I understand the justified criticism of the many dishonest and politically questionable things associated with cryptocurrencies and NFTs. But I don’t remember seeing such a complete dismissal of any tech in this industry before, and I can’t help but feel that’s unjustified
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Sure, there are few use cases, there are many scams, and of course there’s the very questionable energy consumption of the PoW chains. But there are lots of smart folks trying to build legit use cases, using something else than PoW, trying to honestly innovate.
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Many of those orgs are in the same league as your typical ML startup. They may fail, but they’re not all “evil”, and they’re not all stupid. Dismissing everything and everyone uniformly seems just wrong to me.
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Blockchains and smart contracts are technologies with very limited applicability right now. There are good and bad implementations of both platforms and applications. People trying to improve that might succeed, or they might not. (FTR, I’m not one of them.) Time will tell.
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Even the much derided PoW chains have one thing in their favor: They actually work in terms of meeting requirements in terms of not having to trust any single entity, although I’m happy to admit it’s highly questionable whether they do so at a justifiable cost. But they work.
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Admittedly, it’s much easier to just call everyone an idiot or a scammer, and it’s sure going to get you more applause. With some superficial knowledge of how stuff works, you get bonus points for being a socially responsible, critical tech guru, so if that’s your thing …
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The people that are calling these out as scams (Especially @/smdiehl) are trying to save people money, and trying to make a case that we're allocating too many smart people on this.
Worth a read as well, IMO:
1/There are people who are genuinely trying to talk intelligently about cryptocurrencies, but can’t because they don’t have historical background. This thread tries to correct that by suggesting required reading. First, it’s necessary to know what problem it attempts to solve.
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And NFTs in particular have been scorned roundly outside the tech industry as well.
Once you make the connection that NFT -> Burning Electricity for what amounts to a glorified hyperlink, that's easy for non-tech folk outside the hype train to understand that NFTs are hollow.
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And I suspect that NFTs being so hollow, but so hyped, has lead to a lot of reflection over the crypto space as whole.
And we're still in 202X.
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Yes, there is a huge amount of completely legitimate criticism. But e.g. of course an NFT could be useful, iff it actually were created by the owner of some digital good and conveyed actual rights. And it would be good iff it it actually disrupted the current, fucked-up mechanims
Jan 5, 2022 · 9:15 PM UTC