Cryptoland [video] | Hacker News Reader

Cryptoland [video]

peertube.social

223 pointseisa01203 comments

Ironically given the benefits that the cryptocurrency ecosystem supposedly brings to artists, this promotional material contains stolen IP from at least one independent artist [1]. Cryptoland's response was to block the victim [2].

[1]: https://twitter.com/kamilabianchi/status/1478764832967086083

[2]: https://twitter.com/kamilabianchi/status/1479852849932734477

After browsing OpenSea one may reasonably come to the conclusion that for every competent artist selling NFTs of their art, there are approximately 40,000 low-effort mspaint primates.

Or just straight-up stolen art. For every one artist selling NFTs of their own art, there are easily five NFTs sold by fraudsters misrepresenting themselves to have to right to do so.

Wasn't this the literally exact thing NFTs was supposed to prevent?

Yet nothing in NFT's prevent it. Even if every artist minted everything they ever post as an NFT it would not prevent it.

At most there would be a "first to file" authenthicity mechanism in the NFT storefronts like OpenSea.

If you have the artist's address you can always check that the NFT originated from them. I don't even understand why anyone (mostly non-crypto people) would think it prevents copy pasting.

> At most there would be a "first to file" authenthicity mechanism in the NFT storefronts like OpenSea.

Just alter a pixel or put a minor filter, you’re good to go.

No, NFTs serve no purpose. As far as use-cases go, they have none.

To be fair, they do actually have some, but all of those can be better served without a blockchain, which as implemented doesn't even help with decentralization, let alone other claimed things.

Well, unless you count market speculation - that's what NFTs currently excel at.

I'm starting to wonder if we won't eventually go back to "this NFT certified by Christies of New York" otherwise they are basically all worth 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 BTC

Perhaps a sort of trusted authority could validate that...

So, why would you need all the crypto if an authority provides you the value?

One day people will get that crypto is an implementation detail raised to a cargocult status.

That's what I was hinting at

It's impressive how quickly the NFT space has abandoned any semblance of selling unique artwork, and converged on ten thousand variants of "randomly generated animal pictures" with half of them being monkeys because they're cargo-culting Bored Ape Yacht Club. Ironically in trying to create "digital scarcity" they've lowered the bar to entry so far that their "scarce" assets are buried under an endless avalanche of nearly indistinguishable "scarce" assets. Market price is the only thing that would set them apart, but even that's meaningless due to the prevalence of wash trading.

Is it impressive? I would've thought this is exactly what we expected. Actual artists are off making stuff they can sell, and 99.99% of them don't know what an NFT is. Meanwhile there's a whole community of teenagers on the internet who don't make anything but do know about NFTs.

If you run the numbers on "artists who know/care about NFTs" vs "Idiots on the internet gullible enough to buy into anythin" I think 10,000:1 is generous.

> Actual artists are off making stuff they can sell, and 99.99% of them don't know what an NFT is.

In my experience, it's the opposite. If you're an artist with an internet connection, then you know about NFTs.

Art communities across the internet have been fractured by the topic this year. Some have banned the posting of NFTs[1], some have built software to alert members when their work has been stolen and turned into NFTs[2]. Artists who speak out against NFTs are frequently dogpiled by crypto enthusiasts claiming that they don't care about their fellow artists[3]. Even famous artists know what NFTs are[4], since they've all been approached at some point by a crypto investor who wants them to make NFTs. As an artist, it's difficult to escape the topic, and it's causing quite a bit of backlash.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/comments/rrb8s8/rpixelart_...

2: https://www.deviantart.com/team/journal/DeviantArt-Protect-8...

3: https://twitter.com/simonstalenhag/status/136987854676887142...

4: https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/20/22846654/brian-eno-nft-c...

Same thing happened in the online beat space. It used to be producers creating music. Now it's a race to the bottom. Who can download a pre made loop the fastest and put the same drums over everything then sell it for $5. I don't know what has happened with humanity. Everyone just wants to make a quick buck.

