I have a strong and powerful hatred of NFTs, cryptocurrency, web3, and all the other shite that’s associated with it. I’ve long wanted to make a thread where I post all the criticisms I find of these insane Ponzi schemes and grifts. So here it is.

Here is one of the main thesis, a good starting place for anyone trying to understand why cryptocurrency is awful.

Here is one of the first great posts I read about why NFTs are shite.

Recently there has been a lot of talk about Web3, which is meant to be a new blockchain based future for the web (spoiler: it won’t be).

This is going to be a big deal for gamers over the next few years as online pay services collide with NFTs in a way that can’t ever end well.

A reddit post that enumerates a number of the issues with NFTs and crypto in general

I am keeping up with the crypto shite on an almost daily basis and will keep posting more as I find it.

    Alex changed the title to NFTs, Crypto, Web3, and other bullshit .

    I really find NFT really ‘suspect’. I follow a couple of space artists are always finding their working being sold as NFTs knowing. wTF!

    Money box (I’m getting old) live was about them this week. Rarely I have ranted as consistently at a little box (the radio) in my dining room.

    The thing I find most frustrating about NFTs was it was initially a (misguided but genuine) reaction to the devaluation of creative work online. Most people who’ve been in any of the creative industries before 2000 or thereabouts have seen the landscape change so radically that it’s become far more difficult to make a living.

    The idea that an artist might be able to create digital scarcity is a fairly attractive and obvious one to anyone who’s depended on physical scarcity to define the value of their work. But look at it for a couple of seconds more and it simply doesn’t make sense. Not to mention that artists are /still/ having work stolen by people turning it into nfts . So artists are still the ones getting shafted by digital theft.

    It failed to take into account how shitty people can be and seemed completely unaware of the potential environmental impact.

    I seen lots of explanations of Crypto and never found one where it doesn’t just scream Ponzi/Pyramid scheme to me. The complexities of their execution and all the techno-babble just seem designed to obfuscate this.

    From a technological perspective, blockchains and etc. (IMO) remains a solution in search of a problem. Ask anyone who works in actual big data transmission (which using digital money as an actual currency for millions of people would require) their opinion of it and see how long it takes for them to stop laughing.

    NFT’s especially rolls eyes - see the following

    Jonbwfc If anyone had any doubts as to whether it’s a scam those should have been erased by this. 🤣

      Each of those sets of racks is, what, 500 GPUs? And there are 12 racks so 6000 altogether. And they’re presumably being run flat out 24/7. Nvidia recommend a 700w psu, so let’s say they’re pulling 500 watts each for ease of maths. Even if we ignore all the other kit required (e.g control, aircon etc) that means that room is pulling absolute minimum 3 megawatts of power. That is the same as about 1000 average U.K. homes. Put together.

      And he’s got four of them. He is literally using as much electricity as a small town.

      Given all of that is producing nothing useful at all (note : ‘has value’ != ‘useful’) I would not shed a single tear if it was all gone tomorrow.

        There are also interesting questions about how they got the GPUs. They are all founders editions so source directly from Nvidia.

        This thread is an interesting read :

        6 days later

        Alex

        As the visual manifestation of cryptocurrency, NFT art combines the nuanced social awareness of computer programmers with the soulful whimsy of hedge fund managers.

        😃

          Mentioned as an aside to a related story on TSA, there have been 15 trades of Ubisoft’s in game cosmetic NFTs is about two weeks. Yes, fifteen. Total. And four of them were the same guy trading to himself, presumably in an attempt to increase the apparent interest. It almost certainly cost more to mine the NFTs than the total value of trades put together.

          Oh, you’d have to be a saint not to find it hilarious.

          A lot of sales of NFTs are just people buying them from themselves to artificially increase the price. As the blockchain is anonymous it’s hard to know how much this happens but it’s one of the chief reasons the prices are so crazy.

          The thing I can’t get my head round with the blockchain stuff is why are companies so keen on this when the cost of transaction is so high? For a service like Visa you can do a transaction in about 100 milliseconds and it costs 0.001p or whatever. For the Ethereum blockchain it can cost multiple dollars and can take hours to complete. The value you would need to be getting out of your service to justify that cost would need to be massive.

          Financially this just doesn’t make sense, especially when you consider that a lot of the time it’s just being used as an elaborate database.