Community Points allow members of Reddit communities to own a piece of their community, earn rewards for quality contributions, and unlock special features.
Read all about it at the above link. There’s way too much to process here. This is going to be wild.
They own your account right? So they have access to your crypto keys right? So what’s stopping them from taking the cringe coins away again? Do they want people to hold independent password that don’t go through Reddit or is sealed right with pinkie promises?
Also if it’s meant to replace Reddit gold they can absolutely remove evidence a post was rewarded or just delete the post entirely. This feels like the blue check mark phase of Steve Huffman trying to emulate Musk
They have complete control. They can just ban the account who owns the coins, or block them from using it because they are the some platform that it’s used on. Even if a user gets banned and gives their coins to someone else, it’s trivial to track the blockchain transaction to see which account it goes into and ban that one.
They have just as much control as the old coins, except now it burns 1000x the amount of trees and is crypto scam shit.
As @schooner said ethereum uses POS which is environmentally friendly as it uses 99% less energy than the old POW mechanism.
Also yes the account could be blocked but the crypto wallet can’t be. As far as tracking goes nothing stops as user selling on am exchange amd then purchasing more from another. Tracking is effectively stopped at that point.
Proof of stake might conserve power but it is the final evolution of cryptocurrency into a pure pyramid scheme.
I don’t see how anyone is ok with the value of their currency being validated and effectively controlled by the people that have the most of said currency. I can’t imagine people with more clear conflicts of interest in mantaining an honest value of the currency.
I think you need to read more about the technical aspects of how POW actually operates.
It has nothing to do with controlling value, a person who holds a large amount of that crypto can use it as a “stake” think collateral to operate as a consensus node, if they are caught cheating the stake is burned.
It’s in their interest to operate efficiently and fairly or lose there stake and overall network value.
Define “caught cheating” and how accountability is maintained or else this means very little. Why wouldn’t they constantly collaberate with other stake holders to manipulate the value of the currency to their advantage? How would they get caught if they do it carefully?
Also I had deleted my previous comment because it looked like it had failed to federate properly. Now I recieved a response to it. Idk what happened.
Cheating is a catch all term and there are various factors that play into it. Ultimately its not in the interest of holders to even try and mess with the system because the only thing it would do is cost them money.
It’s interesting how I am being down voted for relaying facts about the Ethereum blockchain, come on people you may not like what I am saying but what I’m saying is truth.
You are being downvoted because crypto is volatile, untrustworthy, and the favorite tool in the last 30 years of scammers and swindlers. Even if you described it perfectly, talking about it like it like it isn’t a reprehensible thing will and should draw negative attention from people who know better than to tolerate con artists and their enthusiastic marks.
But again, exactly like how the big players happily maniuplate the stock market willfully for furthering their own goals and increasing their value, how does any of what you said provide any confidence for me or anyone else that people with dominant amounts of the currency can’t cooperatively and subtly push it’s value up or down as it suits their needs? I don’t care either way personally, I wouldn’t get involved with crypto with someone else’s money if I was paid to do it. But idk why crypto people would trust this after the whole point was supposed to be a trustless system
Idc about the value of Ether itself. If it maintains a healthy valuation in real world terms, that’s all that is needed to secure Ethereum. I don’t need to trust validators to know they are doing their job, that’s how the system is designed. Validators should make sure that state integrity is preserved and that’s about it. If they don’t, their stake gets reduced and can even go to zero. This is exactly what it means to be trustless. The valuation of Ether is only relevant to the point that it retains enough value that attacking the network becomes prohibitively expensive.
Market manipulation is a function of people and non-transparent dealings. If anything, fully onchain finance would allow information asymmetry to be reduced so that regular people can beware of such frauds.
Are there con artists? Of course. Why would that make me not try to build a better system than “regulated finance” which is the same, if not worse, deal but where I am not allowed to participate by regulators who act as gatekeepers.
