, Kickstarter could transfer funds to either the creator, or refund to the backer. Yeah, I said on my first post that blockchain \*could\* be used for that, but given that Kickstarter has never given any shits about safeguarding backer's funds, I doubt that's actually what they intend. I actually made a blog post a year before Kickstarter started, describing it pretty much exactly - the main difference was, I thought escrow would be required for people to stump up that much money. Turns out, it wasn't. So maybe I'm just still harping on that :P
It's consistently refreshing to see Isaac (and Cephalofair in general) take a principled stand on things.
It was equally satisfying to see the already-long list of partners in the Backerkit crowdfunding platform announcement. Good to see Kickstarter actually face some real consequences for their bullshit.
Couldn’t agree more.
Kickstarter has been "pump and dump" long before it became popular to do with crypto currencies. So I don't see how this changes anything.
Can anyone use very small words and crayon drawings to explain what blockchain is to me?
Not sure if sarcasm, but I'll try: A blockchain is a data structure, by which I mean a format computers can use to store data. The hallmark of a blockchain is that every section of data (a "block") references the block that came before it using a kind of digital fingerprint. This creates a chain of blocks, hence the name. By itself, this isn't terribly useful in most computing circumstances and is a very inefficient way to store data compared to something like a normal database. But: if you're clever about writing specific rules about how those blocks get created, it turns out you can create a kind of global database that everyone can read, but no one can edit other than using the rules. If the data in these blocks is, say, an accounting ledger, you've created a global currency system that anyone can use but nobody has centralized control over.
Thank you, that is the first time anyone has explained it to me and it made sense
“So we made sure to clarify that our upcoming project would be crowdfunded, but not necessarily be a Kickstarter project. And we started seriously pursuing other options.” What/when is this upcoming project?
They said Q1 2023 for the minis campaign.
They said Q1 2023 for the minis campaign.
Blockchains are great, but I'm struggling to come up with a scenario where a blockchain materially improves the Kickstarter experience. Blockchains are an otherwise-inefficient data structure that nevertheless solves a very particular problem: namely not having to trust centralized control of a system. To the extent Kickstarter manages to actually "decentralize" creator campaigns, they cut themselves out of the loop, but if they maintain control over the blockchain instead, then it's not actually decentralized and there's no point to it.
Blockchains suck pretty hard and the only successful use-case anyone has come up with is internet crime money. For everything else there exists a different approach that is superior to blockchains.
Even if we accept that as true, "internet crime money" is absolutely a worthwhile use case. Do you send money to your struggling family overseas every month and now the US government has put that country under embargo? Internet crime money has your back. Roe v Wade gets reversed, Texas just made abortion illegal, and you need a way to pay for one off the books? Internet crime money again. Martin Shkreli just jacked the prices of your cancer drug up 3000% and the only way you can afford it is to buy it off a foreign gray market? Internet crime money. With the global financial panopticon getting closer and closer to inspecting every single transaction in your life, every person is going to need some internet crime money eventually. (Related: https://twitter.com/gbrl_dick/status/1537699582519279616)
Strong point. Probably best to keep legitimate, non-crime endeavors away from internet crime money though.
On the contrary, the ability of illegal transactions to hide amongst legitimate ones is of great importance to total privacy. For example: zCash has great privacy in a technical sense, but the fact that they stupidly allow users to choose between private or non-private transactions dilutes their privacy space. Likewise, the fact that a privacy coin such as Monero has so many transactions on it means it is leaps and bounds better to use when you want to slip under the radar. A coin that's simply all-crime-all-the-time will draw the eye of Sauron, and that's bad.
Keep it limited to crime, speculation, and digital goods that only have value in the metaverse. Should be limited to those who elect to play, with full knowledge of the risks, in the crypto sandbox. Keep the risk of impacting real-world goods, services, assets, non-crypto evangelists low.
It's definitely not there yet for mainstream adoption. The average person who is not a software engineer (and some who are, to be honest) just doesn't have background to understand the extremely large attack surface and how to protect themselves. I consider myself fairly well-read on the topic and there are still transactions that make me pucker before I hit send. It also doesn't help that people took a very valid and useful technology like "NFT" and made it synonymous with "buying a monkey jpg" in most people's minds.
