Treasure Chess, NFTs and How to Opt Out

Nobody believes they're the common man. I'm me I'm special. I'm worthy of being ripped off.

Banks have an obligation to pay out that money to you if you want to withdraw it. If they can't, they may face legal consequences as well as lose credibility and many people will want to take their money and put it in another bank. That number has real power.

Something just being online vs. not... that on its own doesn't make a difference and I don't think anyone claims that it does. If you think someone here has claimed that then you don't understand what an NFT is in the first place. An NFT is not something that has any intrinsic value because it's nothing more than a digital receipt in the form of a little bit of code. You can't do anything with it other than sell it again for some other currency. Since it's not anchored to anything meaningful like actual currency is, the only worth it has is the worth you can convince a potential buyer that it may have in the future.

Now, you may think that there's some kind of value in owning the thing the NFT is attached to, whether that be digital art, a chess game, or something different entirely. That's unfortunately not true, because in the digital world everything is fungible by default. There is only one Mona Lisa but a digital artwork is just a string of ones and zeroes that can be sent all over the internet at a moment's notice and sit on the computer of tens of thousands of people. The token that says who owns the image may be non-fungible, but there are easier and more effective ways to accomplish that, such as the artist revealing who commissioned their work, and watermarking it so it can always be traced back to them. The only reason you might want an NFT instead is because you're interested in trading it rather than in owning it, which once again goes back to having to convince any potential buyers of its future worth, and once again it intrinsically does not have any.

I'm not sure how NFTs work. But I thought people bought art for one or more of several reasons. They have aesthetic value (to the person who owns it). They are unique, and are often displayed as status symbols (like an antique ugly chair that never gets used). 

I don't know if NFTs are unique and non reproducable. I don't know if they have beauty, or can be displayed as status symbols. But maybe they both could be traded for something, although it seems art might be more desirable.

NFTs and cryptocurrency both use the blockchain, that's why. But you can forget about "fun". There's nothing "fun" about NFTs or cryptocurrency. NFTs are a pyramid scheme for the reasons I've explained, and cryptocurrency is by design highly unstable and thus only good for speculation. Both of them have something in common which is that they're zero-sum games where if someone walks away with more, it means someone else walks away with less. And of course this all involves money.

If you wanted "fun" you wouldn't implement a system over which people's lives can so easily get ruined. This isn't "fun", it's exploitative.

Basically:

you enjoy art because you want to own it and be able to look at it.

you enjoy NFTs because you want to be able to sell it to someone else.

At least that’s my take.

I apparently understand it better than you do. As others have pointed out NFTs operate under the "greater fool" principle which is by definition works like a pyramid scheme. You bought in, and now you need other people to buy in for an even higher price to turn a profit. People easily get swept up in the hype around these things and are then easily taken advantage of by veterans of this kind of tactic, leaving them with financial losses that can be hard to recover from.

Besides, NFTs aren't exactly secure (ironically, since they're based on cryptographic technology). Like I said, they contain pieces of code. It's possible for those pieces of code to be malicious and hijack someone's crypto wallet. Since one of the big draws of cryptocurrency is its decentralised nature that means you have no one to appeal to if this happens.

At the same time, the marketplaces for trading NFTs are anything but. And as centralised entities, they are an attractive target for hackers, which use that centralisation in order to affect millions of users at once. And again, the blockchain itself is decentralised, meaning there's no one to appeal to if this happens. The blockchain is, with very few exceptions, immutable. You may get reimbursed for the loss, but that may not mean much to you if you were sitting on those NFTs in the hope they would become worth more later. It's the worst of both worlds.

Then there's also cryptocurrency itself which NFTs are piggybacking on. Because it's not backed by anything (once again because of its decentralised nature) prices are free to fluctuate massively, meaning it's a bad platform to keep money on. If you keep it in a bank it'll depreciate in value slowly over time thanks to inflation, but you won't suddenly lose a huge amount of money unless the entire economy crashes. Keeping your liquid assets in cryptocurrency means that your wealth will increase and decrease on a day-to-day basis. What could buy you a car a month ago may now only be enough to buy a tyre for it. And a month from now, you may regret not waiting with buying that car because then it could get you a car and a half. No person can live like that. You need stable liquid assets or you might not have any left when you need it most.

As a result of all that, all NFTs and cryptocurrency are is a great platform for investors who will speculate on the growing or shrinking of its values in order to make money. If they're clever, they may be able to reliably turn a profit as well. Which means, to get back to what I said before, that someone else has to lose that money. This is inevitably how it turns out. Naïve people who get taken advantage of by veteran investors and conmen, neither of which bring anything of value to the table in making their living. This is what you're advocating for.

And in all this I haven't even begun to address the horrific environmental impact these technologies have.

I'm a programmer who has followed the development of this technology with wary eyes since the start, so let me tell you darling, I know what I'm talking about.

I don't *think* it's a pyramid scheme, but it's definitely a zero-sum game, subject to all kinds of shenanigans by unscrupulous people. NFTs aren't a bad thing, *IF* the buyer understands what he's buying. In many cases, that's not true; People think they're buying something of value, when they really aren't.

Have you watched this video yet? If you haven't, then I can't assume that you know what NFTs are.

NFTs implicitly work like a pyramid scheme for sure. Once you've bought in you're stuck with a bunch of items that have no intrinsic value. As such, to make a profit, it's good to recruit people and convince them to buy into NFTs to keep inflating their price, because if that bubble pops, it means that all this value you've sunk into your NFTs has vanished into thin air.

It's not a coincidence that you see a similar sort of sentiment with cryptobros as you do with hunbots. Both benefit from attracting others to their cause.

Also, while people can definitely spend their money how they want to, NFTs are massively unpopular and for good reasons (some of which I've outlined above). It makes little sense to incorporate them into an existing service except with ulterior motives or out of sheer naivety. If people want to throw away their money I don't have the right to stop them, but I can definitely be rightfully upset with any decision that implicitly or explicitly supports this kind of environment in which people are routinely taken advantage of.

And it's not like the folks who would be minting those NFTs are entirely blameless either. NFTs are extremely damaging to the environment, and by supporting those systems and keeping that ecosystem running and potentially profitable, untold amounts of CO2 are being released into the atmosphere. It's hard to determine exactly how much since the environmental cost of NFTs is mostly indirect due to the way the blockchain works (and thus the claim that it "costs less energy than an email" is technically valid), but I think a reasonable estimate would be an operating cost of 23kg of CO2 per transaction. For comparison, that's about 10x more CO2 than you get from burning a litre of gasoline by driving your car around. In an average car, that'll take you over 6 miles.

Of course people will argue that it's not fair to assign that environmental impact to people participating in the system because they're not usually causing those emissions directly, but by participating and thus supporting this ecosystem, Ethereum will grow, and as a result its emissions will continue to spiral out of control as well. For every person who participates, we all stand to lose something. So yes, while people are free to spend their money as they wish (and investing in NFTs is an extremely questionable fiscal decision), I take issue with the choice to ruin our environment over it.

Yeah, I wouldn't even use the words "investing" and "NFTs" in the same sentence. NFTs are simply speculations (that is, the greater fool game).

He just seems to like denying everything that people say, despite knowing nothing about it. It really isn't uncommon for this troll

If you knew what you were talking about, you wouldn't use the term "invest". It's not an investment, because it doesn't have any inherent value. It's a speculation, pure and simple.

Or so you keep insisting while repeatedly demonstrating your lack of knowledge about the matter.