Ether by itself is useless, its value is determined by how much demand blockspace on Ethereum has. This is a better system than my government imposing capital controls and taxing the shit out of me without even giving me a good bus to ride on to work.
Anyway, like it was said, if you don’t get it, it’s not really my job to convince you, but I hope you don’t go around spreading misinformation like you are doing right now.
Much of this thread seems to be a case of blind leading the blind for the sake of hate.
The crypto community has more than its share of scams, memes, hype-driven projects, and speculations which give it a bad and unprofessional perception, but that’s just the surface.
Ethereum/cryptocurrency has the power for great change and is actually a pretty complex topic under the hood, the details of which most people will never need to understand, just like the Internet.
It’s trivial to see if they give you dumb reddit coins, that the wallet it’s going into is yours. If they ban you and see that wallet to connect to your account, clearly it’s the same person.
So they have access to your crypto keys right?
Not necessarily, no. I won’t even bother reading the stuff, but it is perfectly possible to have systems where user’s cryptographic keys are kept under the sole control of the user, being using client-only known secrets for encryption, wallet-like software, or even more basically keeping the key only in local storage and telling the user the seed so he can “recover” it if the local storage gets wiped/lost.
Bottom point is, it is very possible to do so, and it can be done in a safe-enough manner for most people without much hassle. Of course, that’s theoretical; weither or not corporations care about actual privacy, control, and are willing to work toward these is another matter entirely. But the technology have been there for years.
I do not disagree with much of the criticism Reddit is getting right now, especially the action taken leading up to this being the reason many of us are here right now.
What I will say though is that this community points system is not brand new and has been operating in the big crypto subs like R/cryptocurrency for some time using MOONS.
Now this system does not prevent the over arching power Reddit can exert on its platform but what it has done is meant is moderators are paid, well paid actually from the one I know personally. The value is determined by market forces so Reddit has little to no control over this.
Also because the points are tokens on the Ethereum ecosystem users can move there points to another wallet that is not controlled/created under the Reddit vault system meaning they can’t just be taken away.
Again, this move far from fixes many of the problems with Reddit, causing us to move to the feddiverse but as far as the idea of “points” go it’s actually the best system yet.
What makes me laugh is what Reddit did recently forcing users to spend or lose the last iteration of points, this is the kind of thing the new system should protect against.
Do you expect to be buying a hot dog with your reddit gold? lol
After Reddit banned my account, I got some sucker give me 40-odd USDT for my MOONS tokens from r/cryptocurrency, then got some other sucker give me $40 for those.
The value is determined by market forces so Reddit has little to no control over this.
This token has no source of value except what Reddit allows it to be redeemed for within their platform.
they can’t just be taken away
I’d bet they implement the ability to blacklist or freeze tokens like the major stablecoins do. And either way if the utility of these tokens depends on their use within the centralized platform of Reddit, that’s a simple way to gate access and take them away effectively.
What makes me laugh is what Reddit did recently forcing users to spend or lose the last iteration of points, this is the kind of thing the new system should protect against.
There’s no way it does anything to protect against it. In fact it’s basically guaranteed to go the same way; people spending money on future false promises from Reddit, and getting rugged.
I’m actually pro-crypto in general, but token speculation as a tacked on business model trends towards being pretty scammy just because of the incentives and how crypto token value works, basically always goes badly. There is no reason to believe this is or will be the “best system yet”, it’s worse than the old points system because the people buying will have some expectation of profit.
This token has no source of value except what Reddit allows it to be redeemed for within their platform.
Well to am extent I agree with you, the ecosystem is the community and if reddit does not foster that it will be worthless. However the fact is MOONs as the example are traded on 3rd party exchanges with an ETH pairing.
I’d bet they implement the ability to blacklist or freeze tokens like the major stablecoins do. And either way if the utility of these tokens depends on their use within the centralized platform of Reddit, that’s a simple way to gate access and take them away effectively.
I agree this is a possibility, and it comes into what I have said in other comments about the token implementation. Though again with the example being MOONs I have not heard of this being an issue.
