Thread by @AlexandraErin

This IS one of the most hilarious things about NFTs, because when the bubble began, the point that got hyped up the most was "guaranteed unique", leading to widespread confusion among the public when, for instance, everybody at a ceremony got "the same NFT" of Chadwick Boseman.

https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/1446129156526264330

Which is probably why the NFTer-Grifters have moved on from "uniqueness" as a hype point to "scarcity", which I feel is going to backfire on them in a more subtle way, as you can't explain how a digital asset is "scarce" without revealing you just chose not to make more of them.

And if you can choose to make more of them at any time, then nobody's "investment" in your "scarce" asset is actually secure. They're just trusting you not to flood the market and devalue their "holdings". Nothing in the NFT framework prevents this, or even can prevent it.

I think the second most hilarious things about NFTs right now is how NFTer-Grifter accounts keep going around to comment/QT on threads about NFT flaws with "Imagine being mad about NFTs and not realizing that [existing media] is used for all the same things."

We DO realize that.

"Imagine being mad about a game using NFTs for in-game assets that are just records on a server when existing games already have items that work that way."

Yes, we know! You can do the useful part of the thing without NFTs! Thank you for admitting that!

"Imagine being mad about NFTs being used for selling digital media when media is already sold digitally and you don't 'own' anything but access to a file that way, either."

Yes, we know! Thank you for acknowledging that NFTs contribute nothing but overhead to the process!

"But NFTs let you do it in a decentralized way."

Every single unnecessary step of the pointlessly convoluted and wasteful blockchain process depends 100% on the existence of internet architecture that is controlled by those central authorities you're supposedly circumventing.

There is at the moment a legitimate edge case use for crypto, which is circumventing payment processors who would restrict the kinds of media that can be purchased online, but as far as I'm concerned, people selling their lewds as NFTs are just hacking two terrible systems.

The vanilla financial system excludes them, and the crypto "financial system" is nothing but an elaborate skin put on the vanilla financial system; the "value" always and only lies in the ability to sell your cryptocurrency for a volatile amount of real money.

And the fact that this edge case exists is a testament to how crypto can never be used to decentralize the world, because you couldn't run a "decentralized internet" with routing and such controlled by a blockchain-based consensus process *without* the actual internet...

...handling the routing during the validation process, and even if you could somehow bootstrap a blockchain-based routing that validates itself (and try not to imagine how slow browsing would be using that), you'd still need the actual money economy for NFTs to work.

Like, "We figured out how to use computers to manufacture scarcity! For the cost of using up already-scarce mineral resources, we can create new and exciting kinds of scarcity!" is so the opposite of a revolution. It's capitalism persevering.

And to the extent that it's not *yet* beset by *all* the problems of late capitalism, it's because it is itself in early days. I.e., it's not monopoly-proof, it's just not cohesive or valuable enough yet for any well-funded outside player to see the point in monopolizing it.