Were we ever so different? Perhaps what has changed is not our nature, but the affordances present in our environment. For all our billions of years of evolutionary history until just about last Tuesday, there has never existed a global market with virtually zero cost of creating “goods” to sell. Now, with digital “assets”, there is.

The ratio of perceived benefit (make money from selling shitty NFTs or shitty beats) to cost (essentially zero cost to mint a shitty NFT or create a shitty beat) is infinite, NaN, divide-by-zero. Of course this results in near-infinite supply and thus most people don’t make any money. But the zero-ish cost means the flow of supply doesn’t stop.

The cost isn't zero though, the environmental cost is huge for NFTs in general, just like the billions made on bitcoin are on the back of that.

That’s right, but the cost is externalized to the planet at large. The person creating the NFT does not bear the cost directly.

The Bored Apes are selling entry to a community not art.

At any rate, as far as I can see artists I enjoy in real life like Refik Anadol are benefiting from and creating interesting art around them. Most NFTs are of course crap (as per sturgeon's) or simply not about art in the first place but I just don't think that means as much as people with an axe to grind think it means.

What's the community and what happens when you enter it? What are the perks to buying into it?

as far as I can tell, they’ve thrown a few parties, and they have a Discord.

the subtext is basically, for fools “you could end up hanging out with Snoop Dogg!” and for smarter people “you could find out what the next craze is early enough to flip it for a profit!”

(by watching the Discord chatter.)

> Lil Baby, the night’s headliner, finally took the stage at around 1AM. Most people had left by then. I was drinking my last vodka of the night and zoning out to “Life Goes On,” though, and a small group of attendees bounced near the front of the stage, and there was something inspirational about Lil Baby’s utter lack of concern with how small the audience had grown and how utterly dry the vibe in Brooklyn Steel was. He had none of Julian Casablancas’ cool kid embarrassment or Chris Rock’s self-consciousness. He was simply getting to the bag. “Brooklyn, if you’re making more money this year than last year, make some noise!” his hype man screamed to the crowd’s delight.

https://www.theverge.com/22824387/bored-ape-yacht-club-nft-p...

Seems like it's a crypto secret society.

- You support the movement!

- Movement towards what?

- Freedom, decentralization, all good things!

- ...by "buying" the picture of an ape?

- It's about the mindset, we're not there yet, you are missing out! JOIN US!!

The thing that saddens me the most is that cats used to own the internet, and I find the monkeys not so fascinating.

I was also hesitating to post this because I was afraid that some cryptobro or what-you-call-them would take this complaint literally and open an NFT trading site for cat pictures.

It's incredible how they don't see how bad these projects look, so my concern is real.

Boy have I got some bad news for you...

https://www.cryptokitties.co/ is a thing.

The absurdity makes this more fascinating than cringe-worthy, if I'm being honest :)

They also sent a cease and desist to one of the folks making fun of them on twitter - for making fun of them, on twitter. [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/molly0xfff/status/1479974074986209286?s=...

Her responses are gold.

> Dear legal team, I have removed all the false statements.

> "cease and decease"

That's a very effective way to inspire people to make fun of you, on Twitter.

Certainly a good example of the Streisand effect. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

So... Streis-land then?

Oh they can do better:

https://twitter.com/widesauce/status/1478816782966136832

https://web.archive.org/web/20220106124249/https://twitter.c...

“Welcome to Pedoland!”

"They also sent a cease and desist..."

They sent a request to cease and decease. Under the laws of Cryptoland, there are no second chances.

True libertarian utopia.

If you haven't read this, it's super funny [1].

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...

Thank you for sharing, this is amazing

Surprised they didn't just mint an NFT out of the song to prove ownership (or something).

They also stole the Jurassic Park theme

Nice to see PeerTube out in the wild.

PeerTube is a software application that implements the interoperable social networking standard, ActivityPub:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube

What this means is if you have an account anywhere on this network, say a Mastodon account, you can interact with the video directly. It's a system that works a lot like how email addresses work (that is, a federated social web).

last note: The Fediverse, as a whole, doesn't want to be associated with the web3 space. Pretty much because it is a system that works, and web3 is just a space for schmucks.

