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Comment by rainsford | Hacker News Reader

> At any event, how is an attendee supposed to assess such a thing? It's not like you can DYOR.

That's why I think the cryptobro angle is relevant to the story, because assessing trust in the folks putting on a conference is the way for attendees to figure out if they're likely to be blinded by the lighting or face other issues. And the type of people the whole cryptocurrency and especially NFT scene attract seem at least in my opinion to be way more likely to put on a conference with hazardous lighting than more reputable organizers. Everything about that whole space gives off a Fyre Festival vibe, which seems like pretty fair warning about going to an actual event organized by cryptobros.

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It was a rave open to the general public. How many people actually consider the reputation of someone setting up a party or rave. Half the time it IS someone out of their mind on drugs in a condemned warehouse or the middle of the desert .

I think you picked the one avenue where people are wary of the person putting on the event because you are gonna be tripping and need to be in a reasonably safe environment, you will get your hearing destroyed in only a few hours by some idiots who think that turning it up to 11 makes for a better show, and raving is a community of regulars that have collective memory for bad reputation.

It's funny because what you're describing with the warehouse is "the afters" which unbeknownst to someone who isn't a regular has already established a reputation and been vetted by the community because they're all word of mouth.

The point is that lack of reputation likely meant that despite the fact that it was public the usual partygoers weren't there. You typically need either a trusted organizer/venue or a trusted artist and their techs who's done this before and aren't gonna do something stupid.

Wait.. just to be clear are you saying you could get in without owning one?

I heard for years the "benefit you don't understand" is the exclusive club access. Exclusive nightclubs were a specific use case I kept seeing argued. If anyone can walk in it's not that exclusive. Heck people might just be a raver that doesn't care about crypto but showed up to dance.

It seems like the club night/party was open to people who bought tickets for the "Open House" event they ran that day, for about $50 US - https://www.artazine.com/news/apefest-2023-nft-bored-ape-yac...

Hard to be sure though.

I would have mistakenly assumed there are like regulations or common sense preventing blasting people in the eyes with raw UV regardless of the event.

This story is a rude awakening for me that one does have to asses event planners for competence, not only for remote Fyre Festivals but also for regular venues. I hope the attendees recover.

Presumably the same regulations apply here that apply to not stabbing people. Outlawing stupidity surprisingly only has limited effectiveness.

> That's why I think the cryptobro angle is relevant to the story

That's an interesting perspective, and reminds me a bit of the "libertarian paradise" at the end of http://bitsim.beepboopbitcoin.com/ . But the fact that it's framed more as a dunk than as genuine sympathy for those affected reminds me of other anti-crypto reporting like "Line Go Up" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g ). Which makes it really hard to recommend it as a way to break people out.

Given a choice between reporting which mocks crypto victims and reporting which might actually help get people away from the rigged casino, I'd prefer to see articles aiming for the latter.

I would actually tend to agree. I think the organizers deserve all the scorn and dunking in the world, but I'm less comfortable about that framing for those impacted. "Conference organized by the monkey JPG people" should be a major red flag, but it wasn't a red flag for the target audience for probably the same reason "monkey JPG" wasn't in the first place.

Similar to the Fyre Festival, the real villains are the scammers (or idiots, if you're giving them the benefit of the doubt) running the show, not the people who fall victim to the scam. Cryptocurrency and NFTs fall into that category where I think recognizing the BS requires a level of technical knowledge that is unreasonable to expect everyone to have. Dunking on people who don't get the technical argument for why NFTs and the people promoting them are BS does not feel like the way.

NFTs, and even monkey JPG NFTs, are perfectly sensible when viewed as art projects. (Not as finance: financially, monkey JPG NFTs are rather silly.)

And by 'sensible' I mean sensible compared to weird things other people either do for art or spend money on for art. Compare eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_art (and that's far from the most egregious corner).

Arguably Christie's (the auction house) invented the concept of NFT before there were NFTs.

I mean, the value of art may be undervalued by society in general, but paintings that sell for hundreds of millions of dollars is just insane. The art collectors are just using art pieces in the same way crypto folks are using NFTs. The only apparent difference is that there's no physical object for NFTs, but the physical object was never the main value proposition for traditional high value art anyway.

