# TTRPGS, Blockchains, and NFTs



## diceexmachina (Feb 12, 2022)

This video from Folding Ideas does a pretty in-depth explanation of the problems with blockchain technologies and why they will never be what the evangelists claim.


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## Yora (Feb 12, 2022)

Yes, NFTs are all one giant pyramid scheme. And like any good pyramid scheme, the actual scammers let a few regular fools get rich as well, to make it look like normal outsiders with no prior knowledge and connections to insiders really can make a lot of money with the whole thing. Buying NFTs is not investment, it's gambling. Gambling that you might be one of the lucky few who actually walks away with a profit instead of the masses who get left with nothing.

The whole NFT business was set up in the first place by known con men who have already been banned from stock speculation. And given with what ordinary speculators do on a normal day, it really takes quite a lot to get banned. This has nothing to do with improving the economic situations of artists. This was planned as a scam from the very start by a group of criminals.


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## Professor Murder (Feb 12, 2022)

While I get and agree with the concerns about the environmental cost of blockchain, putting emphasis on it as the cause for objection feels like an error. The numbers involved are very big and can get very murky for the typical audience. It's the sort of data that people can play around with. See so called "green" crypto and nfts. 

What more sells the danger for me is this: It is all a pyramid scheme. It's selling digital trading cards under the pretense they will appreciate in value because scarcity will convince a future victim to buy it off you at an increased price. They are all scams. What's more, it's the wild west and there is zero regulation to protect customers or the artists who proponents claim this aids. While anecdotal for now, we are seeing increasing reports of IP theft in cypto/nft markets. 

Seeing as I love plenty of things that do known harm, like cholate, it would be hypocritical to say I will abandon an RPG company because they partner with an NFT company or offer them directly. But I don't approve of the practice, would never participate in it or Cryptocurrency, and will never endorse its use.


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## darjr (Feb 12, 2022)

Yea, it's a huge scam. And getting into it supports the scammers especially if you use the services they use.


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## Jd Smith1 (Feb 12, 2022)

Is the power usage really that significant? From what I can see, private data bases of all types pull a tiny fraction of the wattage needed to power street lights.

How are the NFTs going to come into play given a single-tier or at best a double tier system?


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## Morrus (Feb 12, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> Is the power usage really that significant? From what I can see, private data bases of all types pull a tiny fraction of the wattage needed to power street lights.



According to this article, each transaction consumes $100 worth of electricity.









						Every Bitcoin transaction consumes over $100 in electricity
					

Estimates highlight the incredible energy toll of the world's biggest cryptocurrency.




					fortune.com
				




The NYT says bitcoin uses more electricity than some countries do:









						Bitcoin Uses More Electricity Than Many Countries. How Is That Possible? (Published 2021)
					

The most popular cryptocurrency wastes energy by design. Why is that, and could it ever be greener?



					www.nytimes.com


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## 183231bcb (Feb 12, 2022)

Morrus said:


> Other ethical concerns regarding NFTs specifically is that the purchaser of an NFT is not actually purchasing anything, and the value for the digital 'token' they've purchased is speculative. When you buy the NFT of a piece of art (for example) you don't



I hope eventually people will start to apply this concern consistently: there ought to also be a massive backlash to any product with DRM.


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## Dire Bare (Feb 12, 2022)

It's interesting how upset some folks are getting over the so-called "scam" nature of NFTs.

Upset and concern over the environmental impact, I understand. And NFTs are definitely faddish and do seem a ripe area for scams and for those who would take advantage.

But are NFTs, by nature, all scams or pyramid schemes? No.

The basic idea of digital artwork (and digital currency) isn't going to go away. How it is structured will likely evolve, hopefully into something less environmentally impactful and more regulated. NFTs are the beginning of something new.

We have another thread with folks swearing off Chaosium products until they walk back their foray into NFTs mentioned in the OP. I just don't get the upset. I'm not going to be purchasing any NFTs anytime soon, but I don't have a problem with companies like Chaosium or WotC exploring the market. If folks out there want to buy digital artwork and collectibles, I have no problem with companies and artists catering to those demographics.

NFTs . . . faddish, environmentally irresponsible (in their current form), an area where buyers must exercise caveat emptor (buyer beware), an area that could probably use some regulation . . . but not a secret evil plot to disenfranchise artists, consumers, and bring the world one step closer to armageddon.

Of course, if NFTs bother you on a fundamental level, go ahead and boycott Chaosium, and eventually WotC . . . . but I don't think it will have much of an impact on these companies or the burgeoning NFT market.


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## Morrus (Feb 12, 2022)

Dire Bare said:


> If folks out there want to buy digital artwork and collectibles, I have no problem with companies and artists catering to those demographics.



They're not buying digital artwork, though, if I understand the technology correctly.


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## MGibster (Feb 12, 2022)

I feel so out of touch sometimes.  I don't really understand NFTs either and the idea of spending real money on one seems unbelievable to me.  I didn't know Chaosium was getting into the NFT business until I saw a post on Reddit yesterday with people expressing their disapproval by asking for alternative Cthulhu type games.  I'm not going to jump on the NFT wagon mostly because I don't understand it.  But then I felt the same about Bitcoin.  I was listening to the Freakanomics podcast the other day, and if I had spent $112 for 12 bitcoins a little over a decade ago they would be worth $513,000 today.  (Truthfully I would have cashed them out long before today fearing a crash of some kind.)  

I still can't help but look at NFTs and think of the Dutch tulip craze.


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## Dire Bare (Feb 12, 2022)

Morrus said:


> They're not buying digital artwork, though, if I understand the technology correctly.



Like you, I'm not fully versed in the realm of NFTs. But from what I've been reading on the Chaosium offerings, that's basically what it is.

I'm open to being educated, but most of the anti-NFT responses so far seem histrionic, so it's hard for me to take them at face value.

For the Chaosium "Necronomicon" and "Cthulhu Statue" NFTs, (if I understand them correctly) they are not investments expected to appreciate, they are digital artworks to show off to your friends digitally. True, you are technically buying a license, not the artwork itself . . . but that's true of most digital media including music, books, video, and even 3D print-files.