It would be a fun irony if web3 does succeed in pushing society beyond the centralization of web2, but only because it pushes people to use the federated systems we already have to overcome censorship when making fun of web3 stuff.

> The Fediverse, as a whole, doesn't want to be associated with the web3 space

The funny thing is, ActivityPub is vaguely under the banner of the Semantic Web. Which, at one time, was sometimes called, semi-jokingly... Web 3.0.

This is one of the many things that annoy me about "web3" - they have, in my mind, appropriated a term that denotes something quite different.

Youtube vs peertube vs odysee is a good comparison between web2, fediverse and web3. Youtube is popular and garbage, peertube unpopular and garbage and odysee unpopular and not garbage.

Sounds a lot like "The People's Front of Judea" vs. "Judea People's Front"

exactly, "Judea People's Front" are wankers

“Peer tube is supported by the non-profit...”

You’re correct, this is different from true web3, which would be fundamentally self sustaining.

Here[1] is an article with more details. One worrying detail is that whoever runs the Cryptoland Twitter account "joking" about the age of consent being the age of "mental maturity". It is always interesting what laws these people prioritize changing.

[1] - https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3n38x/cryptocurrency-invest...

The official response to the age of consent thing was that they didn't know what "age of consent" means: https://twitter.com/cryptoland/status/1480231356848349192

They've also sent a C&D to someone: https://twitter.com/cryptoland/status/1480236809531838464

That excuse makes no sense. There is no "age allowed" to enter "any other place, like a restaurant, a resort or an amusement park". Those places all let in babies and I assume Cryptoland would too. Also how does that explain the winking emoticon?

To be fair, not a single communique of theirs has led me to believe that English is their first language.

communiqué

a good example of Muphry’s Law, that every online grammar correction/complaint will contain a grammatical error.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law

Also Wiio's Laws that specifically talk about human communication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiio%27s_laws

more importantly, a "cease and decease"

That inspires confidence, I'm sure they can manage an entire island

You'd assume they'd be subject to the laws of whatever country that island is in. One thing you can be certain of is that no country is ceding any territory for them to form their own nation.

The island they are eyeing is Nananu-i-cake in Fiji: https://www.privateislandsonline.com/south-pacific/fiji/nana...

It's at least a real island that's really for sale, but Cryptolands renders present it as being freestanding in the ocean rather than right next to the mainland and another island as it is in reality

This is baffling, if it's still for sale, then the project has not really started, or is not at the promised stage.

The fact it even exists is 100% more legitimate than I expected.

Apparently they blocked the webpage showing that it's still for sale from being linked to in their Discord: https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1478789636868775939

Actually surprised that a private island would only cost $12m.

How about $68k?

https://www.privateislandsonline.com/canada/novascotia/big-t...

319 ETH per acre. ($1mil USD today)

I'm struggling to find a way to constructively criticize. Project aside, the video is not at all professional to a western audience. (watch all of it, I dare you)

It's stylistically tone-deaf for their target market, grift notwithstanding. Who decided that real estate investors need a cartoon? At least Fyre's promo content felt "cool."

Why not try your luck, some crypto ppl who have gotten recently rich might buy such shit.

I don't think I'd be so gentle. It is one of the most cringe-worthy things I've seen in quite some time. Makes the crypto space seem like it's entirely inhabited by morons and fools.

if your industry segment is populated with a theoretical 5 to 10% of vociferous morons and fools, it tends to paint everyone else with the same brush.

5-10% is very generous

Where's the lie

Wait, it's not a parody meant to mock the whole crypto/web3 space as a bunch of shameless pseudo-libertarian get-rich-quick hucksters?

Poe's law strikes again!

It could be deliberate. An unprofessional pitch shrinks the buyer pool, but by repelling scam-savvy people it *concentrates* that pool with vulnerable people, increasing the conversion rate. This is useful if the scammers need to devote a lot of individualized attention on each target.