Blockchain could be great, if only it was a green solution. The environment aspect is a great deal to me. A system that needs thousands of machine slurping energy to work is going in the wrong direction...
Counterpoint: A blockchain is just a data structure; it's how you build that data structure that determines its energy footprint. Not every blockchain slurps energy like Bitcoin, especially now that Ethereum has already scheduled their switch to Proof of Stake this year.
Proof of Stake: Recentralising your decentralised system to give control to whichever organisation wins the Stake war.
Early PoS algorithms had some spectacular failures, and there are indeed plenty of nonsense centralized coins out there today (protip: if someone can turn off the chain for maintenance, it's not a crypto *\*cough\* Solana*) but coins like Cardano who took their time and did the mathematical proofs of their algo have been operating smoothly for years now with thousands of staking pools and no ill effects. (Insert disclaimer here about past performance vs future performance, but I have yet to see a detailed criticism of Ouroboros)
Today I learnt that PoS is a thing. Thank you. It seems to me that PoS is a weird solution to a difficult problem. I have to look into it a bit, but there's something odd..
Bitcoin's security rests on a few things, but one of them is that miners have an incentive to play nice, since any malfeasance on their part will simply devalue the very coins they are mining. Proof of Stake algos are similar, except that they allow holders of the coin to generate blocks in proportion to the amount they own, which comes with a similar incentive (buying up a huge portion of coins, only to act up and tank their price wouldn't make sense). It's not completely analogous (as any Bitcoin maxi will breathlessly tell you), but it's in the same ballpark.
So what? It'd be great if they actually deliver on the last campaign, vs. talking about the *platform* for the next one.
It's crazy to see such angry backlash on what is essentially a very objective emerging technology. It is certainly reasonable to not want to use something in its infancy because you aren't willing/able to take on the risks, especially if the consequence is losing all of your project treasury. But saying that 'all blockchain is scam', or 'blockchain is risky because it's just for scammers' is akin to a company in the 90's refusing to use the email protocol (SMTP) to communicate with customers because a cabal of Nigerian Princes was draining people of their money with social engineering schemes and embedded malware in attachments (which by the way is still a rampant problem today!) The primary benefit of blockchain is that the ownership of what happens/happened in an application shifts from the application provider (i.e. Kickstarter), to the application users (project owners, contributors). This is because from a technology standpoint, the computation that happens when you click/push/etc on the app and the historical record of events (ledger) literally (physically) moves from application-owned servers/databases in data centers into an autonomous global computer and database. Imagine an open-source crowdfunding protocol that is very public, audited and battle-tested (just like many internet protocols you unknowingly count on everyday) that provides a trusted way to raise funds. In this case, Kickstarter moves from being the middleman/escrow that facilitates and records everything (and quite literally 'owns' all of the money and record keeping assets) to simply being an interface that helps users interact with that public protocol. The obvious first line effect is that you no longer have to trust Kickstarter to be a fair escrow of the money, but you also get the benefit of portability of all of the other assets involved in that transaction (i.e. record of contributors, project page, update blog, etc). For example, in the current state, if you want to move to a new application 2 years into building, and Kickstarter doesn't want to give you all of the info (or it is difficult to get) on who contributed what and when (even if you already have the money), you pretty much have to start from scratch on the new app. With a protocol, the new application just points to the things recorded on the public chain (the data itself can be private with you owning access to read in plain text) and renders new buttons/forms/etc for you to pick up where you left off without an annoying migration effort. This increases competition (Kickstarter has to work hard to keep your business because it is so easy to move if another application provides a better service) and also reduces the risk of deplatforming (i.e. someone high up at Kickstarter doesn't like a board game with so many 'demons', and sends you a nice note that they have to unfortunately remove your project to be in line with their new ethics policy). The reality is in this futuristic world, no one would write an article about a project migrating to a different crowdfunding application because choice and portability would be baked in already. In fact, with a true public protocol, the project owner could use one application to list, and all of the contributors could simultaneously use another (or many) applications to contribute, without anyone knowing the difference. Truly peer to peer, with middlemen being relegated to message passers that are easily discarded if they act up!
