As a Crypto Winter Descends, Celebrities Quietly Delete Their NFT Profiles | Hacker News Reader

As a Crypto Winter Descends, Celebrities Quietly Delete Their NFT Profiles

news.artnet.com

55 pointsharambae44 comments

the convention may have hired a Snoop Dogg look-a-like, “Doop Snogg”, to attend the festivities and inflate the convention’s prestige

Not the real thing, just meant to evoke it, and people will pay for it, despite it being unauthorized, hoping to impress others. I finally get it!

It turns out that Snoop Dogg himself is not easily fungible.

You could say he's a non-fungible toker

This begs a probative question: what good is the monkey if nobody knows you have it?

Why not call it a crypto apocalypse, not winter? Winter implies it will be over eventually.

This cycle has happened four times before and every time there are more people investing. It could be the apocalypse but we won’t know for a while.

Once everyone understands the fundamentals there may be no greater fools left. That would be recipe for an 'apocalypse'.

It’s possible but there are a lot of people invested in crypto and they’re not all fools. There are a lot of people that have never invested in crypto and they’re definitely not all fools.

"Greater fool" is a technical term, not a judgement.

The underlying implication turns out to be pretty literal.

Greater dreamer works as well. The most important part is the infinite growth of expectation.

It's both.

It's going to be a long time before even a significant minority of people understand the fundamentals.

Yet pyramid schemes/MLMs keep popping up, for decades. Their model isn't so different from what motivates people who get caught up in cryptocurrency and NFT scams.

The principle of the "daily ten thousand" ensures there's a constant supply of new fools... https://xkcd.com/1053/

> This cycle has happened four times before and every time there are more people investing.

How many more people could be convinced to put money into cryptocurrency? At this point I suspect there aren't a lot left.

Every time it goes up it's more people than the last time.

There's a finite supply of suckers, and the cryptocurrency industry has already been digging pretty deep.

If it's like other tech the more people are now in the developing world which would mean high volume usage but have trouble reaching past heights of speculation.

You don’t think retail are gonna look for alternative investments over the coming cycle? That they’ll be happy with stocks, bonds, and deposit accounts at their local credit unions?

> they’ll be happy with stocks, bonds, and deposit accounts at their local credit unions?

You’re describing gambling addicts. Healthy casinos keep their share of revenue to a minimum for a reason.

Every four years today's high schoolers graduate college and start earning money. They don't witness the previous cycle and it's lessons, so they are impressed by the tech and don't realize the greater fool is them.

Why call it apocalypse when there are no signs of it actually dying. It's a big cleanup, ponzies bust, worthless coins bust, every project has to proof its relevance again.

It was fucking time. People started to loose any relation to anything with all those masked ponzies & not even alpha metaverses.

The thing about monetary systems - crypto, fiat, precious metals, shell beads or whatever - is that they only have value, i.e. can be exchanged for goods and services - as long as other human beings agree that they have such value.

Crypto schemes certainly deserve much of the scorn that has been poured on them recently, but the way things are trending with the $US dollar may not be all that much better. Modern Monetary Theory, which is widely embraced in some circles may not be much more reliable than crypto, and in particular the fact that MMT relies on preserving the reserve currency status of the dollar isn't always recognized clearly (this is why MMT applied in countries like Argentina and Venezuela results in the devaluation of the local currency).

The fact that the Fed's rampant quantitative easing during the pandemic has now contributed at least in part to rampant inflation might indicate that that reserve currency status is faltering (compare to QE during 2008-2009, which did not cause an inflation spike). It's not the only factor driving inflation (supply chain breakdowns, fossil fuel exports, etc.) but it's something to think about.

No - don't sell your Treasury bonds to buy bitcoin, please. But perhaps it's time to think about reviving Bancor?

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

MMT doesn't rely on preserving the reserve currency status of the dollar. It relies on a nation having monetary sovereignty, ie. being able to denominate its debts in its own currency, and not other currencies. I'm not sure how that wouldn't be recognized since it's pretty much the central part of the theory.

I don't believe it's the case that currency is only valuable if people have faith in it, and that's creating a false equivalency between shells, beads, crypto, and dollars.