HN had threads discussing this concept (in the context of 419 scams, I think); I don't remember how to find them. Those have enormous attrition rate between the initial contact, and the "walk into a bank and wire your life savings" step.

edit: They discussed a Microsoft researcher's article about scam emails (thanks, walrus01):

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-... ("Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They are From Nigeria?") [2012]

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=why%20nigerian%20scammers&type...

I think you may be referring to the following:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-...

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/82814/secretly-smart-rea...

by immediately weeding out the skeptical, they can focus their direct person-hours of communication back and forth labor setting up the scam on the most vulnerable and guillible.

That's the one. The Cormac Herley / Microsoft article inspired lots of threads,

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=why%20nigerian%20scammers&type...

Applies to genuine ads too. Where there's any cost involved, it's important for ROI to disqualify non-customers at any stage of the funnel (aka avoiding false positives).

e.g. if you're paying $100 per click to attract a specific demographic, you don't want to run an ad that's so intriguing any random visitor will click on it. Not only will you be charged $100 for a dead lead, you'll also be making your ads less favourable to the algorithm, thus driving up future costs and/or making your ads less likely to appear in future.

Repelling scam savvy people with CGI renderings of monuments to previous crypto scams and a slot machine with a flashing "Scam Alert" is unusally direct.

It's almost like they've gone beyond filtering out the savvy and gone straight for the making sure nobody feels sorry for the "investors" angle

These were the exact scenes in the cartoon that made me briefly confused if this was an elaborate parody or real (the only thing that made me realize it must be real is that no one would foot the cost for such an elaborate parody video)

Never ascribe to malice, what may be explained by mere incompetence?

That's true. Though, given the situation, it'd be more "never ascribe to competent malice, what can be explained by malicious incompetence"...

Never see a pattern where there is a pattern.

(I grant everyone the right to call this law after themselves)

I watched all of it. The video quality is subpar indeed, and they claim it took one year to complete. Their "vision" is biased towards people that value "to party" and "to ostentate". It seems like a crypto funded thematic beach resort venture, possibly led by a team without real experience in the hospitality industry.

It's probably the same principle as email scammers.

https://www.businessinsider.in/strategy/theres-a-reason-nige...

Reading this comment and opening the video, for the first 30 seconds I thought this was some real island that some rich fanatic bought and tried to resell to crypto folks.

Turns out, it's just a plain old scam.

This is the best example of Poe's Law I've ever come across [1]. I honestly can't tell if this is brutal satire or someone's legit endgame. The more I watch the more inclined to think it's satire, but there's a lot of other things in this space I didn't think could be serious that are.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

This must be an art project, right? Legitimately still perplexed.

Guess with the "Silicon Valley" series wrapped up, writers gotta still write.

I'd love to think it's post-irony or meta-irony[1], but really I suspect it's legit and they are trying their best. Bless. Feels like an order of magnitude more risky as an investor than Fyre festival

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsuSveDAlpI

Looks like an example of the emerging genre of post-truth-quasi-parody, where if goal A fails then it is represented as goal B.

Goal A is to dupe the most gullible of cryptozealots, trying to gain financially, goal B is to mock them, gaining exposure.

Win-kinda-win.

My opinion flipped 3 times when watching it.

It like magnetic truth pole, the needle just spins.

> Mirror of the Cryptoland presentation that its creators seem to be trying to wipe from the Internet for some reason.

"for some reason" I wonder why! I'd love to see the comments they got on YouTube.

This seems such a ridiculously obvious "let's cash in on the gold rush" attempt, and Poe's law started hitting me hard when it came to the animated sections. But of course it's the crypto space, so of course it's a real thing!

The Cryptoland Twitter account also endorsed pedophilic grooming: https://twitter.com/widesauce/status/1478816782966136832

Transcript:

> Q: what will the age of consent be in Cryptoland?

> A: Mental maturity should be more than enough! :)

Cryptoland is either tasteless performance art or a disaster waiting to happen.

I saw it more as Epstein's island, but on the blockchain.