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## Morrus (Feb 12, 2022)

Dire Bare said:


> Like you, I'm not fully versed in the realm of NFTs. But from what I've been reading on the Chaosium offerings, that's basically what it is.
> 
> I'm open to being educated, but most of the anti-NFT responses so far seem histrionic, so it's hard for me to take them at face value.
> 
> For the Chaosium "Necronomicon" and "Cthulhu Statue" NFTs, (if I understand them correctly) they are not investments expected to appreciate, they are digital artworks to show off to your friends digitally. True, you are technically buying a license, not the artwork itself . . . but that's true of most digital media including music, books, video, and even 3D print-files.



NFTs aren't artwork, they're 'tokens' associated with artwork. If you were buying digital artwork, you'd just buy digital artwork. You don't even need to own the artwork to sell the NFT. This video (5 mins or so) explains it:


That's the best, easiest to digest explanation I've found.


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## opacitizen (Feb 12, 2022)

If you don't have time for the 2+ hours long video linked above, watch this one: 

 . 

Buying NFTs don't equal buying digital artworks. They equal buying a position in an arbitrary queue to which position something is linked when you buy the position, but it can be replaced later on, and your position gives you no ownership or anything whatsoever regarding the linked item. It does not become yours or anything. As far as I know, and I'm not a lawyer, and so on. Watch the video.


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## Dire Bare (Feb 12, 2022)

Morrus said:


> NFTs aren't artwork, they're 'tokens' associated with artwork. If you were buying digital artwork, you'd just buy digital artwork. You don't even need to own the artwork to sell the NFT. This video (5 mins or so) explains it:
> 
> 
> That's the best, easiest to digest explanation I've found.



Thanks for the link, but this video also started off overblown, if humorously. I stopped after the nice old guy called us idiots.

Yes, if you are buying an NFT, you are buying a "token" . . . how is that different from buying a license? Honest question.

People have been trying to sell NFTs of art they don't own or have any rights too, you mentioned the tiff on Magic cards in the OP, but is that a part of the model, or individuals taking advantage of the new model that isn't well understood by most?

There are plenty of scams in the analog art world. Is all art, and the sale thereof, a scam? I'm not going to purchase an NFT anytime soon, but neither will I be purchasing high-end art ("worth" thousands to millions) to hang on my physical walls at home.

And to be clear, I'm not advocating for NFTs . . . . I don't see the value in them, I think they're kinda stupid and faddish, and I do think a lot of folks are going to throw money into them and end up unhappy . . . . but declaring the entire industry as scams and pyramid schemes I don't think is accurate or fair, as many detractors are doing.


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## Morrus (Feb 12, 2022)

Dire Bare said:


> Thanks for the link, but this video also started off overblown, if humorously. I stopped after the nice old guy called us idiots.



Well, OK then.


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## Ulfgeir (Feb 12, 2022)

And blockchains, and NFTs are not needed for purchases of digital content in most cases, as far as I can tell.  Only case they would be useful is if the users can then trade the digital content between themselves, and the content is unique, but transfers of ownership could be done through a central database, that your app accessess (and that it then rewokes the licence-code to use the object from the previous user).

Edit: and if the content is NOT unique, or you can not trade it betwen users, then you sure as hell don't need any blockchains.


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## Composer99 (Feb 12, 2022)

NFTs - which my autocorrect tried to change to NUTS, perhaps appropriately? - strike me as the "tech dudebro" equivalent of multilevel marketing rackets - I mean, firms.


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## Malmuria (Feb 12, 2022)

Dire Bare said:


> Yes, if you are buying an NFT, you are buying a "token" . . . how is that different from buying a license? Honest question.



Saw this as an analogy:


> The best analogy I've seen in regards to the real world would be if you went to an art gallery, asked to buy a painting and instead of getting the painting they gave you a receipt that says "I own this" and put a little plaque in the back of their office that says "whoever has this receipt owns this painting". You can't take it home, anybody can come see it at the gallery, and if the gallery burns down, you're out of luck but you "own" it. If you sell or somebody steals your receipt, they "own" it now. The art gallery also goes and burns down a good chunk of rainforest in your name for good measure because of all the wasted energy required on these.




The chaosium Veve nfts take this further in a way, because you can't cash out afaik.  You spend really money to buy their "gem" currency, then can use the gems to purchase artificially-scarce NFTs, like a spider man comic book.  This "item" can now increase in value theoretically, but you cannot cash out; the only thing you can do is trade this item for their fake currency to purchase other NFTs.

fwiw, Veve claims to be 100% carbon neutral, though I think that's just through purchasing offset carbon credits.

There are elements here that are similar to the loot box/microtransaction elements in video games, where game companies make money by selling skins or items (or randomized collections of such items).  Is this predatory?  Does it seek out and exploit "whales" who will spend a lot of money on these items?  Is it harmful for children, who sometimes put their parents in debt over such items?  A lot of people seem to think so.


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## EllisEthel (Feb 12, 2022)

It’s all just nonsense to invent more wealth for the already ridiculously wealthy.


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## Beleriphon (Feb 12, 2022)

Morrus said:


> They're not buying digital artwork, though, if I understand the technology correctly.




You do after a fashion. The the NFT is buying proof of ownership of a specific piece of digital artwork. Just like I can buy a print of a Monet, I can buy a digital proof of owernship of a specific Monet digital print via NFT. All the NFT does is prove I own a specific version of said "digital print". Hell, it doesn't convey copyright, or even a license. The art itself isn't even included in the NFT, it usually includes information about a website. So, with the ethereal nature of the web I can lose all value from an NFT by having a website go offline.

Not directed at Morrus: The reason that it comes across as scammy is becasue I can just right-click the art and I have infinite copies of said art. Unlike my Monet example digital art is functionally reproducible ad infinitum. Monet painted exactly one _San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk_ in 1908. I can go buy a print of that, but it isn't the original. Where as what constitutes the original digital art? The copy on the artist's hard drive, what if they hard dive is lost in a fire but they have an exact duplicate copy online? Unlike the Monet nobody would be any the wiser really since it is an identical duplicate copy of a file.

Blockchain for digital art is kind of dumb, but blockchain for proof of ownership of psychical products can make sense. Look at a deed to property, that is currenlty stored and registered somewhere by a government agency. Blockchain is a similar idea and could be useful in transactions related to real goods such as real estate or car ownership.


