Now, at last, the wealth seeking is printed on the tin.

February 6, 2022 4:13 PM

Before software ate the world, finance already had. Ian Bogost (previously) reflects on blockchain and NFTs. (SLAtlantic)

You might find these new digital assets exciting or terrifying. Either way, the absurdity is only going to grow. The natural endpoint of blockchains and NFTs—the golden promise of Web3—is that every aspect of human life, as recorded by computers, will be collateralized. Just think how excited or terrified you’ll feel then.

posted by doctornemo (50 comments total)

I subscribe to Matt Levine's newsetter It's fascinating to read about a smart guy basically throw up his hands about the weird financial instruments that investor are roped into.
posted by SPrintF at 4:34 PM on February 6, 2022 [3 favorites]

Securitization happens primarily because there’s a need, usually because someone is looking to defray (or at least quantify) risk. The existence of futures and options, etc. can be explained by this. What risk does the securitization of personal data solve for? I can understand the value of the underlying, but turning it into a security doesn’t make any sense.
posted by leotrotsky at 4:36 PM on February 6, 2022 [4 favorites]

At first I got excited by this article, thought it might be leading to something consquential but then once again found myself going: if all you're going to propose is that blockchains eventually replace databases/OLTP systems of any nature and that these can be monetized, then, yawn? Isn't this precisely what 'big data' has already done?
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 4:37 PM on February 6, 2022

An NFT-enthusiast friend rolls his eyes at the financialization schemes but is an enthusiastic proponent of the possibilities to associate multiple items securely. His simplest example is "buy a concert ticket and get secure access to ancillary items like collectible art (digital and physical), downloadable bonus tracks, etc."

He has yet to persuasively explain to me why using the Blockchain for all this is better than just using the same QR code you show to get into the original concert. But at least he's trying to imagine interesting use cases, and staying away from the financial shenanigans.
posted by PhineasGage at 6:13 PM on February 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

.
posted by robbyrobs at 6:14 PM on February 6, 2022 [3 favorites]

>why using the Blockchain for all this is better than just using the same QR code

In theory the Blockchain distributes trust / eliminates fraud via double sales and forged tickets. The issue is the existing crypto paradigm seems to centralize rather than distribute trust.
posted by grokus at 7:31 PM on February 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

I’ve been stunned by the explosion of tv ads for various crypto and nft products over the past few months. There are credit cards that pay cash-back in fucking bitcoin. I saw one ad for a retirement IRA invested entirely in crypto. And all of these ads and products are very clearly aimed at the general public, not techbros. It turns my stomach.

I’ve also seen a marked return of tv ads for gold and silver, but that an entirely other scam.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:35 PM on February 6, 2022 [9 favorites]

And all of these ads and products are very clearly aimed at the general public, not techbros. It turns my stomach.

I had this idea like four years ago, and those other fuckers got there first. It's not because I have morals, it's because I'm lazy.

Also, I'm less ambitious. I would have aimed for AM radio and cable news. These fuckers are buying stadium naming rights and superbowl ads.

I'm all in on BTC and ETH for another 9 months at least.
posted by mr_roboto at 10:48 PM on February 6, 2022

In theory the Blockchain distributes trust / eliminates fraud via double sales and forged tickets.

So does running the database yourself - if I have a bunch of user accounts that I have issued tickets to, I only need to trust myself that they're valid. Similarly, I'm not going to allow the same ticket from my database to be used twice when checking them at the door, not allow the use of any I don't know for sure I've issued.

At the end if the day, you won't be doing this yourself though, you'll be trusting a service provider to do it. But then, the crypto way you'll just be paying OpenSea or some other service provider to centralise it all anyway, so you have exactly the same trust issues.
posted by Dysk at 11:25 PM on February 6, 2022 [11 favorites]

Relatedly: Yanis Varoufakis on Crypto & the Left, and Techno-Feudalism

posted by nikoniko at 1:07 AM on February 7, 2022 [5 favorites]

ACOUP's Bret Deveraux takes a historical perspective:

....proponents respond that the power of the blockchain is that it puts you and your assets beyond the reach of ‘the man.’ It does no such thing. Your NFTs, ethereum and metaverse avatar may all well exist in cyberspace, but you exist in meatspace, as does the food you eat, the utility bills you need to pay and crucially the servers that all of your digital ‘assets’ exist on. If the state is unable to exert its claims over you in cyberspace, it will simply do so in meatspace and as far as I can tell, very little if any of this technology connected to the blockchain does anything to harden these systems against meatspace attack. Indeed, to the contrary, the massive server complexes required to maintain the blockchain and their proof-of-work system make for fairly obvious meatspace targets, as do the companies that manage crypto-wallets. For instance, MetaMask is run by ConsenSys, which is headquartered in New York; it would be fairly trivial for the United States government to thus acquire a quite complete inventory of all of the blockchain assets of anyone using MetaMask by pointing metaphorical legal guns or, failing that, very literal actual guns at ConsenSys.

posted by TheophileEscargot at 2:41 AM on February 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

So much of this tulip mania is the collision of a finance industry desperate to get their hands on a bigger pot of other people's money to play with and a generation that's desperate to quickly make up for lost time because of the Great Recession.

At least no one's seriously suggesting we put Social Security into crypto investments, ala the late 1990s with the "booming" stock market. Hopefully history will repeat itself and the bubble will burst before anyone gets a chance to pry open that lock box.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 4:14 AM on February 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

>At least no one's seriously suggesting we put Social Security into crypto investments

Go outside, turn around three times, and spit. What the hell is the matter with you?
posted by lalochezia at 4:35 AM on February 7, 2022 [13 favorites]

I know we're big on using ironic superstition to diffuse the moment, but this is already post on what a crapsack world the cryptobros are planning.

You might have better luck telling The Atlantic to TTTCS.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:34 AM on February 7, 2022

[Aside: this is probably the umpteenth thread we've had on teh crypto in the last couple of months (weeks?). If comments are to be trusted, the 'meta-consensus' would seem to be it's all a grift all the way down. I keep waiting for some other, brighter, perspective on this but it doesn't seem forthcoming right now. Are we just in an echo chamber here on the blue or is this all really just going to end in tears?]
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 5:39 AM on February 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

The problem there is, NFTs refuse to go away, not because of any intrinsic merit, but because really rich and really loud people keep pushing them. They're trying very hard to make them happen, largely because hype sustains their value. So we get Gwyneth Paltrow and Jimmy Fallon literally talking about their stupid ape graphics on late night television. And the rules be, if something is in the news, then it's a valid topic of conversation, if just to mock it and talk about how meaningless it is. (I don't mean any specific Metafilter rules, just, the rules of conversation.)

If we all stopped talking about how awful NFTs are, it feels like it'd leave those who know little about them to be preyed upon unchecked.
posted by JHarris at 6:17 AM on February 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

I did not mean to imply folks should stop posting and discussing crypto/NFT. And I certainly understand no one's making me read more than I want to. I was really just hoping there might be more to this than the financial grift part. I have friends who insist as much though (once again) every article they point me to begins with a laundry list of all the most notorious scams and end with an insistence there's good to be had---we're not like those guys---just give us your money.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 6:52 AM on February 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

He has yet to persuasively explain to me why using the Blockchain for all this is better than just using the same QR code you show to get into the original concert.

Being as generous as I can to the idea (and far more than it deserves), the rationale for an NFT in this situation is that it allows a link to the ancillary item (not the item itself; the NFT simply replaces the QR code here) to be bought and sold on the open market while maintaining provenance and without requiring the continued participation of the original creator of the link, something a QR code typically doesn't. If you imagine the existence of a market in digital collectibles, you can probably also imagine the value in that (presuming you're willing to wave away all the obvious issues that arise given the NFT has nothing in particular to do with the collectible itself). In short, it creates a speculative commodity, and you can never have too many of those!

Of course, the real advantage of the NFT over the QR code is that it's better at hooking the rubes and VCs (but I repeat myself...)
posted by multics at 7:10 AM on February 7, 2022

Are we just in an echo chamber here on the blue or is this all really just going to end in tears?

web3 is scams all the way down afaict
posted by lazaruslong at 7:23 AM on February 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

At the end if the day, you won't be doing this yourself though, you'll be trusting a service provider to do it. But then, the crypto way you'll just be paying OpenSea or some other service provider to centralise it all anyway, so you have exactly the same trust issues.

