Agreed. For me it was the NFT'ing of a fart that was the jumping the shark moment that drove me from being merely a crypto skeptic to being vociferously anti-crypto and advocating against it at every turn.
I'm basically an anti-crypto bitcoiner.
Anyway, you have your choice of what money to use. I prefer USD and Euro myself. And I really still don't understand any use case for someone in a first world country to use crypto.
I grant that 3rd world countries without banking systems may, may need it, but I don't know why we just wouldn't start banks there.
Hi. Here is a use case you can carry on to future discussions. There is a flourishing scene of dark net markets where people can purchase drugs using cryptocurrency. Merchants have reviews, products have reviews, and the whole process is much safer, secure, and convenient than meeting a drug dealer in real life with cash.
Bitcoin is not yet perfect. Hopefully someday. Monero however is pretty great privacy wise.
Two things:
1. Bitcoin Lightning is not Bitcoin and is in fact a centralized by design layer 2 system which the transactions are off-chain [0][1], a direct contradiction to what Bitcoin was designed for. A peer-to-peer on-chain electronic cash system.
2. Monero and the other privacy coins are getting delisted and banned from exchanges due to increasing regulations. [2][3][4]
You can still use Monero, but the on-ramps, exchanges will have banned the privacy coins under these regulations, cutting a way to easily exchange it for fiat.
[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/aba062
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.07746.pdf
[2] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/monero-k...
[3] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2021...
[4] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/03/31/eu-parliament-vot...
Yes, but I personally have node equipment sitting in my closet waiting to be setup. (time constraints) It's not so centralized that it's obviously destined to be controlled by Governments and Corporations. I would put proof of stake down as being much more controllable by monied interest.
> 2. Monero and the other privacy coins are getting delisted and banned from exchanges due to increasing regulations.
That's sad, but it leads me to two thoughts. One, I'm glad I don't live in the UK or EU, and I think it's gross that something like that happens without the input of the people. Not that I'd put it entirely past the US to do this either (sigh). Two, hopefully Uniswap and other decentralized exchanges will allow for people to swap into privacy coins without a regulated exchange, but I agree there are probably numerous ways to penalize or track the entrance and exit thereof.
I think really this comes down to getting off exchanges asap and trying to actually use the currency. My local community has a group that actively uses the currencies for exchange, but who knows how strongly that would survive if the currencies couldn't off ramp to fiat.
Clearly crypto is valuable to break the law. After all, look at the number of crypto scams. Or ransomware attacks.
Except they absolutely have. The contemporary art market is exactly what you describe. There's sharks sitting in tanks of embalming fluid being sold for tens of millions of dollars just to be put in storage, and people laundering their money in art investment schemes. The contemporary art market is absolutely an unhealthy social scene of greed and deception.
With crypto, the pollution is built into the system. It's not only being used by the corruption, it is itself rotten. And neither does some of it look nice on walls.
So is the contemporary art world. The contemporary art world is vastly polluting as well. How much GHG do you think is generated to run a museum, or warehouse, transport aircraft, ect, filled with bad contemporary art?
No-one is proposing that contemporary art is some sort of technological breakthrough that will completely revamp society, make everyone rich and change finance for the rest of time.
(Also, I'm sorry, but I do NOT believe that contemporary art consume even a tiny fraction of the power that cryptocurrencies do when nearly all of it sits in a handful of warehouses and never moves, just changes ownership abstractly. You would really need to prove this claim.)
Yes, there are strong parallels between the art market and the NFT market. The main one being that money laundering seems to be the primary purpose of both. But at least art does provide people with some level of subjective enjoyment beyond that.
On the other hand, NFTs are pretty new. Maybe someone will make a museum of NFTs that don't suck in a couple years and I'll be proven foolish.
I'm not sure how one would curate an NFT museum, I imagine you'd want to display the jpeg and then select for pieces that play with the uniqueness guarantee somehow.
I haven't the foggiest clue how that would work, it if it is even possible, or what it would look like. But people have only been doing them for a couple years. If we made a museum that sampled the NFT population as selectively as an art museum samples the overall art population, that NFT museum would have approximately zero entries, right?
Perhaps the “web 3” evangelists can switch to show more of these apps, and the real world value they provide.
if someone has to defend their tech by using analogy to the early web, it's probably bullshit
It's about how much of a strawman this is. People are literally using the worst possible example of a new class of applications to dismiss all of it. It's usually indicative they don't understand it or were fortunate enough to never having the need for anything like it.
To make an analogy with evolutionary theory: every single technological breakthrough results in mutation pressure and consequently a massive explosion of new species (products). Some of these products are good, fit well with the environment and thrive. Some of them are ill-conceived or mal-adaptive and do not last long.
Yeah, "NFT-as-art" is bullshit, and I would bet that it will go away sooner or later. But that does not discredit NFTs as whole, much less blockchain/crypto/web3/whatever-you-want-to-call-it.
Most of them are literally forks of it.
there are forks of bitcoin, to be sure... but the majority of "cryptos" out there are GPU mineable coins, because there's hardware that can be exploited to mine "profitably". not to mention the need to pre-mine shitcoins so they can be given to grifters and shills who pump & dump.
This is the essence of the Nakamoto Consensus Algorithm, which underpins the entirety of blockchain economics.