Thread by @AlexandraErin

Great thread, with the hilarious addition of indignant cryptobros in the QTs of various tweets going "Clearly the OP hasn't heard that sometimes NFT sellers are also selling perks like a copyright or license for the art with the NFT, which means the NFT has value."

https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1445795667826208770

If you're selling an album or tickets to an event or a piece of artwork -- that is legitimately yours and that you're actually selling -- and you attach it to an NFT, the NFT adds nothing to the process but waste/expense and hype.

Would I like it if there was some open source system where small venues, even ones that aren't particularly tech savvy, could set up ticketing and sell tickets for events without partnering with a big company? Sure.

NFT techbros who say NFTs are this want to be the big company.

And the two things that NFTs add to the process -- waste and hype -- only make them artificially more expensive, the first directly and the second indirectly.

*crypto voice*

"Obviously this person hasn't heard of CoffeeBase, where if you buy a token (currently trading at $13,739) you can scan it at my local coffee shop and get one small drip coffee for free. You don't have to buy the coffee. The NFT does that."

https://twitter.com/greggentry1/status/1446077312991178755

And if there's an online or offline event you want to participate in and the tickets are in the form of an NFT, the NFT didn't do anything... you were forced to buy an NFT to attend the event, for no reason.

Nothing says "My product has value and uses" like making people buy it in order to get other things they actually want.

Some of the QTs on that thread are touting "digital scarcity" as the future, which gets to what I was talking about the other day: the central failure of NFTs is that they're recreating the flaws and limitations of offline existence.

"There's no scarcity online" isn't a problem.

It honestly makes me dizzy thinking about how they've completely missed that the point of technological process for humanity as a whole is to destroy scarcity, abolish and overturn it. A "post-scarcity society" would be a good thing.

It's basically the original sin of cryptocurrency, in that the whole idea was to reinstate the gold standard but sub in something intrinsically worthless (gold has uses!) for gold, under the magical thinking that says "the value of something is the 'work' of extracting it."

The reason crypto mining/minting is so wasteful in terms of processing power is the foundational myth of crypto being that if you can prove you (your computer rig) worked really hard to produce nothing, this inherently bestows value on the nothing.

Which means the idea that investments in crypto will lead to advancements in computing and energy production that solves the wastefulness is a lie, because if it becomes too easy, they'll just have to make it hard again.

There's something bleakly hilarious about the way the same people who tout NFTs "because they offer decentralization" get excited when a big corporation announces an interest in them.

Money talks even louder in cryptoland than it does offline. You have to buy in to have a voice, and -- adjusting for things like technical savvy and crypto metagame -- the more money you have, the louder your voice is.

So it'll be centralized as soon as money wants it to be.

And honestly, I think most of the cryptobros know this? I mean, they're always crowing about how they imagine all us doubters and haters will be left behind in the cryptofuture.

Which means their future is centralized and stratified.

If the crypto future is decentralized and egalitarian, then it couldn't possibly leave me behind. I could willfully ignore it for fifty years and then, at the age of 91, jump aboard with both feet. Who would stop me? What would stop me?

And sure, if crypto hadn't meaningfully changed in that time (which also presupposes human society as we know it wasn't devastated by climate change or anything else), I could, at the age of 91, mint my own new coin or whatever, but a crypto-world would have no need of it.

In a future where crypto is an established thing, there are established winners who have managed to become THE standard for currency, for event ticketing, for whatever.

And chances are they belong to Amazon, Google, Disney, etc. Why wouldn't they? Who would stop them?

"But we're forming DAOs to get away from corporate control!"

Right, and your cute little bottom-up non-hierarchical organization will have majority control bought up by a giant corporation five seconds after you prove it's worth buying up.

Making your organization bottom-up instead of top-down doesn't prevent centralization. It only changes what an entity needs to buy in order to centralize control of it.