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Salesforce Park's notorious NFT-backed Sho Restaurant goes silent

5 points by Stratoscope 4y ago

duxup 4y ago
Are there any restaurants that have memberships that are just restaurants? Maybe a club with a restaurant but that’s not really the same thing and I don’t think of the restaurant business something that lends itself to limiting … potential customers? Restaurant business seems like a pretty rough business to begin with. $30 million in construction costs and a nebulous membership system just seems like it would make it more difficult.
rchaud 4y ago
> “The restaurant is on public property, so we’re somewhat obligated to keep it accessible to the public,” Sigel lamented. “But the membership component really gives us an opportunity to curate and create experiences, and provide a level of access and service that you just can’t do at scale.” Yet again, the NFT is nothing more than a fig leaf for the business model of exclusivity-as-a-service. If cryptocurrencies are speedrunning monetary economics, NFTs are speedrunning golf club memberships. Hilariously, just as art NFTs are backed by nothing other than a CDN capable of serving PNGs, these restaurant NFTs managed to be sold even without a functioning restaurant underpinning it.
- DANmode 4y ago
  "Speedrunning" keeps coming up in these contexts, and I keep reading it as a positive that these communities are learning their lessons sometimes hundreds of years faster. Systems will always have some of the same hiccups when being adopted by (sometimes unaligned) humans. If, and how quickly, the system can recover, I believe is a major differentiating factor.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    Humans learned from the mistakes of the wildcat bank era of 1800s America by instituting regulations and eventually centralizing under single currency. There was no ideological basis for this, aside from people's desire to use a currency that was widely accepted. The crypto community has LUNA 2.0 token doing the rounds, plus about 10 different currencies using some variant of Elon Musk's name. Nuff said.

5 points by Stratoscope 4y ago

Are there any restaurants that have memberships that are just restaurants? Maybe a club with a restaurant but that’s not really the same thing and I don’t think of the restaurant business something that lends itself to limiting … potential customers? Restaurant business seems like a pretty rough business to begin with. $30 million in construction costs and a nebulous membership system just seems like it would make it more difficult.

rchaud 4y ago

> “The restaurant is on public property, so we’re somewhat obligated to keep it accessible to the public,” Sigel lamented. “But the membership component really gives us an opportunity to curate and create experiences, and provide a level of access and service that you just can’t do at scale.” Yet again, the NFT is nothing more than a fig leaf for the business model of exclusivity-as-a-service. If cryptocurrencies are speedrunning monetary economics, NFTs are speedrunning golf club memberships. Hilariously, just as art NFTs are backed by nothing other than a CDN capable of serving PNGs, these restaurant NFTs managed to be sold even without a functioning restaurant underpinning it.

DANmode 4y ago
"Speedrunning" keeps coming up in these contexts, and I keep reading it as a positive that these communities are learning their lessons sometimes hundreds of years faster. Systems will always have some of the same hiccups when being adopted by (sometimes unaligned) humans. If, and how quickly, the system can recover, I believe is a major differentiating factor.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Humans learned from the mistakes of the wildcat bank era of 1800s America by instituting regulations and eventually centralizing under single currency. There was no ideological basis for this, aside from people's desire to use a currency that was widely accepted. The crypto community has LUNA 2.0 token doing the rounds, plus about 10 different currencies using some variant of Elon Musk's name. Nuff said.