curriebelle:curriebelle: whitepeopletwitter:Keep up the good work I’ve been thinking about thi
curriebelle:curriebelle: whitepeopletwitter:Keep up the good work I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. Here are the thoughts.NFTs are tokens for financial speculation that are uniquely suited for taking money from gullible people, centralizing power in the already-wealthy, and accelerating climate catastrophe. NFTs must be stopped.Fortunately, the reason they are proliferating (and the reason they are so expensive) is not because they are useful, but because they appeal to a particular psychology of value.It’s very similar to the value of rare baseball cards or stamps. Stamps do not perform any particular function and you can buy them very cheaply. Very expensive stamps are only expensive because there are a limited number, and because they were printed at a verified location. That’s where the extra value on rare stamps comes from — brand recognition and scarcity.Right now, NFTs gain their value from brand recognition and “scarcity”. People recognize NFTs as NFTs on sight, and there are allegedly limited numbers of them. This is why Twitter implemented the hexagonal profile pics — it makes the NFT more immediately identifiable.In order to make NFTs lose their value, which is exactly what we want to do, all you have to do is expose those two characteristics — scarcity and legitimacy — as the illusions they are. This is why right-click saving the NFTs is so devastating: it shatters that illusion of scarcity. This is also why insulting them as ugly and stupid is important work — it shatters the illusion of brand prestige.And they are both nothing but an illusion. NFTs do not benefit from any extra copy protection beyond conventional digital material (which is why so many NFTs are minted from stolen art). The “scarcity” comes from someone applying a serial number post-creation and selling that string of numbers to somebody, with no more actual credibility than those fraudulent companies that sell stars. There is no way to prove the claim of ownership, and no way to stop anyone from replicating it.That’s why an NFT bro, when faced with criticism of the NFT’s false scarcity, will tell you that you “don’t get” how NFTs work. It’s to protect the sham value of their investment. The NFT has to be scarce or it wouldn’t be valuable. If you point out that it’s not scarce at all, you must simply not understand the mechanism of scarcity. But you DO get it. NFTs are exactly as stupid as you think they are. That’s why exposing the mechanics behind NFTs is actually important work. It’s praxis. The value of NFTs is entirely a rhetorical game, and every time you convince someone that the scarcity of an NFT is a scam, the scam loses some of its power. The value of NFTs is entirely contingent on belief. It’s like believing in fairies, only we want the fairies to die. Addendum: stamps do have a function What I find so frustrating about NFT bros is that they clearly don’t understand the technology and the benefits it COULD provide, but when they’re confronted with this they lose their shit and act like you’re some tech illiterate peasant.Like, say you made a digital artwork and before you share it with the world, you make it an nft so that you can prove you’re the creator. That’s all it is, an easy/easier way to prove the authenticity of a digital product. The whole “being the sole owner” thing is nonsense, that’s not the purpose of it. If it were, the entire internet would have to be rebuild from the ground up. And no, that’s not what Web3 would do. Web3 would just make it easier to identify/use blockchain technology.To build further upon the stamp analogy: imagine being alive when stamps first started getting used. You buy one because you’re going to send a letter but while you’re in the store, you hear several town drunks shouting about how they put their life savings into them because one day they’ll make them rich. When you tell them that’s not the purpose of stamps, they cuss you out for not “believing”. -- source link