NFTs (thread now extremely NSFW)

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now we're all safe to work

happy new year

To get this somewhat back on track I do understand Whineys frustration, lLX like most online leftist spaces pride themselves on being the smartest guys in the room so it almost causes an identity crisis to see things go so far off the rails. Like imagine going back in time to 2015 and telling yourself to sell everything and invest half your money in crypto and putting the other half on Donald Trump becoming President of the United States, and wondering what kind of fucking hellhole we’d fallen into. But as long as there have been stock markets or other forms of gambling there have always been those kinds of regrets. Crypto is not a zero-sum game, it’s negative-sum, and there are far more people losing their ass on this than buying houses and taking vacations. Again I was around for the online poker boom and surprise surprise everyone was “getting rich” then too. The network is so comically unsustainable that even the true believers acknowledge it’s probably gonna crash. But who knows??? Like everyone ITT I am starting to question reality a little.

idk he has a point, i appreciate the honesty, it sounds like it comes from a real place of struggle which i'm not sure everyone else dunking on him itt comes from?

Is anyone dunking on him? Financial FOMO is real for almost everyone, but NFTs aren't any different from previous versions aside from being an even more obvious and stupid scam. Why didn't I invest all my income in high school in pets.com before the bubble burst? Why didn't I study something STEM and move to Silicon Valley in 2004 in time to be one of the first Facebook lackeys? Or I could have at least painted a couple of ugly murals in the office for stock options like that one guy.

At least with Bitcoin there are some forms of use to keep it afloat, NFTs are "what if you went back to 2012 to buy bitcoin but you couldn't buy drugs online with it so everyone forgot about it in 12 months."

Yeah BTC is legitimately useful for buying drugs (I’ve never done it but I know people who have who were very satisfied with the process) & in fact I still have to use it to cash out on my poker site which is frustrating because sometimes you cash out and get the deposit at 3 AM. But it’s way better than paying $59 for a courier check that no bank really wants to cash. But god that brief moment where I actually own Bitcoin feels dirty. They should have regulated this shit 10 years ago.

As far as a get rich quick scheme one thing that gets forgotten is any “sane” person who puts a couple grand in crypto would have probably cashed it out as soon as it doubled or tripled. The way to get rich was to lose your private key and find it 5 years later.

As far as a get rich quick scheme one thing that gets forgotten is any “sane” person who puts a couple grand in crypto would have probably cashed it out as soon as it doubled or tripled.

This is what sets my mind at ease. Even if I'd bought into Bitcoin early, I would have sold it all way before the peak, and then I'd be kicking myself for that. Moral scruples aside, I just don't have the constitution for this kind of thing.

https://t.co/JVKRh046qd pic.twitter.com/9Z3Py3aiIT

— Richard Karn (@TheRichardKarn) January 2, 2022

A very good anti-crypto/NFTs rant

The more crypto grows, the more it resembles the absolute worst parts of government and capitalism. These people absolutely want laws - for example, that if you acquire a monkey picture in the wrong way you must hand it back, for free - they just don’t want the laws that mean they have to pay tax, or anything that might slow the flow of money into their corrupt systems (which of course is nothing like any corporations you might have heard of), even if said flow-slowing might protect people from being scammed or harmed.

None of this is “true” libertarianism - it’s old, boring, scummy opportunism. The obsession of crypto with metaverses and web3 isn’t anything to do with human contact, it’s an intentional attempt to create separate, unregulated societies through which to monetize and exploit people. It may have a different process, but this is just a messy mixture of company towns and lobbying - creating little societies where you control the economies and can arbitrarily influence or outright change the rules to match whatever belief system you’ve chosen today.

Anyone claiming that crypto is “different” isn’t seeing the current state of crypto for what it is - manifold ways to extract, store, exploit and obfuscate capital. The evil bankers and hedge fund managers and their shareholder meetings are replaced with people with ugly portraits that post “GM” and vague platitudes about how they’ll change the world. The key difference is that there are so many suckers who are willing to market these concepts for free, and willing to go to war on social media with those who don’t buy into the spurious visions they poorly describe. It’s because they’re truly invested in the outcome and that they can manifest destiny through the power of posting and vaguely suggesting that you might become a multi-millionaire - that you are “going to make it.”

Who is going to get rich off of all of this? The same fucking people who were rich already. Sure, some people got wealthy as a result of gambling on extremely stupid and pointless shit, but the people who are actually making money are generally a small group of people manipulating a system to their advantage. For every person whose life was changed because of their childlike sketch of a person sold for $50,000, hundreds of thousands of others are desperately talking about how they are going to make it and that their particular picture will be what makes them one of the elite.