Just to clarify -- it wasn't a smile at the end of their gross response, it was a winky face (only important because they're trying to deny they knew what "age of consent" meant now that they caught shit for it, but the little wink gives it away completely).

Why would you want to live in a theme-park on a remote jungle island in a volatile jurisdiction with a bunch of assholes?

Some people cannot conceive of the thing falling apart and everyone dying of hunger and thirst.

It is rather less tropical but Put In Bay fits the bill much better.

The best place to get STDs in the great lakes.

I’m guessing they are trying to appeal to speculators who are gambling that the value of the property will increase. The business model might resemble a pyramid shape.

Isn’t that the exact promise of El Salvador’s Bitcoin City, except for the island part.

You can already move to crypto land. You can buy residency in El Salvador for 3 bitcoin. There's even a tropical beach there. What? You don't like poor people? Tough luck pal. Besides, in your tiny little crypto island who's going to make your bed, take out the trash, make your meals and clean the toilets? Robots? Places like Aspen, or other towns for the super rich usually have a nearby middle class town for all the oompa loompahs. There's no island anywhere of only rich beautiful people.

Notice how most of the people in this video are white guys.

Most women are there to serve the guys.

That's how it is in crypto utopia.

So, there's actually a bit of a history of libertarian-ish types doing this sort of this thing. Examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Minerva

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/07/disastrous-voya...

It doesn't generally end well.

It's like the level Seaside Shock in Cruelty Squad

A group of seasteaders have recently acquired vast fortunes through biocurrency speculation. It wasn't however enough to attain their dream of building an artificial floating island on the open seas, so they've had to settle for a compromise and have purchased their own cruise ship, the 'Titanium Princess'. It is now a den of pathetic losers living out their depraved fantasies.

I like the story of Grafton NH and how things actually turned out when libertarians started to take over a town - https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-...

I like to point people to the Rational Wiki for their articles on topics such as these, which tend to be very entertaining:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Seasteading

I watched the whooooooooooooooooooole video

I've not felt like this since 1999 when I did a party with co-workers at the T1 ISP I worked for at the time. The E-Trade monkey commercial came on and we laughed. We were already reviving large number of T1/T3/Sonet disconnect orders and it was obvious the end was coming soon.

I don't know when crypto will pop. I don't think we've hit max stupid yet.

The stock-market valuations of the late 1990s were excessive, but the objectives of the actual companies were fairly reasonable. Trading... over the internet. Order your pet food... over the internet. Eventually many of these things actually happened, they just weren't done by the "first movers" who were represented in the stock market bubble.

What's happening now, in the cryptocurrency milieu, is more deranged. It's to the point that it's making technology itself seem like a joke.

What really got me to understand what an NFT is was a post in a gold / silver subredit. A poster asked the question "Where could I find someone who could make a physical NFT gold and silver coin". I really didn't understand what that meant so I asked. They answered that it was going to be a intricately designed coin that was a physical NFT.

This physical NFT was just a coin. Nothing special, no blockchain just a coin.

After this I realized that all these NFT's are completely worthless. You wouldn't buy a physical coin that some random guy (Talented artiest but still) for millions. Why would it be different if its digital?

I could be wrong and NFT's will somehow become the next massive institution but I don't think so.

Also the point of coinage is that it is fungible, NFTs are designed to be non-fungible (and even Bitcoin if you get down to the details).

Sadly crypto-currencies still haven't really solved the currency use-case.

> Sadly crypto-currencies still haven't really solved the currency use-case.

I'm not a fan of this space, but I surveyed many crypto tokens last year and it did sound like some well designed tokens could solve the use-case as an actual currency. Algorand springs to mind, they claimed high transactions speeds and also carbon negative footprint (which sounds too good to be true, but I don't know the specifics).

except most NFTs are just URLs right? And it would cost a significant amount of money to actually write say a video into the chain?

Yeah exactly! They are even less practical than my example. Its very confusing how they are worth so much to me

I think this is an elaborate art project.

This is mainly based off of the 2 "founders" at the end talking about the project. When they go scout for locations and one of the founders starts caressing the top of a thatch hut and the immediate next shot is a piece of paper taped to a tree with the title "Mercle Tree", that's when it clicked that this was a parody.

