Blockchain is a hexagon in search of a problem

[erinptah]

There’s been an absolute deluge of Blockchain Space Nonsense news in the past couple of weeks. If you, like me, can’t get enough of it, Web 3 Is Going Just Great is a great source to quench your thirst.

But if not — indulge me for a minute while I sift out some highlights, at least?

Watch on YouTube

 

Everyone and their dog has been sharing this video, but I’ll share it again. It’s good. Not just about NFTs, it covers all kinds of Hot Topics in crypto discourse right now.

I started watching it thinking “I’ve rubbernecked SO MANY terrible details about these already, more than enough to fill a multi-hour video, there’s no way it’ll also have new-to-me info that makes them worse.” Spoiler alert: it had new-to-me info that makes them worse.

“They don’t understand…ANYTHING about the ecosystems they’re trying to disrupt. They only know that these are things that can be conceptualized as valuable.”

The Spice Must…wait what

So a group called “SpiceDAO” pooled a bunch of money in order to buy a rare copy of Jodorosky’s Dune — basically, a long pitch for this guy’s proposed adaptation of Dune. They paid ten times the estimated value at auction, apparently totally convinced that “buying a book” and “buying the adaptation rights” were the same thing.

(A DAO is like a co-op, but to join or vote on anything, you need to buy into the org’s crypto token. These folks also seem to believe “we’re voting on a blockchain!” bypasses any requirements for laws, rules, obligations, paperwork, or, like…basic planning.)

The first half of this Twitch stream has a great time exploring the legal faceplants, but if that doesn’t sound delightful by itself, skip to about 50 minutes in. See, when the DAO was thwarted in their plans to adapt Dune, they commissioned a derivative-but-legally-not-Dune script to film instead. The stream does a Dramatic Reading. Of the whole thing.

I don’t remember the last time I laughed this hard.

“I appreciate the boldness of charting a course utterly unconfined by professional advice or basic subject matter knowledge“

No F@$king Thankses

By mainstream standards, these are not actually popular, it’s just that, right now, they’re loud: “only 400,000 wallets have ever interacted with an NFT, and far less actually own an NFT right now. The FOMO they’re creating to try and scam you out of your money, and the talk about how everyone uses/is abt to use nfts is all an objective lie. It’s all astroturfing.”

A token-trading front-end website called LooksRare turned out to have almost 90% of its trading volume generated by people selling tokens back and forth between their own wallets.

Twitter announced a new “connect your account to an NFT and we’ll make a Special Exclusive hexagon-shaped profile picture out of it” feature. People immediately started dunking on it by uploading pfp images that they cropped into hexagon shape on their own, for free. Here’s made a transparent template to help you nail the exact right type of hexagon, indistinguishable from the Special Exclusive ones.

(…at least, unless you zoom way, way in. Then you might realize it displays as 2 pixels shorter. Shhh.)

In news that will surprise exactly 0% of digital artists, a whopping over-80% of “created free” NFTs on the token-trading front-end website OpenSea get caught as art theft, spam, or other kinds of fraud.

Note: “free” here means “we haven’t actually minted the token yet.” All they did was create an entry on their plain old Web 2.0 product database. It’s not until a token gets purchased that they’ll actually create it (and at this point, somebody has to pay for it). Sites like OpenSea make a point of Actually Touching A Blockchain as little as humanly possible. If you think this might cause some exploitable security problems…congrats, you’ve put more thought into it than any of the people driving this train.

“DeviantArt has issued 80,000 alerts since August 2021, doubling from October to November, then increasing by 300 percent from November to mid-December.”

As of this writing, DeviantArt has caught 3 thefts from my gallery, and I’m sure there’s more to come. To be clear, thieves will steal your art from any website — DA is just the only site that makes the effort of tracking them down for you.

“you claim to place such moral stock in “artists getting paid” yet do not subscribe to my patreon, curious“

Where Do We Crowdfund Now

My impression of what happened in the Kickstarter Management office back in December is just a guess, but it’s looking more and more plausible by the minute.

Their promise of “we’ll totally have actual details about our Mystery Blockchain Project in the next few weeks” has officially been replaced with “there’s not a definitive timeline for details about our Mystery Blockchain Project.”

Not in a public news post or anything, that’s just what Support is telling people who email with questions. (This isn’t the fault of individual Support staffers — they haven’t been given any info either. Kiiiinda seems like the Board is happy to use their staff as human shields, here.)

But, good news:

TopatoCo — which I have been pronouncing wrong all this time, it rhymes with “potato” — launched a beta-testing project for their own crowdfunding system. They’ve been a reliable player in the “fulfillment of webcomic merchandise” field for years; they have the credibility to start a crowdfunding platform from scratch and get the comics community on board.

So does Iron Circus Comix. Which hasn’t gone public with a platform yet, but they’re beta-testing one behind-the-scenes, and are setting up to launch a campaign on it some time in February. Unlike the “white paper in January!” promise, this one I actually trust.

Zoop is a comics-crowdfunding platform that’s been fully functional since mid-2021, it’s just been invite-only…until now. They kicked off 2022 by starting to take project submissions, and they’re actively developing the site to expand their capacity and support even more.

Keep an eye on all three of these! I know I am.