Thread by @leashless

My thread on why young people are embracing NFTs/blockchain hit 600 retweets.

The analysis resonated for people deeply. A lot seem to have found it very moving, speaking to the struggle of their lives.

Now I want to talk about the other side: NFT hatred.

https://twitter.com/leashless/status/1486147735212470274/retweets/with_comments

The first thing is that people are having three different emotions about NFTs: a sense of betrayal, of fear, and of envy.

These three emotions are then channeled through the particularly disgusting positioning tactics which modern internet discourse has sunk to. It's awful stuff

But there are legitimate reasons for people to feel betrayed, afraid and envious. These folks aren't having these emotional reactions *for no reason*. There are legitimate problems, reasons for the complaints.

The problem is they're confusing freedom fighters for prison guards.

So let's pick apart the three emotions. First, betrayal.

Well this should be obvious: the American Dream turned into mass incarceration, hillbilly heroin, and neonazis insisting on their right to sneeze on people during a pandemic. This is a shitshow and SOMEONE MUST BE TO BLAME

Picking on the NFT nerds is much safer and easier than fighting the Republicans. Blaming Silicon Valley for what Boeing and McDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics and the other defense contractors actually did is easier than getting money out of politics.

opensecrets.org/industries/ind…

The fear is obvious: American democracy is dying. Joe Biden is about 200 years old, and is a broken, broken man. Donald Trump looks like one of the less well regarded later Roman emperors, after Rome had lost the plot. Thank god the only war he started was a civil war, frankly.

Housing is stupidly expensive. Health care is an unaffordable corporate welfare scheme, where federal regulation makes providing low-cost effective care impossible due to red tape. Wall Street's drug companies pedalled more heroin than the CIA-backed South American drug cartels.

This shit is terrifying and out of control. If you go so far as to build a Machine Which Can Give You Everything in the form of a gigantic Federal Government **you best keep tight control of it**.

Because if you lose control of the Federal Government, it's big enough to eat you.

Now the envy. That's a tough one, even for me. I divested from Ethereum in 2016, after the DAO crisis. Talked to lawyers trying to understand the hard fork, and they taught me about securities and pointed out I was a front-man for the project.

Oh. I said. I see. I sold it all.

Now, was that the right thing to do? No, absolutely not. Was it the right call at the time? Yes, absolutely.

I had a previous career to protect: 12 years in defense and energy think tanks working on the hardest problems our species face. An SEC injunction or worse? Career dead.

So I had more to lose than most of the people involved: I had (and still have) political assets that I was not willing to give away for money. I need that reputation to cover my flanks when the refugee work I've been doing for two decades finally breaks into the public eye.

But the envy. The people who winged it - and who were almost certainly right, given the SEC's tolerant stance towards Ethereum - are now all worth tens of millions of dollars, or more. It's a whole other world of wealth and fabulous freedoms.

These people can do anything forever

I, on the other hand, run a company and work like a dog for an engineer's salary. It's the hardest job I ever had.

So now I think, well, what if I'd stayed in the think tank world as an analyst, writing papers about bitcoin, didn't buy any because I was trying for a clearance?

And then suddenly everybody's getting rich.

By doing nothing other than betting on a specific vision of the future.

If Donald Trump hadn't been in power, I doubt bitcoin would have made it this far: FedGov's capacity for destructive attention was pointed elsewhere for years.

So here we are. I blew my chance at easy money, and now I'm earning it the hard way.

But oh-so-easy to have done this differently: hung on to the cash-of-uncertain-legal-risk, and turned that money directly into refugee housing and so on

I'd have been active on that *right now*

And, if I was willing to pile on even more legal risk, maybe I could have made enough money to get the refugee cities built.

The envy hits *hard*. **OH WHY DIDN'T I JUST**.

And I knew at the time it could go this way, and the SEC might just chill out. I knew.

So about envy.

The envy people have is four layered: they envy those with security, they envy those with unearned wealth, they envy the lucky, and they envy-hate-fear the smart.

Wall Street's predator class don't get much envy: they're seen as being a Other. Not a "lucky us" but inherent-other

But the notion that the kid down the street is drawing comic books and selling them for ether which is then paying for his mom's new car?

The envy cannon comes out hard for that: "unearned wealth", fear of one's own security, and "how come that lucky shiv is first in the line?"

Here, an even worse problem. Blockchain people want everybody on board the ship. The more people are on board, the more the systems will be protected from regulators: *voters* will change government policy.

Prices will rise because scarce assets will be in even higher demand.

So the kid down the street is like "hey you can join me, you know? just don't buy that new car and put the money into <a basket of ponzi coins OR the future of finance>"

And this is where the fear of being stupid kicks in: how can anybody possibly make a choice? Too complicated.