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## UngainlyTitan (Feb 12, 2022)

NFT are a scam, may be blockchain can be used for something constructive but from my research nothing current is, in any way anything other then a scam

So the first issue is the *Blockchain.* This effectively is a read only append only ledger. There are no take backsies, if a error is entered into the ledger it cannot be undone. One either forks the blockchain or places a reference to the previous transaction noting it as invalid.
Because it is append only, if there is a high frequency of transactions it will get very large very quickly. Everyone has a copy, so this can rapidly explode in to very large volume of data flowing about the internet with the associated storage and computational costs.

One of the videos I have watched, had the opinion expressed, that bit coin mining is going to become beyond the ability of small miners due to the volumes of data they will need to store.

Now comes the really expensive side of the crypto operation the *verification process*. This usually involves computing a cryptographic value from a a cryptographic algorithm where the computational difficulty of the operation increases as earlier values are computed. These values are the source of coin in the crypto system and the increasing difficulty is deliberate to make the coins scarce.

This where the computation power and electricity costs are exploding to become a genuine environmental problem. (Note: the blockchain itself will eventually become so bloated and unwieldy to become a computational and environmental issue itself but that will take a lot longer.

When enough crypto coin are mined the current pending changes  the the blockchain are appended by vote of the miners. This process between one update and another can take quite some time and is the source of all sorts of fun and games. It is also the source of the crazy gyrations of the fees for buying crypto or NFTs.

Furthermore, if any one actor mines most of the coin they get to decide what is appended to the blockchain,

Now to *NFTs. *they are tokens, think of them like browser tracking tokens, inserted into the blockchain recording ones right to something and telling you where to find it. They are not the thing itself, NFT's do not have the capacity to store much. Many of them are a static url to an image.
Here the problem is that if the original file disappears from the net, well tough luck, your expensive NFT is now pointing to a dead link.

The concept of NFT is one thing and I fail the see why it needs a technology like crypto blockchain. A simple straight forward contract between the supplier of the digital item and the purchaser should do just as well.


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## UngainlyTitan (Feb 12, 2022)

Composer99 said:


> NFTs - which my autocorrect tried to change to NUTS, perhaps appropriately? - strike me as the "tech dudebro" equivalent of multilevel marketing rackets - I mean, firms.



Well, if you watch the folding ideas video, that is exactly what it is.


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## Abstruse (Feb 12, 2022)

The issue inherent with NFTs, cryptocurrency, or blockchain-based technology is that they're confusing by design. The culture surrounding the adoption of these technologies involves multiple buzzwords and in-jokes specifically to confuse outsiders attempting to quickly get an idea of what exactly is going on.

I'd like to second Dan Olson's video linked above (which was also linked in this week's News Digest) which does as decent a job as one can do with only two hours to work with to explain this whole mess. For those who don't have that much time, here's as close as I can get to a simplified explanation.

Note: This is simplified, which is another reason the complexity of the subject is considered an asset by supporters of NFT/crypto/blockchain. There are several details I will brush over or oversimplifications I'll make for the sake of ease of understanding. Which means it is easy to "refute" statements attempting to explain the whole thing by picking out one of those and "correcting" it. This gives the impression that critics of NFTs/cryptocurrency/blockchain don't know what they're talking about. even when they do.

The "blockchain" is a spreadsheet (called a "ledger") that is encrypted and peer-to-peer distributed. That means that anybody can download or host a copy of this spreadsheet because it is not stored in any one specific location. The spreadsheet is broken into "blocks" that contain a link to the previous block in the chain, a timestamp of when the block was last updated, and the transaction data for that block. Once a block is created, it cannot be altered or deleted but must instead be corrected by creating a new block.

Blockchains are frequently used for "cryptocurrency", which is "currency" that only exists within the blockchain. A block within the blockchain will state "Darryl owns 1 Coin" to prove that I own one "coin" of this cryptocurrency hosted on this particular blockchain. Each cryptocurrency therefore has its own blockchain to manage ownership of that cryptocurrency.

If I want to trade my cryptocurrency, it must be updated by creating a new block that references the previous block. So if I want to give my 1 Coin to Morrus in exchange for something, I must create a new block that tells the ledger that says "The coin referenced in Block #12345 has transferred from Darryl to Morrus."

Because the blockchain is encrypted, updates must be made via decrypting the blockchain, making the update, then re-encrypting it and sharing the updated blockchain with other hosts. Those who use their computer systems to perform such updates are rewarded when they complete an update with the cryptocurrency hosted on that blockchain. This process is called "mining". The constant encrypting and decrypting necessary for a blockchain to function means that mining requires a lot of power, both in terms of processing power and in electricity. Because it is decentralized, multiple people can attempt to update the blockchain with new blocks at the same time, and must prove the amount of work they did updating the blockchain ("proof-of-work") in order to claim the reward in cryptocurrency.

As of January 10, 2022, the energy requirement for updating a single transaction on the Ethereum blockchain (the current most popular blockchain and the one most frequently used for NFTs) is 238.22 kilowatt-hours. This is about the same amount of electricity for a single transaction as used by a single household in the United States or Canada uses in an entire week, or around two weeks for Australia, France, Japan, the UK, or Spain. The power used by a single Ethereum transaction is almost double the power required to make 100,000 transactions using a Visa card (148.63 kilowatt-hours per 100,000 transactions or 0.0014863 kilowatt-hours per transaction).

Another model called "proof-of-stake" involves putting up a stake in order to begin work on updating the blockchain and be rewarded for that work. In short, someone mining for cryptocurrency on a proof-of-stake blockchain puts down a deposit of a certain amount of that cryptocurrency for the exclusive right to update the blockchain with a new block. This reduces redundancies in the updating process since only one person is updating the blockchain for a specific block at any one time and the claim is that it will reduce power consumption by 99.9%. The Ethereum blockchain (again, the current most popular blockchain and the one most commonly associated with NFTs) has stated that the blockchain will be moved to a proof-of-stake system in 2019. No, 2020. No, 2021. Wait, no, Q2 2022.

