“I’m signing this landscape, and you can own it for a million dollars”

[erinptah]

The tech-hype train has fallen so hard for Large Language Models, it took longer than usual to build up this many crypto links…but they’re still coming.

Lots of lengthier and more-substantial pieces in this batch, too:

March 26: Dan Olsen does a video deep-dive into Decentraland, best summarized as “the developers insist this is the future because blockchain, but all they actually did is reinvent Second Life, except buggier.”

April 19: A follower of an NFT game writes a lengthy reflection on how and why it imploded. The writer actually liked the game, so it’s not just dunking on the concept, it’s a thoughtful dissection of “here’s what the fan community got out of it, and here’s exactly how it went down.”

What really gets me about this one is, the author is really enthusiastic about the “new physics” of digital trading cards using smart contracts. How it “aligns the interests of the game maker with the player”, so there’s no incentive for the game to exploit players with the “unethical” and “addictive gaming mechanic” of selling mystery-content booster packs.

Scroll down a few sections…the game is in financial trouble, the developers need to raise some cash, they do it by holding a special event…where they sell mystery-content NFT booster packs!

It’s just such a stark demonstration of “guess what, you aren’t going to change basic patterns of economic incentives or human nature by putting your game code on a different type of database.”

April 25: Livestreamed Q&A with Bennett Tomlin (Crypto Critics’ Corner), with some fascinating tidbits about his early days as a crypto true-believer. Favorite twist: he applied to one company by writing a paper that did an in-depth consideration of all the potential problems with their token, and they responded that it showed he was “not yet mature enough to be an analyst at this cryptocurrency hedge fund.” (As we all know, if you see any drawbacks in crypto, it’s just because you don’t understand yet!)

May 7: “A recent surge in memecoin popularity has caused Ethereum transaction fees to skyrocket. One trader paid the price, eating a 64 ETH ($118,000) transaction fee just to perform a simple swap of 84 ETH.”

Me, on July 9: “shoutout to #CalvinAndHobbes for having the most spot-on prediction of NFTs”

August 17: “The problem was pervasive enough that it could account for a serious amount of Tether transactions. I’d heard that Chinatown [a compound in southwest Cambodia] alone held as many as 6,000 captive workers like “Vicky Ho.” […] Crypto bros like to claim they were somehow helping the poor. But it seemed none of them had bothered to look into the darker consequences of a technology that allowed for anonymous, untraceable payments.“

(The last one is an excerpt from an upcoming book. Definitely putting it on my to-read list.)

Comments

[lb_lee]

Aw, can't seem to read the Bloomberg article, only the first paragraph or so will load, the rest just never appears, not even a "pay money to read the rest" message.

[erinptah]

Ah! I guess my Firefox avoided that through some combination of the "Bypass Paywalls" and NoScript plugins.

[muccamukk]

It's amazing how many fancy new tech things turn out to just be slavery reskinned.

[erinptah]

I'd say "things that promise incredible results for low costs."

A lot of those are fancy tech things, but the same con can still work if they're not.