There's an entire *industry* of glib morons explaining to scared normies how and why to buy bitcoin, why it's safe to do.

Those people have made so many people so much money. It *does not matter if they're lying* because the behavior they promote has made people rich.

RISKY.

Then then just when you think you have it under control... you bought some bitcoin...

These NFT kids come along and make you feel old and out of touch. At 35 or whatever.

And *THAT* is where the real rage comes from inside of the space. People who thought they had it made...

Because they navigated one wave of innovation and got as far as buying bitcoin. They thought they had it made.

And then the innovation machine keeps on running and people are doing new stuff for 1000x returns - and you're not going to get 1000x on bitcoin no n no.

FOMO indeed.

The anxiety that bitcoiners feel about watching NFTs go mainstream is *profound* - EMINEM and Justin Bieber aren't shilling bitcoin, no, they're buying apes.

Two jumps from BTC: first to ETH, then to NFTs.

The total anxiety of "do I ape in?" is crippling people. And it matters.

So now the nocoiners: the *content creators* (god I hate the word content). The artists.

The screaming shrill artists and fans who (for example) drove Neil Gaiman off an NFT project recently

https://twitter.com/penny_a_pound/status/1488062445088231424?s=20&t=vP_x5DTX-ozdMmSG6yowvw

The fear is simple: they'll be too poor to afford the work.

It's that simple: the pop culture world has provided vast seas of cheap content to kill piracy (STEAM, Netflix), but it's also got the manacles on: $24.99 per series for the new stuff. NFTs look like something that Disney will sell to your kids and damn near bankrupt you. EEEEKKK

Same thing with gamers: the industry's been jacking the price of AAA games for years. Gamers feel squeezed and hard done by already.

Now introduce hats which have crypto-finance applications? Any sane gamer sees this as a direct assault on their future financial well-being. RAID

So what's happening is that already stressed populations are being *threatened* with ever-more financialization.

And why does this hit them so hard?

Because they don't know they can mint NFTs. They don't know they can sell.

They're conditioned AS CONSUMERS and NFTs aren't that

So CONSUMERS see NFTs as spectacularly unaffordable speculative assets which are going to price all of their favorite stuff out of their reach in a few years.

But crypto people are TRADERS and see NFTs as a chance to make some money

CONSUMERS are terrified of NFTs: good reasons

This mindset shift between crypto-native TRADERS and crypto-naive CONSUMERS is deep in the heart of the (upcoming) NFT wars.

The CONSUMERS **hate** the TRADERS. All they see traders as doing is jacking up prices for profit, they don't even *enjoy* the work they're selling.

So fan groups know they're gonna get *farmed* by the NFT process. Buy the NFT, get an option to buy the next book in the series two weeks early.

Become a second class citizen in your own fandom because you don't have enough money

Have some entitled prick spoiler the plot to you

Hence they're out with the pitchforks defending the existing equilibrium. They're effectively UNIONIZING to protect their cultural turf: "no, Neil Gaiman, you belong to US and you will NOT leave with those NFT bros."

It's basically jealousy of the fan cults

So NFTs are *NEW* IP

There's no conversion of existing IP into NFTs at scale. World of Warcraft isn't doing NFTs for games at scale, GALA is. The existing fans don't want this stuff: they're in the old pre-crypto CONSUMER mindset.

With Gala etc. TRADERS are finding new things to trade: play to earn.

I don't know how long that equilibrium will hold, but right now this looks like a generational split.

Gamers are, after all, often pretty old. Consoles have been around forever. The gamer *identity* went mainstream a decade ago or more.

We saw this exact same pattern in finance

There was a period around 2016 when everybody thought the banks were going to mass adopt blockchain technology slash the costs of running their own IT infrastructure and payment technologies. 100% pure tech play against their databases.

Nothing happened.

Why? They're *banks*.

So I don't think the culture industry is going to come along without a fight.

I think it's more likely you'll see a BAYC animated movie than you'll see Disney selling NFTs at scale to their pre-existing fanbase

Young hustlers will hustle, but I expect it to be new IP portfolios

So new IP portfolios - rather than starting as comics, start as NFTs.

Then the NFT characters wind up in comics. Then jump to video games, metaverse, and merch. Then to animated series, and bigger budget video games.

Then to movies.

A new way up for character creators, I think

The trick of this is that the EXPLOSIVE things you can do with **revenue streams** generated by NFT art projects are mostly illegal in America because of the SEC / Howey test / securities law.

NFT folks mostly don't know that law - it's all know-how from the IPO days, friends.

It would require some pretty wizzy legal work to generate NFT character licenses which both protected creators, and allowed fans to profit when their favorite NFT characters wind up with movies and AAA game franchises.

But it's doable. @Mattereum after we do real estate I guess.