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The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

nautil.us

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Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#121

Post by Jerrrry »

acdha wrote: post #76
friendlydog wrote: post #42

Commercial aviation makes up 918 million metric tons of carbon. Bitcoin mining makes up 22 million metric tons. I'm less worried about NFTs than I am air travel.

Commercial aviation is at least useful: every year many millions of people travel for business, school, family, and pleasure needs which would be non-trivial to replace and aviation cargo is a key part of the global supply chain. If Bitcoin turned off tomorrow, some speculators would be very upset and nobody else would notice because 13 years in it still hasn't found something it can do competitively with alternative…

Crypto's use case is drugs and money laundering.

Those are valid use-cases.

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#122

Post by acdha »

Zamicol wrote: post #115
acdha wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you familiar with what is being done on these systems? Uniswap alone did $1 billion in fees last year, a distributed, permissionless, unstoppable exchange. Ethereum did $10 billion in fees last year. Consider whether bragging about the overhead fees for a system which statistically nobody uses is a great way to sell people on it. > I know someone who bought their house with a loan from Dai, which is far less ha…

Fees show obvious usage. "Statistically nobody uses" isn't fair. The fact that someone is paying interested on their house, a physical asset, to a blockchain application instead of Wells Fargo is a huge deal.

Fees show transactions in the system, not real-world impact — smart contracts, anonymization, pump-and-dump, etc. generate a ton of activity for what most people would think of as a single logical operation.

What you really want to see are real-world impacts: how many people use the network? How many real business transactions occur daily? and, especially, how much real value is entering or leaving the system? If a bunch of early adopters are churning an NFT back and forth boosting its value, they're definitely paying fees but that's neither economically-useful activity nor popular adoption.

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#123

Post by julianz »

diogenesjunior wrote: post #31

One of my favorite rappers, Nas, is selling royalty rights to his songs as NFTs[0]. I think selling NFTs as if they were trading cards is silly, but what Nas is doing? I think that's actually pretty cool. Thoughts? 0: https://www.nme.com/news/music/nas-to-sell-royalty-rights-to...

btw I don't think this question should be downvoted, it's a fair thing to ask.

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#124

Post by acdha »

Jerrrry wrote: post #121
acdha wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commercial aviation is at least useful: every year many millions of people travel for business, school, family, and pleasure needs which would be non-trivial to replace and aviation cargo is a key part of the global supply chain. If Bitcoin turned off tomorrow, some speculators would be very upset and nobody else would notice because 13 years in it still hasn't found something it can do competitively with alternative…

Crypto's use case is drugs and money laundering. Those are valid use-cases.

Only until the criminals learn that leaving a signed transaction history for the police is unwise.

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#125

Post by betterunix2 »

joeman1000 wrote: post #78

I’m honestly surprised that hysterics about NFTs have dragged on so long. People must be super bored to give a fuck about this or become upset. People just want to trade proof of ownership, as defined in their own sense. They aren’t really bothering anyone or causing any havoc. Why are people so bloody crazy about it? Just ignore it for fucks sake.

I would agree...except that mining operations are literally keeping carbon-emitting power plants online and even bringing already-shutdown plants back online to power mining. NFTs by and large still depend on these energy-inefficient mining operations despite years of promises that "proof of stake" and whatnot would solve that problem in general. Then there are the NFT scams that serve only to discredit the entire blockchain ecosystem, and the fact that NFT proponents have been going around promoting both scams and misinformation. So it is not too hard to see why people are taking the time to weigh in on it...

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#126

Post by diogenesjunior »

quickthrowman wrote: post #44
diogenesjunior wrote: post #31

One of my favorite rappers, Nas, is selling royalty rights to his songs as NFTs[0]. I think selling NFTs as if they were trading cards is silly, but what Nas is doing? I think that's actually pretty cool. Thoughts? 0: https://www.nme.com/news/music/nas-to-sell-royalty-rights-to...

I only have one thing to say here: “Smarten up Nas” Jay-Z, Takeover, The Blueprint (2001)

How about a dash of Ether?

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#127

Post by betterunix2 »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #77
pphysch wrote: post #2

don't worry, "web3" nonsense will be among the first bubbles to pop as US monetary policy tightens over the next couple years

I'd replace the 'as' with 'if' above. I'm not convinced the Fed has the guts to significantly tighten monetary policy at this point. It's not just the NFT market that would crash, it's stocks and real estate as well - followed by a pretty significant recession.

It is easy to forget that the Fed was already tightening monetary policy over a period of years prior to the COVID crash, and only loosened policy in response to the economic impact of COVID. The Fed has historically not been shy about triggering corrections, crashes, and recessions if that is what it takes to achieve their targets, and I am not sure why anyone would think they will behave any differently this time around. Certainly the bond markets have reacted in a way that suggests that participants there take the Fed at their word that interest rate hikes are coming over the next 12 months.

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#128

Post by quickthrowman »

diogenesjunior wrote: post #126
quickthrowman wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only have one thing to say here: “Smarten up Nas” Jay-Z, Takeover, The Blueprint (2001)

How about a dash of Ether?

I can’t think of a more perfect reply than this, nicely done! It even works on more than one level. Diogenes always had a clever retort, I should’ve seen it coming :)

(Illmatic is better than anything Jay-Z ever released, imo)

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#129

Post by Zamicol »

acdha wrote: post #122
Zamicol wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fees show obvious usage. "Statistically nobody uses" isn't fair. The fact that someone is paying interested on their house, a physical asset, to a blockchain application instead of Wells Fargo is a huge deal.

Fees show transactions in the system, not real-world impact — smart contracts, anonymization, pump-and-dump, etc. generate a ton of activity for what most people would think of as a single logical operation. What you really want to see are real-world impacts: how many people use the network? How many real business transactions occur daily? and, especially, how much real value is entering or leaving the system? If a b…

Fees are a hard cost making gaming systems far harder and costly. $10 billion isn't anything to shake a stick at. That's real business that's having enormous real world impact.

https://cryptofees.info/2021

Other stats are well known and easily googlable. People in the industry are constantly looking at those statistics, just like any other business or industry. Just for starters, Coinbase has 73 million users. Ethereum is doing 1.2 billion transactions a month.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/730818/average-number-of... https://www.coinbase.com/about#:~:text=Coinbase%20powers%20t....

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#130

Post by majewsky »

danaris wrote: post #117
tablespoon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... Even aside from the baloney idea of ownership they offer, the thing that continues to baffle me about NFTs is that the very nature of them assumes that ownership is inherently valuable. It's less baffling if you realize it's just BS "power of positive thinking" [1]. A bunch of people latched on to NFT's because they wanted to be in on the ground floor of the next big speculative bubble. However the thing is fun…

It's not just positive thinking; it's about creating a new kind of scarcity-based status symbol.

So like beanie babies, then?
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