tag > Crypto
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"Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs" is a 2h critical analysis video about NFTs. If the time is to valuable for you to spend on this topic (it should be, go visit a forest instead), here is my short Comment:
In the early 2000s, "P2P" Communities like "BitTorrent" thrived around the vision of making all media and knowledge accessible for everyone for free by removing key barriers and ending (artificial) scarcity. It was a radical departure from the age old philosophy of the dominate power "elites", defined by concepts such as Scarcity, Property, Competition, Surveillance, Policing - and above all, financialization & commercialization of everything.
After years of dirty fights by the "elites" and diverse "middle men" against the P2P, Commons and Open-Source movements, they seemingly have achieved dominance over the narrative once again. The result are things like NFT's, which implement the vision of creating more artificial scarcity by creating more (Intellectual) Property through more technological policing - and above all, more financialization & commercialization of everything. NFT's lead to a plethora of bad outcomes, including opening the (philosophical, cultural) door for all kinds of DRM maximalism nightmares, incl. patents on life.
Members of Hyperledger, indicative of the wider situation Despite the ubiquitous marketing messaging ("Decentralize power!"), unsurprisingly the hidden owners of the Crypto/NFT space are the same criminal gangs and empires of the 0.0001%, that have been running the show for centuries. Never forget rule N.1 of the blockchain: He who owns the biggest (quantum) computer and dominates the (power/fiber) networks, de-facto owns everything.
NFT's represent a massive failure of imagination. In the very moment that creating a post-scarcity, open-source, commons-based economy has become feasible, an entire generation has been enticed to become "wannabe investment bankers" engaged in a giant Ponzi Scheme instead.
More critique of Crypto & NFT's, here, here, here, here, here, here and here
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DRM fetishism (aka "Cryptocurrencies") is what you get when you put Lawyers & Accounts in charge.
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Peak Sillycon Valley: Rich men suggest synthetic wombs should replace women
Perhaps the primary reason the conversation about synthetic wombs is attracting attention is because it was kicked off by a tweet from Tesla CEO and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. He tweeted a concern that we should be worried about population collapse, sharing an article from the BBC about a “jaw-dropping” crash in the global fertility rate.
Sex Robot Fantasies of lonely white men. In response, Sahil Lavingia, founder of digital product trading platform Gumroad, suggested that we should invest in technology that “makes having kids much faster/ easier/ cheaper/ more accessible,” such as “synthetic wombs, etc.” Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin added that women would be able to keep working if synthetic wombs relieved the “high burden of pregnancy.”
#Comment: Somebody please provide hard evidence, that these "people" actually exist and are not "advanced" A.I bots.
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Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future
"There is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to solve it, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast." 💯 👏
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Web3isgoinggreat.com - Web3 is going just great and is definitely not an enormous grift that's pouring lighter fluid on our already-smoldering planet.
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Money is a horrible abstraction of value that detaches people from nature. Digital money worsens it
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web3, as it exists today and appears to be building towards, is actually more centralized than the web it seeks to replace. [...] The problem here is the profit motive: people who are working on web3 generally want to get paid for it, but it's fundamentally harder to extract rent from truly decentralized systems than it is from centralized ones. Because of that, people end up building systems that are centralized at their core, with some aesthetics of decentralization smeared on top, and call it web3.
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Olivier Jutel on Blockchain Imperialism
"For all the rhetoric of blockchain being a stateless technology, we have one government – that of the United States – actively pouring money into Tech Camps and other initiatives, all in order to turn the blockchain into the arch-solution to developmental problems. "
Thinking about crypto and web3, I’m constantly reminded about the ideological battles fought over the big digital platforms and Web 2.0. A decade ago, some of us easily saw through the hype promoted by the likes of Eric Schmidt or Mark Zuckerberg. But the reason why the ideological premises of Web 2.0 were so hard to dismantle was because for every Eric Schmidt, with his commitment to US-led global domination of the planet, there were five Stanford undergraduates who wanted to build an app to feed the hungry children of Africa or teach Syrian refugees how to code or stop violence against women.
Related Stats:
During 2021 Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total, which is comparable to the electrical energy consumed by a country like Argentina. Related CO2 emissions were ~64 Mt; enough to negate the entire global net savings from deploying EVs.
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Why don't you dabble in NFTs yourself? Eno: I’ve been approached several times to ‘make an NFT’. So far nothing has convinced me that there is anything worth making in that arena. ‘Worth making’ for me implies bringing something into existence that adds value to the world, not just to a bank account. If I had primarily wanted to make money I would have had a different career as a different kind of person. I probably wouldn’t have chosen to be an artist. NFTs seem to me just a way for artists to get a little piece of the action from global capitalism, our own cute little version of financialisation. How sweet – now artists can become little capitalist assholes as well.
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Programmable Freedom – Smart Contracts, Blockchain and the Holy Grail of Central Banking
The unification of traditional finance and so-called ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organizations’ propels the evolution of legal abstractions to digital standards. These standards, along with their legal counterparts, form the infrastructure for the large-scale control of society through impact finance, revamped educational credentials, digital health records, fake environmentalism, geo-fencing, smart cities, internet-enabled nanotechnology and all of the other crazy ‘use cases’ such technology makes possible.
Open-air mixed-reality crypto prisons
"Crypto is cover to distract people from the open-air mixed-reality prison roll out. For-profit prison companies are pivoting to social work "continuum of care" pathways. Blockchain ID = permanent records documenting "impact." Hedge funds are giddy."
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Quantum hackers can bring down Bitcoin: expert
Chinese university professor tells Asia Times’ webinar how over $3 trillion in cryptocurrency assets are at unseen risk. [...] If quantum computers capable of hacking your crypto account exist, they are in the hands of governments or large corporations with the resources to build them. If and when such quantum computers are functional, their owners won’t draw attention by stealing from individual bitcoin accounts.
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“The NFT Bay” Shares Multi-Terabyte Archive of ‘Pirated’ NFTs
NFTs are unique blockchain entries through which people can prove that they 'own' something. However, the underlying images can be copied with a single click. This point is illustrated by The NFT Bay which links to a 19.5 Terabyte collection of 'all NFTs' on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. And it comes with an important warning message too.
#Comment: We truly live in a clown world 🤡 - and predicable these digital crypto clowns will soon scream "more police! more surveillance! police my digital fantasies!
Related: Non-fungible tokens (NFT) are Bullshit
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Today in "the fall of western civilization": Bitcoin, Vaccines & other Cartoon Symbolism
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Today in "the fall of western civilization": Comedy cryptocurrencies go mainstream (while the mainstream is quickly becoming irrelevant and bankrupt - a match made in heaven)
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US Congress Taking Revolutionary Steps Towards A Central Bank Digital Currency (Analysis)
The future of money is here; will the Federal Reserve Board be authorized to use distributed ledger technology for the creation, distribution and “recordation” of all the transactions of a Digital Dollar?
Related: Video Analysis of this development
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell reiterated yesterday that the Fed is in the process of evaluating the issue of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) and that it will release a whitepaper on digital currencies “soon.” He had previously announced the whitepaper in July, saying its goal was to begin a major public conversation and lay out the potential benefits and also the potential risks of a CBDC.