Oh, and the minute you decide to retract one of the tickets? (Maybe a guy broke the rules and needs to be banned, maybe someone's payment was subject to a chargeback, whatever) then you effectively need to start running your own database to keep track of which NFTs you're still accepting, and which you aren't (barring some purely vaporware smart contract bollocks). In which case, why not just use that database and fuck the NFTs off?

By putting anything on the blockchain, you're surrendering a lot of control. Now this isn't the accountability that the enthusiasts say it is, because the blockchain has no way of enforcing anything in the real world. So all it means is that it's an unattractive venture for effectively any traditional use case (e.g. why would I, as a club owner or operator, want memberships to be resellable, and be unable to vet members?) and everyone will end up running their own exceptions and additions on top of it anyway (all membership NFT holders are valid, except that child rapist nazi anarchist who bought one of that other guy, and my mate John can come too, and whoops, suddenly the blockchain doesn't represent any truth anymore, those NFTs no longer really mean anything).

This is all about getting in on that irrational investment, both from FOMO small timers and from VCs.
posted by Dysk at 7:25 AM on February 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

I was really just hoping there might be more to this than the financial grift part

If it's a useful analogy, a lot of people vote for very bad people to lead their countries in the hope that there might be more to them than their cruelty and wanton destruction.
posted by ambrosen at 7:33 AM on February 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

Oh really, access to limited edition art of dubious merit? So it's basically Franklin Mint, except you are also destroying the goddamn planet.
posted by emjaybee at 8:05 AM on February 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

The interview with Yanis Varoufakis (former finance minister of Greece and former in-house economist for Valve) nikoniko links to above is great. They give a straightforward encapsulation of why this fairy tale of NFTs as some kind of great equalizing tool is so preposterous:

Do I think that NFTs have subversive potential? Let’s see. In a digital environment, NFTs are like all other commodities. They reflect the triumph of exchange value (with which capitalism trounced experiential or use value) within a metaverse (Valve-like or Zuckerberg-style). In that sense, NFTs offer nothing new within digital worlds, except perhaps that they turbocharge the ideology of capitalism (exchange value rules supreme). In the analogue world, NFTs have value only to the extent that bragging rights offer utility to those who care for them. Even though in so doing, they force outfits like Sotheby’s and Christie’s (which used to monopolise the trade in bragging rights) to change their ways, NFTs in no way subverts the structure of property rights creating and underpinning the oligarchy’s exorbitant power over the many.

posted by spamandkimchi at 8:12 AM on February 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

More from the interview with Varoufakis:

[Question:] What do you make of what is going on in El Salvador? Not only has it made Bitcoin legal tender (shortly after announcing the Chivo Wallet with some money placed in it to incentivize use) but it will also be issuing the so-called Volcano Bonds, which have attracted their share of controversy. Is there a way to look at these bonds as a tactic that expands El Salvador’s options in negotiating with the IMF?

[Answer:] It is a preposterous stunt. For the life of me I cannot even begin to answer those who say to me: ‘Had you, Yanis, adopted Bitcoin back in 2015, all of the Greek people’s problems would have gone away!’ Why would they? The poor of Greece or of El Salvador would have no way to get their hands on Bitcoin anyway. Then the only beneficiaries would be Bitcoin hoarders (of whom very few live in El Salvador or Greece), who suddenly benefit from a spike in Bitcoin demand and from being able to spend their stash in El Salvador without the cost of converting them to dollars. The only poor El Salvadorians who may gain something are the expats sending money home in the form of remittances – people who are, now, fleeced by Western Union and the like.

On Volcano Bonds, this is a dangerous development. A government is inviting speculators to buy cryptocurrency backed by an impoverished state. Early Bitcoin enthusiasts were motivated, partly, by a loathing of governments that took on unsustainable debt – before indulging domestically in financial repression and austerity – in order to be able to extend-and-pretend their debt. The worry was that, at some point, Wall Street and other grubby conventional financiers would start building similar pyramids on… Bitcoin. And, the ultimate fear was that the state would join in. Well, Volcano Bonds are making this nightmare a reality, allowing speculators to speculate on a cryptocurrency using an impoverished sovereign state as backup.

posted by spamandkimchi at 8:29 AM on February 7, 2022

Was not crazy about this. There are a lot of attempts to make analogies that don't quite work, from receipts and ledger entries to this:

One can, after all, own shares of a company, a practice once recorded on physical stock certificates but long since delegated to electronic bank records. Such ownership is entirely symbolic; the owner of stock cannot claim a portion of a company’s inventory or a measure of office space in its headquarters.