The reason this is moved back is that exchanges (websites that manage the trading of cryptocurrency and NFTs) charge what is known as a "gas price" per transaction, meaning every time you buy or sell cryptocurrency or an NFT, you must pay the exchange in cryptocurrency an amount to make up for the power consumption of that transaction. The gas price can vary based on the demand and the value of the cryptocurrency in question. As of February 11, 2022, the gas price for a single transaction on the Ethereum blockchain was the equivalent of US$77.83. On February 10, 2022, it was US$118.79. If Ethereum moves to a proof-of-stake system, this will also reduce gas prices significantly so the exchanges will not be able to charge as much money per transaction.

Another issue with cryptocurrency is that it itself has no value. Despite the word "currency" in the title, it is not technically a currency. It is a commodity and is traded like a commodity. That means the value of a cryptocurrency is based on the price that is currently being paid for that cryptocurrency. Because cryptocurrency trading is completely unregulated, this means there can be wild fluctuations in the price of a cryptocurrency based on the number of people buying or selling at any given time. So when someone says they have an NFT worth $X, what they mean is that it is valued at $X worth of cryptocurrency. If the value of cryptocurrency goes down, so does the value of the NFT.

Now, I haven't even said what an NFT even is. NFT stands for non-fungible token. "Non-fungible" means an item is unique, ie it cannot be replaced by an identical item. If I buy a poster of a piece of art, it is considered "fungible" because if I lose that poster, I can go buy another identical poster. However, if I go to a convention and get the artist to sign my poster, that poster is now "non-fungible" because that poster is now unique - no other poster was signed by that particular person at that particular time and place with that exact signature.

An NFT is a token that is stored on the blockchain that executes a "contract", or a small piece of computer code. In its common use, the token will represent a proof of sale like a receipt for a digital good. For example, an NFT would say "Darryl owns this post on EN World" and include a link to that post. To create that NFT, I must "mint" it by registering the NFT on the blockchain. This requires paying the gas price for minting the NFT. So every time you see an NFT out there, know that somebody paid somewhere between $50 and $150 to bring it into existence.

Because the blockchain is decentralized and because there are no regulations on the use of the blockchain, anyone can create an NFT saying pretty much anything. If I have an NFT that says "Darryl owns the Big Ben", it means exactly as much as buying a "deed" for Big Ben off of a shady guy on a street corner. There is nothing else other than my receipt proving my ownership because it's not backed up by any authentication saying so, like how with an actual deed to property the government will say "Yes, that person does, in fact, own that property".

Another issue with purchasing NFTs is that they are not hosted on the blockchain. The size of the data stored in the Ethereum blockchain ranges from between 500 GB to 1 TB and that is _just_ for the records of transactions stored on that blockchain. To store all the images, sound files, video files, etc. would cause the size of the entire blockchain to skyrocket into hundreds of TB very quickly. So instead an NFT points to a link of the file instead. 

Going back to the NFT of this post as an example, that NFT would not contain the entire text of this post but instead would only have a link to this post. If I sold that NFT and then later came back to edit the post by replacing all this text here with just the word "butts" (because I still have access to the EN World account that posted it), according to the blockchain, the person I sold it to would not own a detailed-yet-oversimplified explanation of the blockchain but instead a post that just says "butts". If the moderators decide this post violates the Terms of Service and deletes it, that NFT would indicate that the buyer was the proud owner of "404 file not found".

Also, the NFT does not verify that the person who created the NFT owns any rights to the NFT. Buying an NFT of a work also does not mean that you own the copyright to that work. So if I buy an NFT of a piece of digital art, the only thing I actually own is the NFT itself. The artist who created that art still holds the copyright to the art and can go to the hosting company (remember, the image isn't hosted in the blockchain but is just a random link on a hosting site, typically owned by either Amazon or Google) and issue a DMCA takedown request. Once removed, that link in the NFT is now broken.

So there's another scam that is far older than the internet called "wash trading". It is a form of artificially pumping up the value of something (artwork, stocks, etc.) that has been illegal in the United States since the 1920s. The way it works is I have a thing and go to Morrus and say "I'm going to sell you this thing for $100. Then you sell it back to me for $1000. Then I'll sell it to you for $10,000. Then you sell it to me for $100,000. Then I'll give you the $100,000 you paid me back." The end result is the same as where we started - I have the thing and Morrus has $100,000. However, I have a list of transactions that prove that every time I sell that thing, it goes up in value. So I can claim that this thing is currently worth $100,000 since I can prove it sold for that much. I can also prove that the value of the thing increases by ten times every time it is sold. But listen, I'm in dire straights at the moment and need money right this second, so I'm willing to sell it to you for just $50,000. I'm taking a huge loss here since it's worth $100,000 and it grows in value every time it goes up for sale so it'll probably worth $1 million if I auctioned it off right now, but I really need that $50,000 right this second so do you want to buy it?

Pretty much every single time you see headlines of an NFT selling for some absurd amount of money, it is a wash trade. Which, because the blockchain is public record, anyone can go look and see that yes, this NFT sold for $2.5 million worth of Ethereum, but the person who sold it transferred $2.5 million in Ethereum to the person who bought it just the day before. And it might not even be two different people, but one person using two different accounts.

Wash trading is also frequently used in money laundering. By pumping up the value of a thing, I can then "sell" that thing between myself and those I'm working with. So I use the money I earned through the illegal trade of black-market Kinder Eggs to "buy" a thing from a friend, then I sell that thing to a second friend (who then sells it back to the first friend) and, as far as my taxes and any legal records, I can prove that I earned my money by selling that thing and had absolutely nothing to do with smuggling illegal chocolates into the United States. Again, this is far older than NFTs and cryptocurrency (for example, if you ever go on Amazon and see that somebody's selling an out-of-print RPG book for $500, there is speculation that those third-party sellers are using Amazon's used book trade to launder money in exactly this same manner), but it is frequently done via NFTs and cryptocurrency.

Oh, and remember when I said that NFTs are actually little pieces of computer code and are typically used as proof of ownership? Well, they don't _have _to be. In fact, there's a new popular scam where somebody will just give you an NFT. That NFT gets attached to your account. You didn't ask for it or want it, but it's there now. If it's cluttering things up or you think maybe you can sell it, the second you try to transfer it out of your account, the code included in the NFT runs and transfers everything in your account to someone else. If you remember the whole "you stole my apes" thing from a few months back, this is what happened. And it's not just a one-off case so that now people are telling others that if you get a strange NFT and you don't know where it's from, just let it sit there so that it can't steal all your other NFTs and your cryptocurrency. Oh, and if you know anyone who works in information security and want to see what it looks like when they laugh so hard they can't breathe, ask them about this.

