> A lot of us older grizzled engineers came from an open source culture that, at least aspirationally, built software around ideas of abundance, post-scarcity, universal access, and equality. We may not have always succeeded in achieving such goals, but these ideas informed much of what we now take for granted as the open source substrate that powers well … everything.
Lol. And how is that working out for you with the modern internet? I came from this period as well, and I believe in these ideals. But scarcity is a fact of the world, and it is going to exist on the internet whether we like it or not. The only choice we have is whether that scarcity exists in centralized servers and closed protocols, or whether it exists on top of open, decentralized ones. The "post scarcity internet" is a ship that sailed two decades ago, or more.
> Much ink has been spilled describing the technical internals of NFTs, and about as equal as much ink has been spent on obscurantism and decentralized woo woo to explain why the internals don’t matter. There is very little common ground on such debates because to the faithful the value of NFTs is a presuppositional truth instilled in them in the revelation of them making money off them. And simultaneously the non-believers can “right-click” or Torrent any NFT as a statement of the rejection of the ontological status of playing word games with the term “own”.
I agree with all the author's criticisms of NFTs. However, they all apply equally well to every piece of art ever created. A context in which I also agree with them. NFTs are no more or less stupid than the art market generally. I'm not particularly into art myself, but the art market has a very long history of existing and operating relatively smoothly. Any decent modern day painter could make you a passable copy of Starry Night, but that doesn't make the original any less valuable.
> There’s nothing new under the sun and the phenomenon of self-perpetuating faith-based economic schemes are well known to exist, there’s even a term: the Tinkerbell Effect. The phenomenon where things that are thought to exist only because people believe in them. The crypto acolytes really believe they can will into existence a whole new epistemé of value detached from the classical economics of the previous order. And that’s an idea that’s not without some historical precedence. The first book about virality of mania was written by the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay back in 1841 (See Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds), and to this day it remains the definitive reference on crypto mania because human nature remains largely invariant across the ages.
This was a totally valid criticism in 2013. Just as this criticism was valid of the internet in 2001. It is not valid today. Even if you believe crypto will never offer any transactional utility to anyone, assets like gold derive 99% of their value from their utility as hedges. Ultimately, that is not an economic truth, it is a social truth. People don't like that - they desperately want their assets to have some mathematical, provable value to them. But they don't. Some assets really are equal to their discounted future cash flows. Other assets, like gold and bitcoin, derive their value from inter-subjective social consensus. That does not make them illegitimate, any more than the meaning of words or handshake greetings are illegitimate.
> But at the same time, it must be understood that many of us in other intellectual traditions don’t look at the Tinkerbell Griftopia and see a promised land where we sit on a golden throne of monkey JPEGs. We see crypto as a mob of misguided fools repeating the ecological disaster of Easter Island on a global scale for the sole purpose of selling man-child themed Neopets. And some of us in the old guard think that’s not a future we want to see realized
It's amusing to me that people lean so hard into the environmental argument. This argument will likely continue to be valid for Bitcoin, but it won't be for Ethereum, and most of the stuff this guy is criticizing lives on top of Ethereum. Hitching your wagon to a contingent, ephemeral feature of the technology who's obsolescence is already planned seems like a major tactical error to me. But go ahead.