He walks this back a tiny bit later, but this is really misleading. If you own shares in a company you have significant legal rights and there is, at a minimum, a floor based on the company's real world assets and income. To wit, if the shares are worth much less than those things, someone will acquire the company for profit and will pay you.

And mortgage backed securities were tied to an income stream. That is why they collapsed: The real money flowing into them from mortgage holders went down.

Even the putatively weirder stuff, like derivatives based on weather, loops back into real world economics. If I'm insuring real property the weather is a big wildcard and will increase or lower my net income. One party may be engaging in pure speculation, but the other is hedging. Finance is weird, but that doesn't mean everything that is weird is finance.

So I don't think this is great as an explainer and I don't think the predictive value is high.
posted by mark k at 8:31 AM on February 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

[NFTs can be] sold on the open market while maintaining provenance and without requiring the continued participation of the original creator of the link, something a QR code typically doesn't.

And a feature that gets touted is that the original creator of the link gets a royalty on resales, automatically*. As you can see with the BAYC ape NFTs, where the original artists people who paid the original artists to create the art get 2.5% on every resale.

* Until they lose access to the wallet where those funds are going.
posted by jimw at 8:42 AM on February 7, 2022

Per Insert Clever Name Here's comment, I have been trying to find a non-crazy take on web3. But it seems, even given friendly spaces to make their case, web3 people can only just handwave. E.g. from the Galaxy Brain newsletter: https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/galaxy-brain/619717362e822d00205ab3e9/case-for-crypto/

Noah Smith had a all-in "Crypto" trader write a "primer for normies" for his newsletter, and it's not vague handwaving, but it is equally baffling an horrifiying https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/a-defi-crash-course-for-normies-crypto and basically comes down to: "Crypto" is a way for tech-folks to scam wealth off of the finance-folks.

So, yeah, basically even smart "positive" coverage of these things is basically in agreement that NFTs are a scam.
posted by 3j0hn at 8:44 AM on February 7, 2022

And a feature that gets touted is that the original creator of the link gets a royalty on resales, automatically*.

*Can get a royalty. There's nothing in the spec defining or requiring royalties, AFAIK. It's all just social convention & smart-contracts & hoping that nobody rug-pulls the resale contract.
posted by CrystalDave at 9:11 AM on February 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

Right, I'm a little fuzzy on the capabilities of these smart contracts. How would the smart contract know how much it was sold for? I've seen accounts of people giving someone an NFT as a "gift" so it seems I could gift it to someone who coincidentally paid me, and the smart contract won't know a thing about it.
posted by RobotHero at 9:52 AM on February 7, 2022

I think as people realize what Web3 means for their personal data (browsing habits, financial records, etc) there's going to be widespread horror. These large super-predators of the financial world are doing what to my data in the deeps of anonymous ledgers?

If Web3 is the Dark Forest then Web4 will be a reaction to people operating at maximum anonymity. Bots that sign up for nonsense randomly, click all the tracking links, and go on a merry run as digital chaff with randomized fake identities, operating from an anonymously purchased server overseas. Services like OnePass but for collating the random usernames, email redirects, and VPN point logins used for that particular site/day, running as instances on your PC, maybe with an encrypted cloud backup that only you have the key for.
posted by Slackermagee at 10:24 AM on February 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm not into IT or development at all, so that's not a "This is how itll happen exactly".
posted by Slackermagee at 10:25 AM on February 7, 2022

The Crypto Backlash is Booming [also The Atlantic]
posted by chavenet at 12:28 PM on February 7, 2022

Max Read: Mapping the Celebrity NFT Complex (via jwz)
posted by tonycpsu at 12:29 PM on February 7, 2022

Right, I'm a little fuzzy on the capabilities of these smart contracts. How would the smart contract know how much it was sold for?

That makes two of us.

Where to smart contracts even execute? What platform do they run on? Where do they execute? How do you guarantee that the platform will execute the code faithfully while still allowing that platform to protect itself against malicious code? How do smart contracts guarantee they're being given the right input? How do you guarantee that their output is being added to the blockchain?