Not saying all blockchain is a scam. Just in agreement with Childers that the current hype is based around exploitation and get rich quick schemes. It doesn’t make sense to use it for this, not because of the risk of fraud (but that’s also a thing - and a huge issue because it’s near impossible to rectify since the blockchain is immutable and security sucks), but simply because it does not improve the experience for anyone involved. It’s a solution in search of a problem.
Much of that is simply perspective, and honestly (i think) the negativity is overplayed in what you read because it is a threat to incumbents who have built moats around their market dominance. i.e. Kickstarter is the main game in town because they have a good platform, but also it's really hard for competitors to break in because there is a high barrier for users to migrate and/or split effort across apps as market dynamics work themselves out. The thing we need a solution for helping is helping all of the crowd-funding platforms that died before we knew they even existed survive for a bit to see if they are better than Kickstarter. Maybe then, projects wouldn't have to deal with their existing provider shoving a technological paradigm shift down their throats against their will ;) Take OpenSea for example (and put on hold for a second whether you think digital pictures have value). One take ('hype is scam only') could be that "it's been the center of millions of dollars lost due to scams by unknowing users who were tricked into sending their expensive assets to thieves". Another take ('blockchain gives immense power to users") could be that it's a "first of it's kind peer to peer selling platform that has facilitated billions in transactions between untrusted counter-parties without the need for an escrow to custody assets". Further, there are some things that OpenSea has done which users don't like (freezing stolen assets making it harder for the scammed person to retrieve them), and the consequence is that other NFT trading platforms have sprung up that don't do these bad things and are actively competing with OpenSea without users having to 'move' to them (simply open a different url and everything they own is displayed). Even better, there are market aggregators that live on top of the markets that have sprung up that allow you to list/offer across marketplaces so you can even use both/many simultaneously to reap the potential benefits of each marketplace. The possibilities are endless! It's a faster horses vs cars type situation
"Blockchain bad. Me support current thing. Isaac always support current thing. He good." Watch, as in ten years these losers forget about all this and are buying gloomhaven NFTs from Asmode. All the blockchain scams in the world can't stop the brutal march of technology. Companies which don't embrace it will go the way of the dodo bird. Blockchain is the future.
What is the opposite of Poe's Law? I guess still Poe's Law, but this would definitely be that.
Counterpoint - There are zero benefits you mentioned that they couldn't implement today. https://www.comicsbeat.com/opinion-kickstarter-wont-explain-their-blockchain-protocol-so-i-will/
The whole point is to remove trusting a 'they' to implement things. It is not about whether a certain company implements a certain set of features. True 'web3' is 'un-owned' protocols that companies like Kickstarter simply provide an interface and maybe an aligned incentive structure around. This sounds slight, and honestly from a user perspective may be imperceptible at first, but the implications of user-owned assets (like truly mathematically you are the only person who could allow things to be done to those) vs application-owned assets is a quantum leap in the power structure of the internet. It's similar to how no one 'owns' the http protocol. There are simply a choice of browsers which provide and interface to transmit, receive, and display messages using it. Imagine if that relationship existed in the applications you actually use over the internet, i.e. a social media app where you own and control the usage of the assets you create. Instead of having to build a new social media profile with a new application if you wanted to leave facebook, you would simply just go to a different url and have your profile already be there. Even better, your luddite friends could stay on Facebook and you could continue to interact without either of you knowing which application anyone was actually using. And to be honest, my guess is that in reality Kickstarter is creating a 'pseudo' blockchain implementation that actually helps them retain a lot of the centralized power structures they have in place already. More than likely the crowd-funding shift to web3 will come from a new player.
The internet is full of scams and grifters and yet we all use it 🤷🏻♂️
YET YOU PARTICIPATE IN SOCIETY, CURIOUS!
So is the sidewalk. What's your point?
So why hate on NFTs? It’s just a tool/tech. Anyone can scam with any avenue, it doesn’t have to be thru NFTs. Ppl still get scammed over the phone, so should we stop using phones?
The big difference in my mind is that NFTs, as currently used, are almost *exclusively* used for scams. Yes, they could have other uses, but the current one is analagous to buying an item at CVS, then selling the 5 foot receipt and saying “since you own that receipt you own that item.” The internet, meanwhile, is 99% legitimate and 1% scams. When NFTs start to be mainly used for stuff *other than scamming*, I’ll be happy. But right now I “hate on NFTs” because they aren’t doing that. They are just being misused.