We used to buy things that had physical value, now we just buy memes.
The whole movement is really good at making you feel dumb for following safe and conservative career advice like "do something practical, save your money, and retire eventually (maybe)". Why sit through yet another technical interview when you could just buy the right stock/cryptocoin?
Even a cursory, technically-minded dig in the garden shows that there's nothing at the center. Smart contracts require oracles. NFTs are addresses that depend on an external interface to make any sense of them. Blockchains are expensive public immutable databases...
I tend to filter a lot of these crowd behaviors through the lens of Terror Management Theory. In this case, convincing others that crypto has some true value might not only benefit investors financially, but also reinforce their identity as part of some important movement.
I think it's been a tragic waste of economic resources and brain power. Talk about "the smartest people of my generation spend their time figuring out how to make me click ads." If all of this energy had been pointed in the direction of innovating against the direct problem of abundance vs scarcity, it would have avoided becoming a joke. Otherwise, it's just a mimicry of the economic patterns that have dominated the West since its inception, and thus, not revolutionary in the least bit.
Today, it looks to me as a presumptuous way of considering what each person decides to do with they time and lives.
One could as easily argue the oxygen you and I are breathing right now is a big waste of resources.
Let's just let people do what they want to do. If they wanna spin up a machine and run a hash algo all day, just let them.
What's the real difference compared to you playing a game? Or watching YouTube? Or whatever you'd like to?
They're not forcing us into anything, let them in peace...
The English language has plenty of words, the ones that come to mind are: rube, mark, or sucker.
It's unfortunate, the cryptocurrency and blockchain space is so filled with scams and con artists that at this point, even if a very important and significant use of blockchain appeared, or a viable cryptocurrency emerged, the majority of reasonable people would dismiss it because the space is oversaturated with bullshit. And the true believers are either joining in on the scams or becoming victims, which are ultimately the only two choices once an ecosystem is as overrun as the crypto space is now.
The only difference between crypto and the stock market is that crypto has less impenetrable jargon, and everyone pretty much knows and excepts that it's all fucking crazy and anything can happen, as opposed to those who've somehow convinced others that they know what the stock market is going to do.
At this point, I wouldn't be too sure about saying anything to your coworker about that $1000 of Bitcoin. I saw people make posts like yours (and agreed with them!) When it was at $100, $500, $1k, $5k, $10k, and $20k. At that point it was pretty fucking obvious nobody knows what's going on and nobody has any basis for predicting anything about it long term, so the only rubes are those that have a strong convictions about what it's going to be like a year from now.
But wait, actually, why sit through yet another technical interview when you could just buy the right stock/cryptocoin?
It seems to me that a lot of would-be conservative, career-driven tech workers are discovering that they can make more money flipping jpegs and meme coins than writing code for a big company.
Meanwhile, people like us are doing the "real" work of... using machine learning to increase engagement and sell ads for crap people don't need? running A/B tests to see which button configuration causes more UGC? optimizing conversion funnels for ad campaigns?
I've come to the sincere belief that the people involved in SHIB or NFTs or any of that are actually contributing more to society than most software engineers that I know. They're trying out new ideas about property ownership and forming new communities around new values. They're doing something of questionable value, but the vast majority of tech workers are doing something of negative value.
Regardless of the topic, if your conclusion is that "No, it is the children who are wrong!", chances are you're missing the point.
To me it feels like selling snake oil. Things like NFTs do not seem to have any real value except to those who believe it has real value.
I do like your take on it that these engineers are exploring new outlets of engineering and that could have some positive externalities kind of like how car enthusiasts in the 50s' were able to build out incredible racing cars and racing series that improved engines quite dramatically
So just like any other art, which is one of the things NFTs are being marketed as?
Money doesn't really have physical value, only speculative (you want it because you trust that someone else will want it in the future).
Shares in public companies don't really have physical value unless you own enough to change the management. Sure you 'own' that fraction of the company and their assets, but the managers of the company don't ever have to pay you out any of it. Almost all the value of a share for most people is in its speculative value.
Art generally doesn't really have physical value, the value is almost entirely in the story that goes with any specific piece. This isn't just true of modern art, being part of the story of the Mona Lisa is much more important than the aesthetic experience of looking at it (they let plebs do that for free!).
Education certainly isn't something with physical value. Sometimes it has utility value for what you can do with it, but more often it's just something that people want you to have because it distinguishes you from people who don't have it.
Insurance doesn't have physical value, it's more the value of feeling safe, which is a meme.
Entertainment is almost entirely memes and people have been paying to listen to music or watch drama for millenia.
Even the stuff that we 'used to buy' that was physical, like a car actually has a huge segment of its value that was meme based. You can tell by watching what companies advertise for. They rarely advertise for utility, they advertise for meme value.
Certainly monuments like cathedrals, huge stone circles, shrines etc were memetic as well as physical, and humans spent a phenomenal amount of effort on those things.
A huge amount of stuff that people spend money on has been primarily mimetic going back into prehistory.