We've only spent the last [checks watch] thirty years trying to fix all the nasty security implications that came with Javascript by sandboxing any Internet-facing application that might even catch a glimpse of executable code.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 12:54 PM on February 7, 2022

I would like to see the Web be Monet-ized, actually
posted by Tad Naff at 1:22 PM on February 7, 2022

Tad Naff: "I would like to see the Web be Monet-ized, actually"

Pixelated? that's more Seurat...
posted by chavenet at 1:39 PM on February 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm generally very skeptical of the blockchain at large. Transferring money across borders is a meaningful use (and there are some coins that do so with low fees), but most people are "using" crypto as a speculative asset -- one with inherently no real value. However...

One of the central issues in the music industry the last twenty years is that once music is digitized, it can be endlessly copied, so musicians can no longer make a living selling physical copies of their music. As a result of this, many musicians now primarily make their money on touring.

But there's an issue with touring: for in-demand musicians, more people often want to see them than they have tickets available. So there's a secondary market to scalpers who leech money off the back of musicians - that's a problem. To tackle this, musicians can raise prices for their performance, but then they quickly look like they're selling an elite product, which they generally don't want to do - that's also a problem. A common solution to this is the hell we all know as Ticketmaster/Live Nation - essentially, the market value of concert ticket is hidden within the layers of hidden fees, tickets reserved for specific buyers, etc - that's another problem.

NFTs have smart contracts that allow the original seller to be able to capture a portion of the profit of resold tokens. Non-blockchain analogues to could exist through authorized resale markets, but as far as I can tell it is Ticketmaster et al that is capturing most of the value.

So concert tickets do genuinely strike me as a legitimately useful use-case for the blockchain. In-demand musicians can sell NFT concert tickets at a low rate to devoted fans that they want to reward, while also capturing a fair chunk of the value that would be lost to the resale market.
posted by lewedswiver at 1:44 PM on February 7, 2022

So, yeah, basically even smart "positive" coverage of these things is basically in agreement that NFTs are a scam.

But, here is the rub. You will be the scammer this time (smiles showing a mouth full of gold teeth)!
posted by Literaryhero at 1:44 PM on February 7, 2022

So concert tickets do genuinely strike me as a legitimately useful use-case for the blockchain. In-demand musicians can sell NFT concert tickets at a low rate to devoted fans that they want to reward, while also capturing a fair chunk of the value that would be lost to the resale market.

Interesting and I like the idea of this. Dunno if it's possible or not---I don't mean the tech, I mean the market's own determination to make an honest go of it.

(And why oh why am I now suddenly thinking about Burning Man tickets for the 2022 event, should the Borg decide to go through with one this year. Techbros would EAT THIS SHIT UP.)
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 2:05 PM on February 7, 2022

(And to make things even more luscious: how about a smart contract that gives the Borg a percentage of every subsequent resale?)
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 2:21 PM on February 7, 2022

Interesting and I like the idea of this. Dunno if it's possible or not---I don't mean the tech, I mean the market's own determination to make an honest go of it.

Except the tech's not really possible either. As someone mention above, in a different context--I can just gift you the token/ticket. I can choose to do that after you've made me a $1000 payment via Paypal to become my friend.

I can imagine way to lock down this, at least partially, but none of them require the ticket to be an NFT.

But, here is the rub. You will be the scammer this time (smiles showing a mouth full of gold teeth)!

I was catch up with some old friends this weekend. NFTs and the like came up and apparently their brother had become a true believer, raved about them, talked about his research and how he got in on the "ground floor"--and promptly lost a few thousand dollars to a "rug pull."

The lesson he learned was that he needed to be extra canny next time. There was obviously money to be made; he just needs to be smarter.

I remarked that a good con leaves the mark unaware they've been conned, and indeed ready to try again. There are some great stories about this effect in The Big Con, down to victims running down their con men not for revenge but to insist they be allowed to try again because "it was a brilliant plan and we almost pulled it off!"

