Thread by @SecretGamerGrrl

... OK, just to make it clear, there is not, and inherently can never be, a "non-scam use" for "NFTs."

The entire PREMISE is inherently a scam, confusing people into thinking they are purchasing... something (I don't know what people actually think it is they get, and I'm not

sure they even have a clear idea, almost tempted to survey) when they are in fact just forking over huge sums of money to someone in exchange for them popping an imgur url or whatever into what's essentially just tinyurl.com but worse.

And THAT whole fraudulent trade

is really only happening to inflate the perceived value of bitcoin, because my little "but worse" there is doing the real heavy lifting of "incrementing the totally arbitrary counter that is 'the blockchain' that by design requires someone to burn even more fossil fuels than last

time the counter ticked up to have a few shipping containers full of graphics cards hold a dick measuring contest with each other by encrypting then decrypting this ever growing transaction log."

And the only reason anyone cares about THAT is that ensuring the next counter tick

is going to be that much more expensive lets other con artists claim that bitcoin, which requires the same dump enough electricity into shipping containers full of graphics cards purely for the sake of wasting more electricity than last time every time it changes hands "increases

in value" every time it happens, by virtue of how you need to ask for more to justify trading any away each time to justify the constantly skyrocketing costs.

And people are extremely invested in doing THAT because the alternative is to admit that bitcoin is also 100% a complete

and utter scam, and a shocking number of Silicon Valley investors and payroll managers and such would have to admit that they literally threw away millions if not billions of dollars "investing" in something that never actually existed but they thought were like, energon cubes?

For real, I'm curious what people think they're actually getting in exchange for their money with bitcoin/NFTs.

I know with the former there's a lot of weird magical thinking that all that electricity gets magically converted into some kind of super battery you can take it back

out of later, when really what's essentially happening is someone in a desert somewhere is just plugging like a few million space heaters into diesel generators outside in a desert and cranking them up to max.

With NFTs though, what do they think they're getting? I see confused

ramblings about like, "Fortnite skins but you have them outside of Fortnite!" before and I remember when there was that gross Oscars thing they were showing this gaudy animated gif so like... do people think they're buying 3D models? Like, .obj files or something? Because like if

that's what you want, you absolutely are not actually getting that, but you can totally just go to a site like this cgtrader.com/free-3d-models… and defy all those anti-piracy ads by downloading a bunch of cars. Load'em up in Blendr, import'em into Unreal/Unity to make a game. Go nuts

Well, maybe check the usage licenses first to see what the artists allow, but still.

And OK I have someone replying with the theory that it's all just about the super abstracted concept of "ownership" but like... you don't end up owning things. People reductively talk about NFTs

as "buying expensive jpgs" but you're not even actually doing that. Like, I could totally go "make an NFT" with this here gif of the Hamburgler and sell that to you, but like, you don't then own the Hamburgler, or even the gif. All you "own" is the receipt that says you gave me

like $20,000 in exchange for pointing at a gif of the Hamburgler (which may not still exist where I was pointing and which I never actually owned). But, you know, people are doing math to that receipt to pretend their monopoly money is worth more now.

If you're into the abstract

concept of ownership, you're way better off like, actually buying a thing. Or hell if you just want to splash some money out and not have to deal with the overhead of actually owning a thing, like, donate a bunch of money to a hospital and have them name a wing after you maybe?

Actually hell, I celebrate my birthday next month. Here's a wishlist. amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls… Today only, buy me something off there and tell me and if they didn't start like requiring log-ins or something I will make a tinyurl with your handle in it pointing at that gif up there

As I understand it, this is exactly as valuable as an NFT, but I am charging like... 0.1% of the going market rate on the things. That is just an absolute steal, how could you ever pass it up?