There’s no way it does anything to protect against it. In fact it’s basically guaranteed to go the same way; people spending money on future false promises from Reddit, and getting rugged.
It protects in the sense that I can trade my tokens with a 3rd part into another. However if Reddit kills tokens on the app then the value would be 0 making that void. I am not saying this is a perfect system, as with any crypto project the success comes from the developers and early users nurturing the ecosystem and driving the value.
I’m actually pro-crypto in general, but token speculation as a tacked on business model trends towards being pretty scammy just because of the incentives and how crypto token value works, basically always goes badly. There is no reason to believe this is or will be the “best system yet”, it’s worse than the old points system because the people buying will have some expectation of profit.
Me too, I’ve been in the space for a long time and seen my fair share of scams and BS, but through it all I still believe in the potential crypto has overall. Based of the MOONs this current system has legs in my opinion and can actually financially compensate otherwise unpaid moderators in popular subs for the hard work they do. As a concept this is good.
You scepticism is healthy, and more people need to have this attitude in crypto in general to stop the wild speculation you talk about however it doesn’t mean we should dismiss good concepts out of turn. Give it a chance, I’m not saying it will be the best system yet just that it has potential, I don’t want to let my overall feeling of what Reddit has done totally blind me to that.
Though again with the example being MOONs I have not heard of this being an issue.
From what I can see the source code for the contract is not published/verified. That is not a good sign in this regard.
I am not saying this is a perfect system, as with any crypto project the success comes from the developers and early users nurturing the ecosystem and driving the value.
Disagree. Long term success requires a sound value model, and aligned incentives. The concept needs to be solid, otherwise it is doomed regardless of developer and community efforts.
can actually financially compensate otherwise unpaid moderators in popular subs for the hard work they do. As a concept this is good.
Compensating content creators is potentially a fine concept and has worked for other platforms. But with what is a crucial part of the equation that can’t be overlooked. In this case the “with what” on the surface seems to be an implied promise from a soon-to-be corporation that the tokens will be redeemable for “community governance” and “premium features”. Both things Reddit has very recently been openly and explicitly scamming its users out of (protest crackdowns, deleting previously held stuff people paid for). They are obviously not good for it.
In the short term that probably won’t matter, because speculators will buy the token off of creators regardless of the strength or weakness of its fundamental value proposition, because it has brand strength, and that can drive price on its own. There’s probably manipulation going on as well to convince investors to buy just on the basis of what the chart is doing. But that stuff isn’t sustainable. So in the end what’s going to happen is you’re going to have a population of bagholders who have watched their investment decline over years, begging Reddit to do something to pump their bags, and Reddit will shrug, point to some fine print saying they don’t legally have to do anything, and redirect the systems that would have accrued value to token holders towards accruing value to investors in their actual stock. It would be incredibly naive to assume they will not do this. I believe that the idea here is to have a system to pay content creators for a little while, but where the money comes from the eventual losses of speculators and Reddit doesn’t have to actually spend its own money.
From what I can see the source code for the contract is not published/verified. That is not a good sign in this regard.
Agreed
Disagree. Long term success requires a sound value model, and aligned incentives. The concept needs to be solid, otherwise it is doomed regardless of developer and community efforts.
So initial concept is ofcourse the foundation but surly it’s the developer and user participation that drive value long term?
the tokens will be redeemable for “community governance” and “premium features”.
The tokens can be traded into ETH and cash, the ability to leave the ecosystem with value for what you have added is a good concept in my opinion.
I totally agree Reddit has been a scummy actor, especially in recent months but I feel if they had acted differently up to this point the reception of this change would be more welcomed.
For example if they had not killed 3rd party app and instead of just wiping the old point system clean they essentially air dropped an equivalent of the new token to users.
I’m no fool, I can see how reddit could use this as another log on the trash fire however I think the concept is good and I’m on the fence to see how it will go from here.
The tokens can be traded into ETH and cash, the ability to leave the ecosystem with value for what you have added is a good concept in my opinion.