One more thing I should point out is that NFTs aren't actually a big thing. As of January 2022, only 400,000 accounts have ever owned an NFT and only 40,000 accounts own about 80% of all NFTs. So this is a niche within a niche within a niche of people who own things that they can "prove" are worth a lot of money and are trying to sell them to other people who aren't aware of how the system works.

And if any of this sounds familiar, it might be because you're thinking of the subprime housing market. Or beanie babies. Or 1990s comic books. Or pogs. Or baseball cards. Or the scheme between Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd at the end of the movie Trading Places. Or the stock market bubble of the 1920s. Or the South Sea Trading Company in England. Or the Dutch Tulip market of the 1600s. ♫♪It's a tale as old as tiiiiime♪♫

Okay, I think that should work as a very basic, oversimplified primer on the blockchain, cryptocurrency, and NFTs. Remember, the reason this crap is so hard to understand is that it's made that way by design because the less you understand, the more you can be lied to and misled. Or maybe it's all fud because I'm a shill with fomo who's ngmi because I didn't btfd.


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## eyeheartawk (Feb 12, 2022)

I'm still waiting for Chaosium to even acknowledge that they even have a huge PR problem out there right now. No official statement yet. I don't think it's going to go away.


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## SAVeira (Feb 12, 2022)

eyeheartawk said:


> I'm still waiting for Chaosium to even acknowledge that they even have a huge PR problem out there right now. No official statement yet. I don't think it's going to go away.



Same.  I still cannot believe that looking at the current climate no one at Chaosium went this is a bad idea, we should not continue as NFT are higher profile and most people dislike the concept.


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## Galandris (Feb 12, 2022)

Professor Murder said:


> What more sells the danger for me is this: It is all a pyramid scheme. It's selling digital trading cards under the pretense they will appreciate in value because scarcity will convince a future victim to buy it off you at an increased price. They are all scams.




Are they? Because being totally virtual doesn't make it a scam. It's a scam if they're sold you as something else, is'nt it? What I haven't seen in text is how nft-sellers are marketing them. If they say "buy this tulip bulb and try to get rich with it by passing it on someone as gullible as you for more money despite having absolutely no intrinsic value (well, actually it could be a pretty flower)" it's not really a scam, even if it won't work for long. How are people duped into buying them?


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## Crusadius (Feb 12, 2022)

Beleriphon said:


> You do after a fashion. The the NFT is buying proof of ownership of a specific piece of digital artwork. Just like I can buy a print of a Monet, I can buy a digital proof of owernship of a specific Monet digital print via NFT. All the NFT does is prove I own a specific version of said "digital print". Hell, it doesn't convey copyright, or even a license. The art itself isn't even included in the NFT, it usually includes information about a website. So, with the ethereal nature of the web I can lose all value from an NFT by having a website go offline.



The stupid thing is that you are buying proof of ownership of a thing, not ownership of the thing itself.

And the thing? You want to show it to someone then the technology they use (usually a web browser) will create a copy of it on their device so they can view it.... so then they have ownership of a copy of the thing without buying an NFT.

That is, NFTs are proof of ownership but not ownership of a thing that can only be displayed/shown to others by creating a copy because of how the internet and web browsers work.


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## Abstruse (Feb 12, 2022)

Galandris said:


> Are they? Because being totally virtual doesn't make it a scam. It's a scam if they're sold you as something else, is'nt it? What I haven't seen in text is how nft-sellers are marketing them. If they say "buy this tulip bulb and try to get rich with it by passing it on someone as gullible as you for more money despite having absolutely no intrinsic value (well, actually it could be a pretty flower)" it's not really a scam, even if it won't work for long. How are people duped into buying them?



Those are two completely different scams. A pyramid scheme is where people who started or bought in early make more money that anyone who buys in later because they sell to the people below them in the pyramid. Which cryptocurrency completely is. Meanwhile, the Dutch Tulip was a speculator bubble (which is typically also a pyramid scheme). People who owned all the NFTs/Mint Condition Youngblood #1/shares in the South Sea Trading Company were the ones selling them. So they made all the money. And the people buying them off of those people made slightly less money. And the people buying off them made slightly less money. Meanwhile, the price goes up and the people who made them originally still have more to sell so they can take advantage of the increased prices. And it keeps going until somebody goes "Hey...wait a minute...why am I paying as much as a house for some tulip bulbs?"

Either way, it's a still scam. Doesn't mean it's illegal (there are a lot of scams that are perfectly legal), but it's still a scam.


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## Crusadius (Feb 12, 2022)

Galandris said:


> Are they? Because being totally virtual doesn't make it a scam. It's a scam if they're sold you as something else, is'nt it? What I haven't seen in text is how nft-sellers are marketing them. If they say "buy this tulip bulb and try to get rich with it by passing it on someone as gullible as you for more money despite having absolutely no intrinsic value (well, actually it could be a pretty flower)" it's not really a scam, even if it won't work for long. How are people duped into buying them?




Fear Of Missing Out, plus selling it as belonging to a club. All it takes is a few people to fall for the scam. And then those who do are desperate to convince others it's not a scam else all their money has gone.


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## Jacqual (Feb 12, 2022)

All I think of regarding NFT's and the Crypto currency "crap" is you get to own something that doesn't actually exist, sure you can buy stuff with it until there is a blackout or whatever else happens to destroy the said value of whatever it is you think you own.


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## Dire Bare (Feb 12, 2022)

Morrus said:


> Well, OK then.



Sorry, didn't mean to sound dismissive . . . I do appreciate the link and your trying to help me get a different perspective.

It just seems the discussion over NFTs is so charged.


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## Abstruse (Feb 12, 2022)

Dire Bare said:


> Sorry, didn't mean to sound dismissive . . . I do appreciate the link and your trying to help me get a different perspective.
> 
> It just seems the discussion over NFTs is so charged.



That's because most people don't know what NFTs are. So you have two people trying to explain what they are, people who are warning people away from a scam that is doing active harm in multiple different ways, and people who have bought into the scam completely and are defensive when anyone offer criticism of it. If you ever hear the term "FUD" is, it's "Fear Uncertainty and Doubt", which is what people involved with NFTs call anyone offering even the most mild criticism of NFTs. It's the cryptobro version of "That's just the fear talking, do it anyway!" So some of them fight back against any criticism with mocking dismissiveness or outright hostility. After getting enough of that, critics get exhausted and begin to associate "I support NFTs" with the abuse and harassment they suffer.