...

The consistent pro-crypto argument is that big companies control the platforms we use every day, and decentralization is the only way for us to be truly “free.” The problem is that there is no real difference between a web3 company that has transferrable ‘votes’ and a regular company - those with the money still have the power, except they have the ability to directly monetize each vote. Democracy is quite literally for sale by the company (and regularly sold to wealthy investors before anyone else!), and those buying votes under the auspices of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ are really just participating in an even more corrupt and punishing system than we have in the real world.

What’s amazing is how blind the average crypto users appear to be to the naked industrial cronyism. Who gets access to hot tokens early? Investors and friends of the developers. Who gets early knowledge that things will get listed? Investors and friends of the project. There are no insider trading laws that stop this from happening, because we’re in a beautiful libertarian paradise where anything goes, because of how good freedom is.

Thread worth checking out

Some statistics to start the year:

During 2021 Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total, which is comparable to the electrical energy consumed by a country like Argentina.

Related CO2 emissions were ~64 Mt; enough to negate the entire global net savings from deploying EVs.

— Digiconomist (@DigiEconomist) January 1, 2022

Not with a bang but a dogecoin

Cyberbullying works

I’ve thought long and hard about NFT’s and I’ve decided it’s not something I need to do🙏💕 pic.twitter.com/4522gEoCPG

— Richard Karn (@TheRichardKarn) January 4, 2022

he looked at it and said "i dont think so, tim"

He was a bad bad Borlan

That Ed Zitron essay is a good counter to this piece of gobbledygook I read today: https://li.substack.com/p/the-web3-renaissance-a-golden-age. All of the stuff she talks about as revolutionary to me sounds like ... just plain old "buying things," but with fancy jargon.

Purchasing an NFT is akin to collecting real-world merchandise, enabling fans to feel closer to the artist and own something rare, akin to a “non-fungible super-like.” Digital scarcity and uniqueness—which had been missing from the web2 internet—is enabled by the blockchain, leading to a new business model for creators that lessens the economic control of platforms.

Excitingly, the introduction of scarcity through NFTs doesn’t mean that access to the underlying media is limited, as it would be with paywalls or paid digital downloads. The actual media underpinning NFTs can remain public goods, available to be consumed by anyone at no cost. Those who think this undermines the scarcity of NFTs (“right-click and save”) fundamentally miss the point.

I don't think I "miss the point," I'm just not sure that me buying a collection of songs in the form of an NFT is really any different than buying digital album through Bandcamp.

You get to burn down an acre of rain forest to own the NFT album, though. Makes it more real.

"Purchasing an NFT is akin to collecting real-world merchandise, enabling fans to feel closer to the artist and own something rare"

lol yes, the people buying those ugly ape things are basically living the dream of hiring Bosch to paint an altarpiece.

xp
But then you don't "own something rare." (That the artist you're buying from likely knows nothing about.)

Excitingly, goods can now be both extremely scarce and extremely valuable, while simultaneously they are available in unlimited quantities to be consumed infinitely by anyone at no cost!! This is exciting because it elevates ordinary nonsense into a special kind of nonsense that you can buy and sell!!!!!!!

As many of you know, my wife tragically passed away last year.

To honour her, Deranged Crypto Ape have produced this Sarah Oxford-Laughdugry Memorial NFT.

And you can win one!

To enter:
1⃣ Follow @sarah_ox_laugh
2⃣ Like & Retweet this post
3⃣ Tag a friend#NFTGiveaway #NFT pic.twitter.com/e0UlkilqSc

— Oliver @ Sarah Oxford-Laughdugry Memorial Charity (@sarah_ox_laugh) January 2, 2022

doing it for the lolz is getting increasingly depressing

shots fired

time to admit... buying vinyl is just a version of nft-ism...

— Rob Wile (@rjwile) January 4, 2022

even if you reduce this just to the people who spend like $5000 or whatever on a low-numbered version of The White Album with the intention of selling it later the analogy still doesn't work because shit like that is valuable & inherently interesting b/c everyone knows who The Beatles are. literally nobody on the planet gives a shit about the Bored Ape stuff other than those trying to make money off it

Except for me and my monkey

nice

loool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiHopGox5cU

be sure to get at least 3 minutes into that video

i'd think it was a parody but it's around 12 minutes longer than any parody would bother

Honestly, the idea of confining all these fuckers on an island (and then nuking it to the ocean floor, shh don't tell 'em) grows more appealing by the minute.

i think it may be real?
https://cointelegraph.com/press-releases/cryptoland-the-worlds-first-crypto-island-is-launching-the-most-epic-nft-giveaway

who even knows anymore