It's scary that it took me that long to realize.

Art project for sure, and based on the engagement so far I'd say they've succeeded.

Here is some of their previous work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEtBHQu4DoM

A film with the aspect ratio of a piece of string. Interesting approach, I guess.

I agree; I'll buy all 60 plots if it's real! I feel people are so overly keen on dunking on crypto at the moment, that they are blinded to agreeable satire. The proof that people claim makes it sincere isn't compelling.

Featured in FT Alphaville today. Is this real? Feels like FYRE 2.0

https://www.ft.com/content/c79ea41b-41c0-4900-90ee-6e6347449...

https://cryptoland.is/

They have a quote by Carlos Matos, from BitConnect fame. "We are changing the world as we know it."

lol

Probably fake.

Matos found out they mentioned him in the video. He tweeted his displeasure. Trying to find it...

for something fake clearly somebody, somewhere put a lot of time into doing the 3D modeling and animation. seems like a bit too much effort for satire.

That's because it basically is. I'm pretty involved in the cryptocurrency space and I haven't found a single person outside of the memecoin get rich types (see "Shiba Army") that thinks this is a good idea or seriously viable in any real way.

Honestly I can do nothing but hope that the craze around cryptocurrency dies down so that these types go back to other get rich quick schemes and leave the actual researchers, engineers, and developers to their work.

They eventually removed the request, but there was a group that wanted to create a blockchain utopia (smartcity) north of Reno, Nevada.

https://www.rgj.com/story/news/politics/2021/10/07/blockchai...

Another group actually bought a cruise ship, the Satoshi... a fascinating story.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/07/disastrous-voya...

For a good laugh on this matter, I recommend reading this.

https://blog.mollywhite.net/cryptoland-thread/

The level of incompetency and ironical jokes is overwhelming.

This is great.

I'm pro-cryptocurrency generally, but I'm horrified by the crypto-as-salvation, utopianist narrative coming from some wealthy crypto proponents in denial of their own moral bankruptcy and the problem of human fallibility in general.

It feels like the same crowd who are buying up places in cryostasis chambers and pinning their hopes on terraforming Mars.

So like, where does the water come from? Where does the food come from? Who does the cooking, cleaning, and essential maintenance of infrastructure? Where would these essential workers live? What would they get paid? How do you resolve disputes of who owns what hardware keys? Where do you treat sewage and waste water?

Like those are just my questions on first glance. Let's not even get into the fact that the video straight up says nothing has been bought or paid for yet. It's clearly a scam, they're gonna be laughing all the way to some country that has no extradition treaty with Spain.

The island (Nananu-i-Cake, pronounced roughly "nah-nah-nuh ee tha-keh") is less than 750 meters off the coast of Fiji's most populated island, Viti Levu, so piping in water, electricity etc and ferrying in workers is eminently achievable.

Of course, the fact that the video doesn't mention any of this, much less trivia like the location of the bloody island, is a strong clue about how seriously this project has been planned and how seriously we should be taking it.

Hi gang. There was an older version of this video that was released first. This newer version has a lot of changes that give a bit of an insight into how they want to present themselves.

Here's a twitter thread detailing the changes: https://twitter.com/jpainio/status/1479863994387161093

The raw side-by-side video is here: https://peertube.social/w/wpDMyuGRYu9ax6Xz3q9Hdi

Wtf did i just watch.

This has got to be someone trolling, right?

If you didn't watch the whole thing, make sure to at least watch the animated section.

I don't know what's happening, people are paying tons of money for hashes of jpegs, honestly can't tell it's 50/50 from my pov.

I've wondered how much of that is really just laundering crypto?

Lets say you had a successful ransomware attack and got millions of dollars worth of BTC. How do you transfer that to a wallet you can use to cash out?

I've always figured thats why people will pay massive amounts of crypto for really stupid NFT things. Its sort of like an express lane for more traditional methods of money laundering. For example, you don't need the physical art piece to launder fine art. NFTs are way easier than doing it the old fashioned way.