And yes, this is the same tactic used by many online harassers - some of them act like raving jackasses to wear the target down then someone else acts "reasonable" and "just asking questions" in the hopes that the target snaps and responds with the same hostility back, which is then used as further evidence to support the ongoing harassment and gets uninvolved people to join in because "Look at this, they're so angry and mean to somebody who was perfectly polite". It's like good cop bad cop meets sealioning.


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## Dire Bare (Feb 12, 2022)

eyeheartawk said:


> I'm still waiting for Chaosium to even acknowledge that they even have a huge PR problem out there right now. No official statement yet. I don't think it's going to go away.



Keep waiting.

You're upset, so are a few posters here. Likely elsewhere as well. But . . . "_a huge PR problem_"? Okay.


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## Professor Murder (Feb 12, 2022)

Galandris said:


> Are they? Because being totally virtual doesn't make it a scam. It's a scam if they're sold you as something else, is'nt it? What I haven't seen in text is how nft-sellers are marketing them. If they say "buy this tulip bulb and try to get rich with it by passing it on someone as gullible as you for more money despite having absolutely no intrinsic value (well, actually it could be a pretty flower)" it's not really a scam, even if it won't work for long. How are people duped into buying them?



People going into scams thinking they will get the better of it does not make them not scams. Far from it. Confidence swindles are built on the basic foundations of pitching a mark an easy route to generating profit. People thinking they are going in with their eyes open, that they wont be scammed because they will get out in time, that the people they are roping in are not being abused because they don't think they were is irrelevant. It's a scam. I stand by the assessment. I don't trust anyone who thinks otherwise, because either they don't grasp it or they are in on it or as I stated above, they can actually be both because scams work off greed.


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## Dire Bare (Feb 12, 2022)

So far, no one has convinced me that NFTs are inherently scams (_not that it's anyone's responsibility to do so_).

Definitely wild and unregulated, definitely attracting bad actors using the technology to scam others, definitely a fad pulling folks in to spend money unwisely. Probably a bad idea for most artists being solicited by others to get in on the fad . . .

But here's an example of a pair of independent artists who created their own NFTs and saved their home. Is this a scam? Were these two artists scammed (by themselves), are they scamming their patrons? Or are they foolishly engaging in something that will come back to bite them?

CNBC.com - Dastardly Ducks

NFTs can and are being used for evil. Can they also be used for good? Or, just a neutral way to share digital art?


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## Levistus's_Leviathan (Feb 12, 2022)

Dire Bare said:


> Sorry, didn't mean to sound dismissive . . . I do appreciate the link and your trying to help me get a different perspective.
> 
> It just seems the discussion over NFTs is so charged.



The discussion behind any scam is inherently charged. This is the Golden Means fallacy in action (and a bit of supporting sealioning "this side is being perfectly polite, while this one is freaking out, I guess I know which one to support"). If you don't like what anyone has to say about NFTs because they're inherently negative and dramatic about it . . . that's a bit like complaining about people disliking domestic abuse or something else that's common and harmful because the language behind trying to stop it is inherently negative and "dramatic". 

If something is abusive (whether it's a scam or physically abusive), that's going to make people upset. "Why are people so upset" while ignoring all the examples of why they're upset because their language is "charged" is not arguing in good faith and is logically fallacious. If something is a scam, people are going to be upset, while others are going to be claiming that it's a perfectly valid way of making money. That's how the conversation always is. If you don't like how the discussion is being held . . . don't involve yourself in the conversation. 

Right now you're just playing a Devil's Advocate for people that do not need you to support them, where you have no reason to support them, in a circumstance where people have fallen for scams because of the subject matter. 

Again, if you want to learn about why NFTs, cryptocurrency, and blockchain are bad, watch this video. Yes, it's two hours long, yes, it's inherently biased against NFTs (because they're a scam and they explain exactly why they're a scam), and yes, they are upset, but until you do watch this video . . . you should probably stop arguing about NFTs. People have given you the tools to educate yourself on this matter, and you've dismissed them because of their "divisiveness". 

This topic is inherently divisive. If you don't want to participate, fine. However, don't support something that you know next-to-nothing about, and don't dismiss someone's valid criticisms because they're "dramatic". 

Yes, the discussion is "charged" . . . but sometimes that's a valid reaction to the subject matter. This is one of those times.


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## Professor Murder (Feb 12, 2022)

Sorry, but I'm well out of spell slots to take anyone who "just has questions" at face value any more. No time for insincere sea lions.


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## Abstruse (Feb 12, 2022)

Dire Bare said:


> So far, no one has convinced me that NFTs are inherently scams (_not that it's anyone's responsibility to do so_).



I wrote a 2500+ word post explaining it.


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## Dire Bare (Feb 12, 2022)

Abstruse said:


> I wrote a 2500+ word post explaining it.



And it was a good post, with excellent (and hilarious) examples. Honestly, best post in the thread so far.

It convinced me that the tech is wild and unregulated, and a perfect playground for scammers. But it did not convince me that the tech is, by it's nature, a scam. That all NFTs are scams.


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## Dire Bare (Feb 12, 2022)

AcererakTriple6 said:


> The discussion behind any scam is inherently charged. This is the Golden Means fallacy in action (and a bit of supporting sealioning "this side is being perfectly polite, while this one is freaking out, I guess I know which one to support"). If you don't like what anyone has to say about NFTs because they're inherently negative and dramatic about it . . . that's a bit like complaining about people disliking domestic abuse or something else that's common and harmful because the language behind trying to stop it is inherently negative and "dramatic".
> 
> If something is abusive (whether it's a scam or physically abusive), that's going to make people upset. "Why are people so upset" while ignoring all the examples of why they're upset because their language is "charged" is not arguing in good faith and is logically fallacious. If something is a scam, people are going to be upset, while others are going to be claiming that it's a perfectly valid way of making money. That's how the conversation always is. If you don't like how the discussion is being held . . . don't involve yourself in the conversation.
> 
> ...





