The Mayor of Reno Is Betting Big on the Blockchain

In this context the NFT is kind of like naming rights, except vaguer and high-tech sounding.

"I can prove I paid someone for a poorly-defined, possibly unique special relationship with this artwork!"

This article perfectly encapsulates the state of crypto and blockchain. Long story short, the mayor of Reno is using buzzwords and a lack of knowledge to fix issues that don’t exist. She is also very publicly pushing the coins she has invested in, and trying to use them in her city (is this legal?).

Here are some key passages that are making me shake my head…

She leased a whale statue for the city, that is now sitting there unmaintained because the artists want 500k for it. She has tried to sell it but with no takers. So now the solution is to sell it as an NFT?

-> The new owner would receive a .CAD file and a video from the artist, but the actual, physical sculpture would stay in that downtown Reno plaza. The proceeds would raise funds for the city to clean up the whale and preserve it for the public to enjoy. Schieve realized this type of semi-symbolic sale might require some sweetening. So she was contemplating offering benefits, like tagging along on her annual trip to Burning Man with fellow elected officials.

… So it’s literally just raising money from an investor? But because of “blockchain” and NFT it’s suddenly special?

-> So she began researching other blockchains and the problems they sought to solve. One day, she was reading about forms of digital identity—think blockchain-enabled driver’s licenses or vaccine cards—and came across some interesting cryptography that Chainlink was using to keep them secure.

As always with crypto, the “problems they seek to solve”, are vague, opaque, and hastily skipped over. If this solved an actual real world issue - why would it be some little aside in the article?! “think blockchain-enabled driver’s licenses or vaccine cards” , I AM thinking that - and I see NO REASON why blockchain is needed for that, or what problem blockchain is supposed to solve that we can’t with traditional methodologies?

She was the judge at a Chainlink-sponsored hackathon. Let’s set aside the fact that she’s an investor in this speculative coin, and will only make money if more people buy it (regardless of the intrinsic value), so she uses her public office to push this onto people. On the winning entries

-> She gives me a preview of the winning entries: a system for farmers to use carbon credits, and another for demand-based pricing of public transit. They were “cool,” she thought, but clearly in beta. Schieve was familiar by now with this dynamic. She had hoped to use blockchain technology to certify the provenance of the designer handbags she sold, helping to weed out counterfeits, but the options didn’t look viable yet. She considered accepting cryptocurrency for clothes, but her customers didn’t seem all that interested. “It’s all so new,” she says. “Saying it and doing it are two different things.

Are you kidding me?! So the winners created solutions, to problems that don’t exist, and even if they did, could be absolutely solved with traditional methodologies. Why do you need a blockchain for “demand-based pricing of public transit”? Seriously, does anybody know? And then the 2nd half of the quote is her admitting in so many words that she has absolutely no idea what real world issues blockchain can or will solve.

Later on in the article it mentions she hired a 21 year old she met from twitter comments, to lead the city’s white paper development of “decentralized autonomous organization”.

-> They “envision that city residents will receive cryptocurrency that corresponds to the value of certain city-owned parcels. People could buy and sell their stakes, and if the land were leased or sold, they would all share in the proceeds. This would happen automatically, through smart contracts—blockchain-based programs—that could be altered only by consensus among the shareholders. It was exciting, Schieve thought, because it could help prove out all sorts of applications. Could an unemployment system run by smart contracts be more transparent and fraud-resistant? What about the security of death certificates issued by blockchain?

So they want to explore using a system, that can never be changed, the data is immutable, and opens up an absolute labyrinth of complexity to achieve a goal we already have solutions for. Again, there are these vague questions with absolutely zero real world connections. “Could an unemployment system run by smart contracts be more transparent and fraud-resistant?” HOW? WHY? WHAT DOES THIS SOLVE?! Is the goal to place the entire city’s unemployment system into an immutable algorithm removing humans completely from the process?

And the final kicker quote to end the article: -> Schieve casts it differently: They’re in the education phase. Yes, crypto is mostly at this point about speculation, and perhaps there is a certain degree of posturing involved. But she remains a believer and hopes she can create more believers. Eventually, she thinks, the technology could help this place she holds dear.

As always, the real world problems it will solve are far off, vague, and unknown. She even admits crypto at this point is speculation - and she is still trying to use it for essential city services! This screams to me like somebody personally trying to shill their coin onto more people in the hopes their speculative investment rises.