I was shocked to discover after looking more closely that most of the popular NFTs do not contain the image hash in the blockchain token data, nor do they even contain the URL to the image! They simply contain an integer (the token ID).

The ERC721 interface only requires String GetTokenURL(int tokenId) be implemented!

Are there a limited number of NFTs, then? INT_MAX?

tokenId is a uint256, so there are at most 115792089237316195423570985008687907853269984665640564039457584007913129639935 NFTs per contract.

Comparable to the number of atoms in the observable universe.

I don't think it is trolling.

Crypto has made it so a lot of young people have randomly gotten extremely rich. For some of these people, it is bound to go to their head and make them think that they are actually business geniuses. Sprinkle in a dash of bro culture and suddenly "buy an island and have a huge nonstop party" feels like an attractive idea.

this reminds me of the crypto/seasteading bros who tried to buy a cruise ship

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/07/disastrous-voya...

https://futurism.com/the-byte/bitcoin-cruise-ship

cryptoland, more like grift-o-land

Poe's law in action: after watching this I cannot tell if this is 2nd order trolling or real thing

I'm very confused. I was seeing the video and then the website as if it was a joke. But then it started to look like it wasn't very funny and that it wasn't a joke.

But... crypto, the crazy amounts of energy it uses, rising sea levels, and putting rich crypto people on an island.

Weird sub-communities and ballpits (timestamp 5:05) are not a famously good combination.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/dashcon ?

Yep, that was the reference.

Let's ignore everything else. They're buying a private island, that would generally mean that the island is already part of a country, in which case it isn't materially different from buying a few hundred acres in rural Montana or some such. You aren't creating your own country, you're still subject to the laws of the state the island is part of.

So I'm unsure if they're confused, or it's a scam.

Certainly no matter what they may think, they don't get to choose their own age of consent.

I'm about half way through this, and I honestly can't tell whether it's satire or not. If real, this could be the "The Room" [1] of pitches. Just waiting for it to turn into a Lord of the Flies type situation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Room

It would be a legitimately great setting for another incarnation of Bioshock

It's good that they started with the most important thing when they want to live on an island with no infrastructure and unclear jurisdiction.

A 3D animated video.

I think Taiwan and Hong Kong are looking at this with awe.

Unfortunately a lot of people are gonna get scammed. This has happened so many times… I’m a bit surprised financial regulators aren’t cracking down on it just yet.

At this point there’s not much to do but

> I’m a bit surprised financial regulators aren’t cracking down on it just yet

Financial regulators are government agencies supervised the government i.e. the lawmakers.

As Tesla, and big banks have thrown millions and billions into crypto, don't you think that they will do everything in their power to keep this hype alive?

Crypto crypto crypto! Say it enough times and it loses all meaning.

ZOMBO!

Still there! https://www.zombo.com/

"The only limit is yourself."

"Proof of work gym"

This legitimately clever joke buried in the middle of a horrendous video makes it even funnier

One of the first places to be flooded by rising sea levels:-(

I work in blockchain; I'm getting massive Fyre Festival vibes from this crap

Poe's law really applies here. I cannot believe this is not a parody.

Looks like a great place to host the next Fyre festival.

I love how the only things you can associate with crypto is scams, which are celebrated gleefully.

I can no longer tell what is real and what is satire.

Wow. This is amazing. Worth preserving for the ages, seriously.

A crypto-island scheme has been a thing since the very early days of bitcoin. None of them ever get anywhere, of course.

Now that I think about it, there was some sort of bitcoiner ranch/compound/village/utopia in some place like Chile or Argentina. I think it actually did get off the ground, but I don't remember hearing any more about it. I'll have to rabbit hole that soon.

EDIT- It was in Chile, and it fell apart long ago. https://www.vice.com/en/article/bn53b3/atlas-mugged-922-v21n...

Is pinball making a comeback?

Either way…I can see it being real. I can see it being a parody. I can see it being a parody funded by parodists but created by true believers. I can perhaps see it the other way.