>Money doesn't really have physical value, only speculative (you want it because you trust that someone else will want it in the future).
And because you need it to pay your taxes in it
>Shares in public companies don't really have physical value unless you own enough to change the management. Sure you 'own' that fraction of the company and their assets, but the managers of the company don't ever have to pay you out any of it. Almost all the value of a share for most people is in its speculative value.
Nowadays the price depends mainly on that yes, but dividends are a thing, and legally (which is the only thing that matters in finance anyway since private property is also only legally a thing) you own that slice of the company and its assets. The price and the value are different
>Art generally doesn't really have physical value, the value is almost entirely in the story that goes with any specific piece. This isn't just true of modern art, being part of the story of the Mona Lisa is much more important than the aesthetic experience of looking at it (they let plebs do that for free!).
And in the tax avoidance schemes it enables
>Education certainly isn't something with physical value. Sometimes it has utility value for what you can do with it, but more often it's just something that people want you to have because it distinguishes you from people who don't have it.
Now we are getting more interesting, what's the difference between physical value and utility value? What's the difference between social value (it will make me desireable) or personal value (it will make me happy) and "physical" value?
>Insurance doesn't have physical value, it's more the value of feeling safe, which is a meme.
Only if you don't understand probabilities and risk management. Also, good luck buying a house without life insurance
Things have value because we need them (inelastic part of the supply-demand curve), things have a price because we want them (elastic part of the supply-demand curve).
This is a particularly interesting thing to point out in this context - property ownership is a meme itself.
> Things have value because we need them (inelastic part of the supply-demand curve), things have a price because we want them (elastic part of the supply-demand curve).
Incidentally while it's an interesting distinction, I don't agree with your comment on need/value want/price. I value lots of things I don't need. Humans are creatures that value things, things that are valued are valuable.
> Only if you don't understand probabilities and risk management.
Yeah, you're probably right on that. I could maybe try to claim that probabilities and risk management are memes themselves...
It sounds like there is a disagreement on definition of "need". Perhaps yours is closer to "will physically die if not present", and the parent poster's is "somewhere on Maslow's hierarchy of needs".
It's basically mortgage protection insurance - This is a particular type of life assurance taken out for the term of the mortgage and designed to pay it off on the death of the borrower or joint borrower
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/housing/owning_a_home/...
I'm much more talking about things that have value only because people think they have value. That's mimetic value. These things are valuable because the meme of them being valuable has infected society.
Like money, or art, or education (except in narrow practical fields) or entertainment or a notional (but rarely practical) ownership claim on a company, or intellectual property,
None of those things would have any value at all if people didn't think of them as valuable, or treat them as valuable, or respect them.
Notably, a farm does not fall into this category. It is a physical asset that produces other physical assets; that's utility value, not mimetic value. You can eat its output for food or burn it for energy.
The more meta stuff is about how even physical and utility value assets are often partially acquired based on mimetic elements. So people pay more for a car that makes them feel like an international spy than they do for a car that gets them from A to B, so the meme of feeling like an international spy has increased the value of the simple physical asset.
Some things never change. It's crazy how much our (financial) world is built on fraud. The cases that are discovered and where the perpetrators get convicted are only the tip of the iceberg.
The - therefore - price multiple is still meme specific and can evaporate at any time
But I mean we would be having the same conversation if this was a $100mm marketcap coin, instead of a $36bn marketcap coin, but the criticism would be less true
so yeah just something to see, not exactly a counterpoint, just some additional peculiarity that makes you go “huh, well how about that”
https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2018-07-18-0148-va...
> But I mean we would be having the same conversation if this was a $100mm marketcap coin, instead of a $36bn marketcap coin, but the criticism would be less true
apparently pointing out the limitations of a low-hanging fruit criticism makes one a fanatic with no discussion on the common enterprise generating revenue, just the association with the meme brand.
zero discussion on whether the observer caught or missed all of the alpha, zero discussion on whether there was any conflict or any interest in the underlying asset, zero verification of whether the aforementioned exchange product created actually had the $500mm in assets and growing or daily trade volume even though people - including a Brazilian University's professor in a comment to a US securities regulator - have been trying to compare crypto assets to equities or a commodity supported by cashflow for an entire decade.
the irony being that without the token nobody would have noticed this 4 month old exchange generating $30mm-$490mm daily volume existed - earning fees no matter what the nature of the volume is - but the existence of the token and accessible branding prompts otherwise intelligent people to shut their mind off to any discussion about it, not even considering to even look at the product. just call the person that did look, or at least someone else that would look, a fanatic. probably hyperbole, as they feel the need to blend in to elevate their own opinion without similar exclusion, but frustrating none the less.
and doubling down makes me look like a fanatic, well played, ser
historians: this is the state of crypto discussions in 2021, just want a couple people now, and more people in the future, to see that.
People saw the criticism and created something else actually due to market forces
Its like wow there are so many good criticisms and you pick that one immediately after I gave you newer information that supersedes the main point of your old information?