I get that, but can you understand that this Eth and cash needs to come from someone? And that it will be someone who is only buying it because they believe they will be able to later sell those tokens for more? Does it simply not matter to you where that money comes from or whether someone is getting screwed over in the process? The ‘value’ created by interacting with Reddit is not magically transmuted into value for the token, you just happen to get the tokens after interacting with Reddit.
I will try and watch this when I have time however I want to give some initial thoughts now. I am a techy amd have been in the cryptosphere for a long time so have a pretty good understanding of the current state of play.
NFTs are a great concept but have a number of potential draw backs. The biggest issue, the one that was the real issue during the NFT hype some years ago, is that without the correct implementation they are worthless. So the common NFT at that time was essentially a blockchain item that contained a url that linked to an image on a centralised server, the server goes down and then you have a digital item that holds a dead link. Now what NFTs have the potential for is to hold the data such as an image directly on chain (however this has some scaling related issues at this time) that would address this issue. And NFTs have much more potential than just images, in game items ate one that is touted often, but really the limits are endless. They could solve practical problems like virtualised receipts/ proof of authenticity for real world items, membership and account management for digital content or real world events are some of the examples that come to mind.
It’s important to note that NFTs (the ethereum ERC-721 standard) are not digital tokens (the ethereum ERC-20 standard) which is what the new reddit points are being implemented using. Tokens are inheritently on chain, they have there own potential draw backs and that entirely depends on the individual implementation of the token itself. They are programmable so the rules defined will outline if drawbacks exist.
The point of a toke is to create a medium of exchange within an ecosystem, the idea that each community has its own token is a great example of that. Yes the token will have little to no value to people outside the community but that is not to say it will have no value at all. The current test is r/cryptocurrency and the MOONs which have been in use for years now, this was the test bed for this system. Moderators and users receive MOONs and are able to trade them on an exchange to get ETH and then into cash of they desire. Its hard to argue it doesn’t add value to the R/Cryptocurrency ecosystem when it does by evidence.
Is it perfect? No. Does it excuse Reddits scummy actions up to now ? Hell no but it is not a bad move in and of itself.
Without going into the technicals too much L2s address the some of the scaling issues of ethereum making transactions cheap. Combined with the POS system ethereum now uses, its the best choice. Cheap fees and it doesn’t kill the environment.
They own your account right? So they have access to your crypto keys right? So what’s stopping them from taking the cringe coins away again? Do they want people to hold independent password that don’t go through Reddit or is sealed right with pinkie promises?
Also if it’s meant to replace Reddit gold they can absolutely remove evidence a post was rewarded or just delete the post entirely. This feels like the blue check mark phase of Steve Huffman trying to emulate Musk
They have complete control. They can just ban the account who owns the coins, or block them from using it because they are the some platform that it’s used on. Even if a user gets banned and gives their coins to someone else, it’s trivial to track the blockchain transaction to see which account it goes into and ban that one.
They have just as much control as the old coins, except now it burns 1000x the amount of trees and is crypto scam shit.
As @schooner said ethereum uses POS which is environmentally friendly as it uses 99% less energy than the old POW mechanism.
Also yes the account could be blocked but the crypto wallet can’t be. As far as tracking goes nothing stops as user selling on am exchange amd then purchasing more from another. Tracking is effectively stopped at that point.
Proof of stake might conserve power but it is the final evolution of cryptocurrency into a pure pyramid scheme.
I don’t see how anyone is ok with the value of their currency being validated and effectively controlled by the people that have the most of said currency. I can’t imagine people with more clear conflicts of interest in mantaining an honest value of the currency.
I think you need to read more about the technical aspects of how POW actually operates.
It has nothing to do with controlling value, a person who holds a large amount of that crypto can use it as a “stake” think collateral to operate as a consensus node, if they are caught cheating the stake is burned.
It’s in their interest to operate efficiently and fairly or lose there stake and overall network value.