Another aspect it shares with classic cons is the overtly scammy aspect of all of this: When it works it's because you've outsmarted people (one might think), and if you give up after one loss you're just admitting you lack the intelligence and drive to get ahead.
posted by mark k at 2:22 PM on February 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

Except the tech's not really possible either. As someone mention above, in a different context--I can just gift you the token/ticket. I can choose to do that after you've made me a $1000 payment via Paypal to become my friend.

Hmm. I have to think about this some more. If physically entering the venue requires I present the NFT (ticket) and transfer it to some kind of 'terminal' wallet that says 'received & used', doesn't it actually have to have been first transferred into a wallet I control first?
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 3:20 PM on February 7, 2022

Even if that were true, couldn’t a scalper buy every ticket with an otherwise new, empty wallet, and sell the password?
posted by mubba at 3:34 PM on February 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

I guess if the person who buys the password to this wallet (let's call them the Terminal Scalper) wants to then stand at the ticket gate of the show and individually let each person who purchased a ticket from them (cause there's only the NFTs, not any physical tickets) in to the venue, sure. Also the Terminal Scalper would have to maintain a list of the people who purchased the tickets and check them off, one by one. And the ticket purchasers would in turn have to trust that the Terminal Scalper wasn't going to rip them off: "Hmm, don't see your name on my list!"

Or maybe I'm just in over my head here. ;->
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 3:48 PM on February 7, 2022

He could just set up a whole bunch of wallets and buy a ticket or two to each of them, then sell those wallets individually.
posted by Dysk at 4:12 PM on February 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

(And there's nothing stopping me from "selling" the ticket for a symbolic fee, of which the artist gets a cut per the hypothetical smart contract, while taking my scalper price out-of-band, like in cash, PayPal, bank transfer, etc.)
posted by Dysk at 4:14 PM on February 7, 2022

Sigh. Well, at least I tried to see something good here. ;->
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 4:28 PM on February 7, 2022

From the Atlantic's crypto-backlash article:

The term itself—Web3—was first used by Gavin Wood, the co-founder of the popular Ethereum blockchain, in 2014, in an essay now referred to as “seminal” and “classic” by crypto enthusiasts.

So that's where it came from? Web 2.0 seems to have come from Tim O'Reilly. Web3 is from the creator of fucking Etherium? What idgits gave him the authority to co-opt that term?!
posted by JHarris at 6:23 PM on February 7, 2022

Here's some information on where celebrities even find out whatever the hell NFTs are.
posted by JHarris at 6:36 PM on February 7, 2022

Web3/Crypto/NFT proponents very often try to draw parallels between the current Web3 hype/bubble cycle and the original dot-com era. There are a number of reasons why this comparison is... less-than-apt but one that's kind of been crystallizing for me is laid out in this post title: "the wealth seeking is printed on the tin". People are quick to point out that the original dot-com era brought us successful businesses like Amazon and eBay and Paypal and whatnot. But it also had stuff like Geocities/Angelfire/Tripod webrings, LiveJournal, Usenet (yes this is from earlier, but I'm counting it), etc... Namely, things that weren't obviously going to be profitable businesses (and in lots of cases weren't). In fact, even things like Yahoo, Friendster, Myspace, or even (I think) Google were not really obviously going to be profitable businesses at their inception. They just seemed like cool stuff to do at the time. The current Web3 hype cycle seems to have basically none of this. The whole point of anything Web3-related is, well, just to get rich. There's this thin veneer of whimsy and fun and community but it's roughly the same kind of fun and community that you'd find at a timeshare sales meeting or, more to the point, an MLM retreat. I don't doubt that some people find their own fun and community in NFT discords just like I'm sure there are some Lularoe salespeople who found community in that MLM. However, the core of Web3-dom appears to be nothing much more than hollow, dead-eyed greed dressed up in the latest technology and financial shenanigans. Every non-greed-related application of Web3 technologies seems to be purely vaporware. In earlier internet hype cycles, you could at least point at things that people were doing, even if a lot of the time it was just "doing something you could do in the offline world but now on the internet". With Web3 stuff, no one seems to be doing much of anything besides straight-up financial speculation. Even the things that aren't supposed to be about financial speculation (e.g.: play-to-earn games) turn out to be about financial speculation. There's just no there there. And I think that's why some people -- or at least I -- have such a visceral reaction to *waves hand around vaguely* all this.
posted by mhum at 8:58 PM on February 7, 2022 [4 favorites]