Professor Murder said:


> Sorry, but I'm well out of spell slots to take anyone who "just has questions" at face value any more. No time for insincere sea lions.



There are some good posts in this thread outlining the problems with NFTs. I'm convinced the tech is problematic and _not-good-for-society_ overall. I'm not convinced that all involved are either scammers or being scammed.

I disagree with many of the posters here. Doesn't mean I'm ignoring them, dismissing/minimizing them, "apologizing" for anyone or anything, or "sealioning". And that's my point. Someone disagrees, they're attacked as sealions. Emotionally charged over-reactions.


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## eyeheartawk (Feb 12, 2022)

Dire Bare said:


> Keep waiting.
> 
> You're upset, so are a few posters here. Likely elsewhere as well. But . . . "_a huge PR problem_"? Okay.



I would suggest taking a look at r/rpg and their recent social media pages these last few days before you dismiss it like that. But if you don't care, that's fine, some of us do.


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## UngainlyTitan (Feb 12, 2022)

Proof of work crypto is a scam because the computational effort to prove the next addition to the block chain trends toward infinity. So at some point the value of the computational effort in energy consumed and in the value returned in using that computational power in some other activity ( like serving cat videos) will exceed the value of the crypto mined. It is a find a bigger fool scam,  because ultimately to realise long term gains one has to cash out into a real currency, one has to cash out at a value greater then you buy in. 
It does, not matter how you buy in, either from direct purchase or by mining. 
I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to imagine the problem that arise from buy in/bid to vote on the content of the next block committed.


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## tenkar (Feb 12, 2022)

NFTs were discussed last night on the Iron Rations Livestream. Rob Conley (Bat in the Attic, Blackmarsh) attempted to explain it to three other gamers (Matt Jackson, JoetheLawyer, and myself).
Rob is good, but I STILL don't understand it all


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## UngainlyTitan (Feb 12, 2022)

tenkar said:


> NFTs were discussed last night on the Iron Rations Livestream. Rob Conley (Bat in the Attic, Blackmarsh) attempted to explain it to three other gamers (Matt Jackson, JoetheLawyer, and myself).
> Rob is good, but I STILL don't understand it all



The Folding Ideas Video, linked on the first page of the thread is very good and @Abstruse has a pretty good summary, better than mine.


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## overgeeked (Feb 12, 2022)

Morrus said:


> While I'm writing this article, I do need to point out that I'm not a great person to do so; my understanding of blockchains, NFTs, cryptocurrencies, and related technologies is very, very limited and my attempts to get a handle on the subject have not been entirely successful. I'm sure more informed people will post in the comments.



As long as you know it's all a scam and an environmental disaster, you know everything there is to know about them.


Morrus said:


> Kickstarter is not the only tabletop roleplaying game adjacent company delving into such technologies. _Call of Cthulhu_ publisher *Chaosium* announced in July 2021 that it was working with an NFT company to bring their Mythos content to a digitally collectible market, with specific plans to sell two different models -- the Necromonicon and a bust of Cthulhu -- from the Cthulhu Mythos; and while things went quiet for a while, last week the company tweeted that 'We have more - lots more -- to drop... when the Stars are Right." A Facebook statement from Chaosium's CEO appeared on Twitter talking more about the decision.



There's a small but growing pushback against Chaosium for this move. Various groups on the socials talking about finding other, adjacent games to play and support instead of CoC & Chaosium. With this and their terrible "open" license and their handling of the Free Cthulhu, Cthulhu Reborn, or whatever it's called now, I think I'm all but done with them anyway. Which is really too bad as they're putting out some great stuff.


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## Abstruse (Feb 12, 2022)

Dire Bare said:


> And it was a good post, with excellent (and hilarious) examples. Honestly, best post in the thread so far.
> 
> It convinced me that the tech is wild and unregulated, and a perfect playground for scammers. But it did not convince me that the tech is, by it's nature, a scam. That all NFTs are scams.



Because there is no legitimate use for them. NFTs have been around for around five years now and there's not a single use for them that's had any sort of legitimate use. There hasn't even been proposed use that isn't a scam, and the vast majority are "new innovations" that companies have been doing for decades already in far more safe, secure, and efficient ways.

The most obvious of these are NFTs in video games. The claim is that you can "prove" ownership of an item in a video game like a magic sword or a special gun or a costume. You would then be able to sell that item to other players of the video game.

Except not only do I already do that right now in Star Wars: The Old Republic, I was doing it over 20 years ago in Ultima Online.

"You can take your NFT game items from one game and take them to a different game!" No, you can't. Because the games use entirely different numerical systems and game engines. What, do you think if you buy an NFT of the USS Enterprise you can just click a button and start flying it over Azeroth launching photon torpedos at Alliance while shouting "It is a good day to die for the horde!"? No. Hell, look at the modding community for Fallout for an example. There are items in Fallout 3 that took modders months if not _years _to figure out how to port into Fallout: New Vegas and those are games _that use the exact same version of the exact same game engine_. So unless you make every single video game made by every single company look and play exactly the same, that's not going to happen. And even if you do, it's _still _not going to happen.

The only thing that NFTs can do that can't already be done with pre-existing technology is scam people. That is why all NFTs are a scam.


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## eyeheartawk (Feb 13, 2022)

overgeeked said:


> There's a small but growing pushback against Chaosium for this move. Various groups on the socials talking about finding other, adjacent games to play and support instead of CoC & Chaosium. With this and their terrible "open" license and their handling of the Free Cthulhu, Cthulhu Reborn, or whatever it's called now, I think I'm all but done with them anyway. Which is really too bad as they're putting out some great stuff.




Yeah that SRD is hot trash. What's this handling of these other games you're referencing? 

I do agree it's a shame, since everything Nu-Chaosium has put out has been top quality.


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## overgeeked (Feb 13, 2022)

eyeheartawk said:


> Yeah that SRD is hot trash. What's this handling of these other games you're referencing?
> 
> I do agree it's a shame, since everything Nu-Chaosium has put out has been top quality.



Someone used the older SRD of BRP and made a free Cthulhu game. Looking it up, it was called Open Cthulhu, now called Cthulhu Reborn, apparently. Chaosium went after them like rabid dogs and got several forums to block their content. It was entirely ugly.