Define “caught cheating” and how accountability is maintained or else this means very little. Why wouldn’t they constantly collaberate with other stake holders to manipulate the value of the currency to their advantage? How would they get caught if they do it carefully?
Also I had deleted my previous comment because it looked like it had failed to federate properly. Now I recieved a response to it. Idk what happened.
Cheating is a catch all term and there are various factors that play into it. Ultimately its not in the interest of holders to even try and mess with the system because the only thing it would do is cost them money.
I am going to leave you with this article as it talks about some attack vectors and compares POW to POS, it explains it better than I can: https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html
It’s interesting how I am being down voted for relaying facts about the Ethereum blockchain, come on people you may not like what I am saying but what I’m saying is truth.
You are being downvoted because crypto is volatile, untrustworthy, and the favorite tool in the last 30 years of scammers and swindlers. Even if you described it perfectly, talking about it like it like it isn’t a reprehensible thing will and should draw negative attention from people who know better than to tolerate con artists and their enthusiastic marks.
But again, exactly like how the big players happily maniuplate the stock market willfully for furthering their own goals and increasing their value, how does any of what you said provide any confidence for me or anyone else that people with dominant amounts of the currency can’t cooperatively and subtly push it’s value up or down as it suits their needs? I don’t care either way personally, I wouldn’t get involved with crypto with someone else’s money if I was paid to do it. But idk why crypto people would trust this after the whole point was supposed to be a trustless system
Idc about the value of Ether itself. If it maintains a healthy valuation in real world terms, that’s all that is needed to secure Ethereum. I don’t need to trust validators to know they are doing their job, that’s how the system is designed. Validators should make sure that state integrity is preserved and that’s about it. If they don’t, their stake gets reduced and can even go to zero. This is exactly what it means to be trustless. The valuation of Ether is only relevant to the point that it retains enough value that attacking the network becomes prohibitively expensive.
Market manipulation is a function of people and non-transparent dealings. If anything, fully onchain finance would allow information asymmetry to be reduced so that regular people can beware of such frauds.
Are there con artists? Of course. Why would that make me not try to build a better system than “regulated finance” which is the same, if not worse, deal but where I am not allowed to participate by regulators who act as gatekeepers.
Ether by itself is useless, its value is determined by how much demand blockspace on Ethereum has. This is a better system than my government imposing capital controls and taxing the shit out of me without even giving me a good bus to ride on to work.
Anyway, like it was said, if you don’t get it, it’s not really my job to convince you, but I hope you don’t go around spreading misinformation like you are doing right now.
Which is still 100% more than needed
You can transfer it to a wallet that is not linked to reddit.
And Ethereum is not like Bitcoin anymore, so the environmental concerns are reduced.
That doesn’t matter. Transactions are easily visible and can just be followed to a new account.
Yes, but they can’t be linked to a reddit account, which was your whole point.
…yes they can
No, they can’t. How would an EOA created in any standard wallet be linked to a Reddit vault?
Much of this thread seems to be a case of blind leading the blind for the sake of hate.
The crypto community has more than its share of scams, memes, hype-driven projects, and speculations which give it a bad and unprofessional perception, but that’s just the surface.
Ethereum/cryptocurrency has the power for great change and is actually a pretty complex topic under the hood, the details of which most people will never need to understand, just like the Internet.
Time will tell I guess!
It’s trivial to see if they give you dumb reddit coins, that the wallet it’s going into is yours. If they ban you and see that wallet to connect to your account, clearly it’s the same person.
That’s not what was said. You said even if the coins are transferred to another wallet, it could be tracked to a new reddit account. It can’t.
Bottom point is, it is very possible to do so, and it can be done in a safe-enough manner for most people without much hassle. Of course, that’s theoretical; weither or not corporations care about actual privacy, control, and are willing to work toward these is another matter entirely. But the technology have been there for years.
I do not disagree with much of the criticism Reddit is getting right now, especially the action taken leading up to this being the reason many of us are here right now.