All the possibilities are open, just like crypto or something

I can't tell if this is satire or not

Reminds me of that Futurama with Nixon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm4MH-Yf87Q

Really impressive, this is a ton of effort for a satire piece.

I guess at some point they’ll try to pivot this into “it was satire all along” to regain credibility, but there’s no wink here… someone really believes this stuff.

Oh well at least there's a real island they are planning on "Nananu-I-Cake Fiji , South Pacific USD 12,000,000.00" https://www.privateislandsonline.com/south-pacific/fiji/nana...

They are planning on selling 60 lots for ~$1m each so the maths could work.

Eww. And I thought a climate destroying ponzi grift was bad enough... And then there's this tirefire?

Hopefully a hurricane will sweep 6mo in and wipe this out.

Regardless of what you think about crypto, wishing people to lose their homes and potentially lives is morally questionable don't you think?

wishes aren’t magic. There's a difference, morally, between doing someone harm and a desire for someone to be harmed.

How is the moral difference between wishing and doing relevant? It doesn't help determine if wishing something bad can be morally questionable, which was my claim that you disagree(?) with.

Please explain what is wrong with my reasoning. I'm here to learn.

It could be valuable proof of work to rebuild it.

What's with crypto and tropical escapes?

FTX moved their headquarters to the Bahamas and now they are trying to build it into a crypto-hub too: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sdjcH7KAxgB328RAb/...

Most are tax havens that turn a blind eye to money laundering and other financial crimes.

Other than what's been mentioned, the "digital nomads" have a pretty long history of traveling to low-cost tropical areas, to get most bang for the buck as far living cost goes. And it makes sense.

But these projects, however, I'm not sure. Maybe they really just want some secluded cult-like utopia of likeminded people. This is gonna be much more expensive than simply camping out in Thailand.

This is high comedy. Like alien intelligence level existential trolling. These are my people, I must find them.

This is a joke, right?

The joke is that they really believe in their project...

Who's got the mirror for this video

Even the Principality of Sealand is getting in on the action:

https://sealandgov.org/shop/become-a-duke-or-duchess/

The full cartoon video is still on the official channel: https://youtu.be/jf3ajS5me78

This is just a scam to try to sell their NFT's, right?

Oh my god, this video is incredible. Truly a work of art.

a shark shaped island and a "Vladimir Club" in the center! Looks like an opening of a Hawaiian themed Snatch. Vladimir dressed in lei will come personally to break your legs.

If to expand the target audience beyond the crypto toward all the youngish and hip - well it looks like the Metaverse that FB wants to put the world into, no real island required.

Honestly I think I could do this build an Island thing with a bunch of people much better... Might have to do it now LOL

I watched the whole thing and I still don’t understand if this is a joke or a serious project

Take a drink every time he says a word prefixed with crypto, hard liquors only

This looks dumb af

Fyre 2.0

Blockchain Fyre Festival?

Fire festival on steroids

Is it me, or the island looks on purpose like crocodile/alligator? heh

Anyone noticed "OneCoin" in the video?

why was it removed?

It was marked as unlisted, then Molly White (@molly0xFFF) got ahold of it and started making fun of it. That's how I found out about it. Now Cryptoland is threatening Molly with legal action

https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1479974074986209286

Edit: She has another site that is very cool: "Web3 is going just great" consisting of a daily update of the latest rugpulls and other frauds

https://web3isgoinggreat.com/

I thought it was a prank?

And that c&d looks faked

It feels like that way to me but it's hard to tell these days. Possibly a good example of Poe's law

The email is likely not faked because they doubled-down but it shows another area of incompetance. A real cease and desist would likely go through an actual lawyer (with relevant contact information to ensure they actually have standing), not a legal@ email address.

it's not a c&d if not sent by a lawyer. this is a nagging email

What's the difference?

"cease and decease". omg, what a bunch of hacks

https://twitter.com/cryptoland/status/1480236809531838464

Her response to that is gold.

> "cease and decease"

> I have removed all the false information

Reply on news.ycombinator.com