You're absolutely right, but at least there is some underlying art-intended-as-art there. Just as much of the stock market can be viewed the same way but at least there usually is an underlying company with some value behind the stocks. With NFTs there really is nothing there. It's finance without any art component.

You know there's more to NFTs than Bored Apes, right? Look at the stuff Beeple was doing before NFTs hit the mainstream. NFT was about the art before it became a get rich quick thing. Still is if you ignore Yuga Labs and people like them.

I did write that in my other comment. I was just abbreviating here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38172108

Why insane? An asset with a value that can be arbitrarily manipulated in a plausibly deniable fashion is extraordinary useful for money laundering and tax avoidance.

I disagree. They're generally not intended as art or consumed as art. Performance art, modern art, post-modern art, avant-garde art - while not always to everyone's taste - is usually intended in a purely artistic sense. (And in my opinion much of it actually is good. Jackson Pollock was regarded as nonsense or non-art and still is by many but he's one of my favorites, for example.)

NFTs that start themselves as NFTs, like Bored Ape NFTs, are a solely financial product intended to convey status and something to eventually be pawned off to others for a profit. It's a market, not an art community. Not all artists who sell things they make as NFTs necessarily fit this mold, but things like Bored Apes definitely do.

I'm sure there's plenty of art and artists who are very aware of themselves being used as tools in a status game.

See eg https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/apr/14/receipt...

Helping people get out is not the only purpose for media about a thing. Informing people who aren't in it is also legitimate news, and can be important if the people outside need to know what's going on inside so that they don't get taken in in the first place.

That does not require dunking on those who got sucked in.

So this article helped with that? The rave wasn't regulated properly. By the way, NFTs are bad.

I guess it's a reminder that your redditor from yester-decade is now old enough to do that as a professional gig.

Well also it's totally fair to say they should know better than to spend thousands of real money on idiotic computer-generated cartoons. But it's really unexpected that any event would blind the attendees. The first is a pyramid scheme and the second is like a war crime or something. There's zero financial incentive to blind the attendees.

Guess which kind of reporting gets more engagement?

Molly White has made a career out of mocking crypto bros, she'll have a hay day with this one!

https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF

Can confirm. A crypto bro / lawyer invited me to learn to shoot. I hate guns but figured it was a way to spend time with him. The result is I now have noxacusis, a repetitive stress injury of the ear.

At times I've been unable to tolerate everyday noises like talking or faucets. An unstudied condition that's hugely disabling. The other person in my city with this condition lives in a closet 24/7 with earmuffs.

What's his excuse? "I'm a libertarian and I don't like when gun ranges bother me. I just want to get out there and shoot". Dumbfounding.

Not all crypto bros are ignorant and don't know how to use proper hearing protection or firearm safety.

In fact, not all of them are gun nuts or hardcore libertarians. 52 million Americans own crypto, do you really think they're all like that?

“not all men”-ing libertarian crypto bro gun nuts is really a “fourth-level-down in Inception” own goal

Who was the gun nut in your fantasy? All I read was guys shooting and not wearing protection, something any 'gun nut' would know and preach. Seems you are inserting your own, unfounded, bias.

"in my opinion to be way more likely"

I have no data but still, here's my bias.

It is so annoying... ehag do people believe "in my opinion" means? Also: is everything you believe actually based on facts?

If not, by posting your comment just showed a whole bunch of biases that are secretly controlling you.

in customer experience design the user's perception is objective reality.

so it's not "i have no data but here's my bias," it's "anecdote IS the singular of data, not only that, but data doesn't matter: what matters is what happened to me."

i can't imagine going to a movie theater and getting your arm lopped off by a whirling sawblade, but since you have no data on the frequency of it, your anecdote is an inaccurate overgeneralization, and you should not dare to assert that an entity that throws raves that burn and blind people are more likely to jump into trends recklessly with such limited information.

I don't have a spreadsheet handy, but I will say that entities that consider these types of happenings as good investments are trying to embody the "don't miss out on being cool at the cool party" moreso than the "there is no party because we are interested in having a conservative and responsible image to bolster our solid technological foundation" side of the spectrum.

I'll get back to you after I get back from the ayahuasca + squirrel wingsuit base jump retreat my retirement fund manager is holding

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