What I will say though is that this community points system is not brand new and has been operating in the big crypto subs like R/cryptocurrency for some time using MOONS.
Now this system does not prevent the over arching power Reddit can exert on its platform but what it has done is meant is moderators are paid, well paid actually from the one I know personally. The value is determined by market forces so Reddit has little to no control over this.
Also because the points are tokens on the Ethereum ecosystem users can move there points to another wallet that is not controlled/created under the Reddit vault system meaning they can’t just be taken away.
Again, this move far from fixes many of the problems with Reddit, causing us to move to the feddiverse but as far as the idea of “points” go it’s actually the best system yet.
What makes me laugh is what Reddit did recently forcing users to spend or lose the last iteration of points, this is the kind of thing the new system should protect against.
The coins aren’t used anywhere else besides Reddit. Do you expect to be buying a hot dog with your reddit gold? lol
After Reddit banned my account, I got some sucker give me 40-odd USDT for my MOONS tokens from r/cryptocurrency, then got some other sucker give me $40 for those.
How many hot dogs is that?
The point of tokenisation is to create an ecosystem currency, it’s not for buying hotdogs with unless you’re using hotdog coin.
I’d invest in carne asada fries coin.
An investment for sure but how long could you hold on to them?
Hotdog coin would be the first stable coin as it’d actually be tied to a stable asset lol
When the world economies collapse and the people are trading in hotdogs atleast I know who to blame… or thank ?
This token has no source of value except what Reddit allows it to be redeemed for within their platform.
I’d bet they implement the ability to blacklist or freeze tokens like the major stablecoins do. And either way if the utility of these tokens depends on their use within the centralized platform of Reddit, that’s a simple way to gate access and take them away effectively.
There’s no way it does anything to protect against it. In fact it’s basically guaranteed to go the same way; people spending money on future false promises from Reddit, and getting rugged.
I’m actually pro-crypto in general, but token speculation as a tacked on business model trends towards being pretty scammy just because of the incentives and how crypto token value works, basically always goes badly. There is no reason to believe this is or will be the “best system yet”, it’s worse than the old points system because the people buying will have some expectation of profit.
Well to am extent I agree with you, the ecosystem is the community and if reddit does not foster that it will be worthless. However the fact is MOONs as the example are traded on 3rd party exchanges with an ETH pairing.
I agree this is a possibility, and it comes into what I have said in other comments about the token implementation. Though again with the example being MOONs I have not heard of this being an issue.
It protects in the sense that I can trade my tokens with a 3rd part into another. However if Reddit kills tokens on the app then the value would be 0 making that void. I am not saying this is a perfect system, as with any crypto project the success comes from the developers and early users nurturing the ecosystem and driving the value.
Me too, I’ve been in the space for a long time and seen my fair share of scams and BS, but through it all I still believe in the potential crypto has overall. Based of the MOONs this current system has legs in my opinion and can actually financially compensate otherwise unpaid moderators in popular subs for the hard work they do. As a concept this is good.
You scepticism is healthy, and more people need to have this attitude in crypto in general to stop the wild speculation you talk about however it doesn’t mean we should dismiss good concepts out of turn. Give it a chance, I’m not saying it will be the best system yet just that it has potential, I don’t want to let my overall feeling of what Reddit has done totally blind me to that.
From what I can see the source code for the contract is not published/verified. That is not a good sign in this regard.
Disagree. Long term success requires a sound value model, and aligned incentives. The concept needs to be solid, otherwise it is doomed regardless of developer and community efforts.
Compensating content creators is potentially a fine concept and has worked for other platforms. But with what is a crucial part of the equation that can’t be overlooked. In this case the “with what” on the surface seems to be an implied promise from a soon-to-be corporation that the tokens will be redeemable for “community governance” and “premium features”. Both things Reddit has very recently been openly and explicitly scamming its users out of (protest crackdowns, deleting previously held stuff people paid for). They are obviously not good for it.