Dollars are a medium of exchange because they are legitimized by the government, primarily because they are the only thing you can pay your taxes in if you live in the US, which creates an ongoing demand for them. If we all decided to change to beads, for some reason, we'd still have to buy dollars to pay the US government.

MMT is a deliberate conflation of monetary and fiscal policy. It’s bullshit.

> Dollars are a medium of exchange because they are legitimized by the government, primarily because they are the only thing you can pay your taxes in if you live in the US

No, they’re a medium of exchange because they have the desired properties due to collective belief (stores value through time, common unit of measure, subdivideable). If I could pay taxes in push-ups, push-ups wouldn’t be a medium of exchange.

> If we all decided to change to beads, for some reason, we'd still have to buy dollars to pay the US government.

No, the IRS would simply not be able to collect because there would be no USD market of any kind for seized property. Zero demand for dollars would be stable.

Surely you're kidding about Bancor.

No, and don’t call me Shirley

> Crypto schemes certainly deserve much of the scorn that has been poured on them recently, but the way things are trending with the $US dollar may not be all that much better.

Sure seems like holding dollars was a lot better than holding crypto the last few years, so not sure where you are getting that USD is not much better. Anyways, they're not really comparable since it's pretty clear at this point that crypto isn't a viable medium of exchange even at feature-set level (ignoring the problems with its volatility - everything you can buy with crypto got 66% more expensive in the last 6 months, which is worse than price rises under USD inflation).

But how badly have things been trending with the USD vs other true mediums-of-exchange (i.e. currencies that you can use to pay for normal things, like food, clothes, energy, taxes, etc)?

Seems like not very differently. Inflation, induced by monetary policy, pandemic, and war is affecting all significant medium-of-exchange currencies and economies right now. None of those real currencies is realistically going to take over reserve currency status from USD any time soon.

> but the way things are trending with the $US dollar may not be all that much better

Why do crypto maxis keep saying this? At the very least, the entire USA population uses USD daily and have an entrenched interest in continuing to use it.

How do you possibly think you could convince all of them to switch to your fav crypto, just because you’ve been “stacking” it?

> but the way things are trending with the $US dollar may not be all that much better

Absolutely ridiculous assertion.

> can be exchanged for goods and services

Right, and NFTs perform the extremely valuable function of preventing FOMO; or in the case of celebrities: fear of missing a fashion statement.

This entire series of debacles has proven that cryptocurrencies are not immune to human stupidity, which was supposed to be the main selling point of it all. It has spectacularly failed.

> The fact that the Fed's rampant quantitative easing during the pandemic has now contributed at least in part to rampant inflation

It’s impossible to quantify “contributed in part”, but this would not explain rampant inflation across nearly all developed countries [https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/15/in-the-u-s-...]

> both Hilton and Fallon have changed their Twitter profile photos from the Bored Apes that once united them. Although, to be fair, both maintain the “.eth” suffix that keeps them a part of the conversation, and Hilton is still minting her own NFTs.

So this fluff article basically tells us that celebrities have changed their profile picture, but haven’t stopped using crypto? Did we expect them to keep an ugly ape as their profile picture for their entire lives?

What would loud deletion sound like?

"All crypto is a ponzi scheme and it has run out of greater fools, good luck to the morons who bought crypto because of the endorsement deal FTX paid me for. I am now replacing my profile pic with something else." In a tweet would be a loud deletion in my mind.

Tweeting about why you’ve stopped using the algorithmically generated cartoon ape you paid a large sum of money for as an avatar might be a start. Rather than quietly just making it vanish.

Is it normal for celebrities to announce when and why they change their profile pics?

This is a direct response to the Nazi and Negro dog whistling in Bored Ape Yacht Club: https://youtu.be/XpH3O6mnZvw

Wow that was really interesting

It's getting downvoted and mogged heavily by NFT shills.

Just finished watching the video. Really appreciated, than you.

I had actually already felt a strange sensation when I saw their use of apes for this NFT and the logo that reminded me of the SS emblem. I felt a little bit stupid to think about this and ended up discarding this idea entirely.

The author seems to have done extensive research on the topic, I find it hard to tell if it's just about looking for signs that don't exist or if it's actually one of the major racist conspiracies I've seen in my professional life.

They'll be back once the cycle reverts

The "winter" in "crypto winter" may imply that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com