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> Lots of average Joes saw a superbowl ad, put their money into a large, well-respected exchange that didn’t promise impossible returns, and lost everything! H
by sinity 4y ago
> Lots of average Joes saw a superbowl ad, put their money into a large, well-respected exchange that didn’t promise impossible returns, and lost everything!
Happens in everything. Corporations can fail. Trad-finance institutions can fail. Sovereign currencies can fail.
I still think that beats centralized finance, where I'm barred from investing in, say, startups. Because I'm not ~~rich~~ accredited investor, lol. Ofc that's for my safety, because apparently reducing opportunities of non-rich people is 'protecting' them.
For some bizarre reason one doesn't need to be an 'accredited' to start their own business. I wonder what's the logic here? Government should clearly fix that issue - after all, if investing into sth like OpenAI (for example) is considered risky, then starting your own business is straight up delusional.
> I had a nontechy relative call and ask me how she should go about selling her (literal traditional paint-on-canvas) paintings as NFTs!
What's wrong with that? Is selling physical merchandise bad too? Or digital goods in general? Commissioned digital art? Why is it illegitimate and, say, autographs aren't? Frankly, I find it to be a more elegant system than these other approaches. It would be nice if it caught on someday.
> For a little bit there it seemed like there might be enough momentum for cryptocurrency to become too-big-to-fail before skeptics even had time to object.
How great! "Skeptics" are a bit of a weird name for this. Tech innovation doomers is more fitting, I think. Narratively, I'll admit, you guys are currently on top somehow. VR, Metaverse, AI, whatever Musk ever does... (well, AI doomerism isn't quite universal yet, maybe).
Truly amazing, let's not ever do anything different or new, it's all shit after all.
(also, maybe I'm delusionally optimistic, but I don't think it's quite over yet)
- alephaleph 4y agoMy objection to her minting her art as an NFT was that she was going to lose money on it! She was about to become a bagholder in a market she probably didn’t even realize was a market! The fundamental value of physical artworks is getting something pretty to put on your wall. The fundamental value of a digital commission is the existence of an image that otherwise would not exist. The NFT-theoretic concept of digital ownership isn’t inherently invalid or meaningless, but it’s not something that most regular people were ever going to find valuable, and it was being used as a smokescreen to obscure the fact that most of the value of NFTs came from speculation. That call really soured me on the whole thing because it was firsthand evidence that cryptocurrency boosters were scamming ordinary people by convincing them that they were opening an Etsy store when they were actually buying casino chips.
- majormajor 4y ago> Happens in everything. Corporations can fail. Trad-finance institutions can fail. Sovereign currencies can fail. Corporations can also succeed. Circular perpetual motion machines leveraged against their own bullshit to claim ever-higher valuations while telling folks "you don't need to know about crypto, just give us your money" on TV? That's never gonna work out. It's fundamentally broken. You try to equate crypto skeptisicm with general anti-innovation thinking but... what was the innovation in FTX or Luna or [insert other implosions here]? Seeing hype as innovation is hardly sound thinking. Show me some actual "future of investment" innovation and see if I'm as critical about it. Or any non-fintech innovation for that part. Lots of interesting technological developments happening, they just mostly aren't in the crypto hype bubble.