In the short term that probably won’t matter, because speculators will buy the token off of creators regardless of the strength or weakness of its fundamental value proposition, because it has brand strength, and that can drive price on its own. There’s probably manipulation going on as well to convince investors to buy just on the basis of what the chart is doing. But that stuff isn’t sustainable. So in the end what’s going to happen is you’re going to have a population of bagholders who have watched their investment decline over years, begging Reddit to do something to pump their bags, and Reddit will shrug, point to some fine print saying they don’t legally have to do anything, and redirect the systems that would have accrued value to token holders towards accruing value to investors in their actual stock. It would be incredibly naive to assume they will not do this. I believe that the idea here is to have a system to pay content creators for a little while, but where the money comes from the eventual losses of speculators and Reddit doesn’t have to actually spend its own money.
Agreed
So initial concept is ofcourse the foundation but surly it’s the developer and user participation that drive value long term?
The tokens can be traded into ETH and cash, the ability to leave the ecosystem with value for what you have added is a good concept in my opinion.
I totally agree Reddit has been a scummy actor, especially in recent months but I feel if they had acted differently up to this point the reception of this change would be more welcomed.
For example if they had not killed 3rd party app and instead of just wiping the old point system clean they essentially air dropped an equivalent of the new token to users.
I’m no fool, I can see how reddit could use this as another log on the trash fire however I think the concept is good and I’m on the fence to see how it will go from here.
I get that, but can you understand that this Eth and cash needs to come from someone? And that it will be someone who is only buying it because they believe they will be able to later sell those tokens for more? Does it simply not matter to you where that money comes from or whether someone is getting screwed over in the process? The ‘value’ created by interacting with Reddit is not magically transmuted into value for the token, you just happen to get the tokens after interacting with Reddit.
You need to watch this, friend: https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g
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I will try and watch this when I have time however I want to give some initial thoughts now. I am a techy amd have been in the cryptosphere for a long time so have a pretty good understanding of the current state of play.
NFTs are a great concept but have a number of potential draw backs. The biggest issue, the one that was the real issue during the NFT hype some years ago, is that without the correct implementation they are worthless. So the common NFT at that time was essentially a blockchain item that contained a url that linked to an image on a centralised server, the server goes down and then you have a digital item that holds a dead link. Now what NFTs have the potential for is to hold the data such as an image directly on chain (however this has some scaling related issues at this time) that would address this issue. And NFTs have much more potential than just images, in game items ate one that is touted often, but really the limits are endless. They could solve practical problems like virtualised receipts/ proof of authenticity for real world items, membership and account management for digital content or real world events are some of the examples that come to mind.
It’s important to note that NFTs (the ethereum ERC-721 standard) are not digital tokens (the ethereum ERC-20 standard) which is what the new reddit points are being implemented using. Tokens are inheritently on chain, they have there own potential draw backs and that entirely depends on the individual implementation of the token itself. They are programmable so the rules defined will outline if drawbacks exist.
The point of a toke is to create a medium of exchange within an ecosystem, the idea that each community has its own token is a great example of that. Yes the token will have little to no value to people outside the community but that is not to say it will have no value at all. The current test is r/cryptocurrency and the MOONs which have been in use for years now, this was the test bed for this system. Moderators and users receive MOONs and are able to trade them on an exchange to get ETH and then into cash of they desire. Its hard to argue it doesn’t add value to the R/Cryptocurrency ecosystem when it does by evidence.
Is it perfect? No. Does it excuse Reddits scummy actions up to now ? Hell no but it is not a bad move in and of itself.
To those with the down doots, is there anything constructive you want add to the conversation ?
Ah they’re built on etherium? Well at least they can’t take the useless things away. That makes a lot more sense than what I was thinking
Correct it’s built on an L2 of ethereum.
Without going into the technicals too much L2s address the some of the scaling issues of ethereum making transactions cheap. Combined with the POS system ethereum now uses, its the best choice. Cheap fees and it doesn’t kill the environment.