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## eyeheartawk (Feb 13, 2022)

overgeeked said:


> Someone used the older SRD of BRP and made a free Cthulhu game. Looking it up, it was called Open Cthulhu, now called Cthulhu Reborn, apparently. Chaosium went after them like rabid dogs and got several forums to block their content. It was entirely ugly.



BOOOO-UURRRNNSSS


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## overgeeked (Feb 13, 2022)

eyeheartawk said:


> BOOOO-UURRRNNSSS



Sorry, what?


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## Bilharzia (Feb 13, 2022)

Delta Green has been ticking along quite merrily using the Legend OGL, as has OpenQuest and the Jackals RPG. So if anyone wants to publish a BRP-derived-but-not-BRP game, even one using Lovecraft elements, they can do so using the Legend OGL. Now they can also use any parts of the Delta Green game which have been identified as open content. The Legend OGL has been available for at least 10 years now.


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## MGibster (Feb 13, 2022)

Here's another video explaining NFTs.


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## MGibster (Feb 13, 2022)

Hear me out, guys.  How about a Call of Cthulhu modern adventure featuring the King in Yellow NFTs?


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## Umbran (Feb 13, 2022)

Galandris said:


> Are they? Because being totally virtual doesn't make it a scam.






Dire Bare said:


> Like you, I'm not fully versed in the realm of NFTs. But from what I've been reading on the Chaosium offerings, that's basically what it is.




When you buy an NFT, you do not buy the actual artwork.  That's important.  You buy a unique token that is associated with a digital file.  However... the digital file the token refers to is not necessarily unique!

"NFT ledgers claim to provide a public certificate of authenticity or proof of ownership, but the legal rights conveyed by an NFT can be uncertain. *NFTs do not restrict the sharing or copying of the underlying digital files, do not necessarily convey the copyright of the digital files, and do not prevent the creation of NFTs with identical associated files.*"

That bolded bit is why they are a scam.  An artist can create a digital artwork, and sell you an NFT for it.  And you think you have something unique, but they can then sell NFTs for a million other copies of the exact same file.  The only unique thing is the token, not the art it refers to.

Indeed, in the typical form, you buy the NFT, and you don't actually download the associated art - you use the token to access it from some cloud storage somewhere.  And, guess what?  You having the NFT doesn't actually guarantee the file will be there to access, now or in the future!  



Dire Bare said:


> For the Chaosium "Necronomicon" and "Cthulhu Statue" NFTs, (if I understand them correctly) they are not investments expected to appreciate, they are digital artworks to show off to your friends digitally. True, you are technically buying a license, not the artwork itself . . . but that's true of most digital media including music, books, video, and even 3D print-files.




But, dude, you don't need an NFT to do that!  Any time one of us buys a game book on DriveThruRPG, we get a digital file with art in it!


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## Jd Smith1 (Feb 13, 2022)

Jacqual said:


> All I think of regarding NFT's and the Crypto currency "crap" is you get to own something that doesn't actually exist, sure you can buy stuff with it until there is a blackout or whatever else happens to destroy the said value of whatever it is you think you own.



You've just described money: strips of cloth-based material which can currently be exchanged for goods and/or services, but which have no intrinsic value. Money is simply an assumption that the government that issued it will continue to exist and people will continue to accept that it has value.

These days, most currency exists as electronic data as well.


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## Umbran (Feb 13, 2022)

Ulfgeir said:


> And blockchains, and NFTs are not needed for purchases of digital content in most cases, as far as I can tell.  Only case they would be useful is if the users can then trade the digital content between themselves, and the content is unique, but transfers of ownership could be done through a central database, that your app accessess (and that it then rewokes the licence-code to use the object from the previous user).




Well, no. The point of using an NFT, and the blockchain under it, is that it isn't a _central_ database.  It is a _distributed_ database.  The difference being - if there's one central database, then really, your ownership is only as good as your trust of the people who own and control the central database.  Blockchain makes the database public, not subject to any singular owner or controller.  And not just publicly accessible - the database actually exists distributed out among the machines of the various people who use the blockchain.


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## Dire Bare (Feb 13, 2022)

Umbran said:


> But, dude, you don't need an NFT to do that!  Any time one of us buys a game book on DriveThruRPG, we get a digital file with art in it!



Yes. You don't need the NFT tech to sell digital art. I get that.

I think I'll bow out of this discussion. Opinions are set, no one's minds are being changed.


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## Umbran (Feb 13, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> You've just described money: strips of cloth-based material which can currently be exchanged for goods and/or services, but which have no intrinsic value. Money is simply an assumption that the government that issued it will continue to exist and people will continue to accept that it has value.




Sure.  Heck, Emperor Norton issued currency, and it was honored in San Francisco.

The main difference is that folks buying bitcoin are doing so largely in the hopes that it will increase in value, while nobody expects the dollar they get as wages today will be worth notably more a month or a year from now.  

That difference in expectation makes cryptocurrency a speculative investment, rather than a currency.


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## Professor Murder (Feb 13, 2022)

Dire Bare said:


> Yes. You don't need the NFT tech to sell digital art. I get that.
> 
> I think I'll bow out of this discussion. Opinions are set, no one's minds are being changed.



Yes. Opinions are set. That is a thing that happens when people learn things and form opinions. What is visibly disingenuous is a claim that one just wants things explained and claims to have no dog in the race and gets defensive when their claim of having no opinion of their own on the issue is nakedly false. If you had no opinion, why would changing anyone else's matter?


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## EzekielRaiden (Feb 13, 2022)

Dire Bare said:


> CNBC.com - Dastardly Ducks
> 
> NFTs can and are being used for evil. Can they also be used for good? Or, just a neutral way to share digital art?



In the form they currently exist, probably not. Almost certainly not the latter, because NFTs don't "share" anything; they are just ledgers and links with no other internal content. You still need actual data sources (whatever the links point to) in order to share anything. Sort of like how the number "5"--or indeed the entire list of natural numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.--does not by itself _communicate_ anything, you need _other_ structures to indicate actual meaning. (Hence why one proposed means for showing "hey, this is a signal from an intelligent being and not just some random physical phenomenon!" is to give the list of _prime_ numbers up to some value, usually in binary, because long lists of primes are highly unlikely to occur in nature but are easily reproduced by artificial means.)

Let me put the "probably not usable for good in its current state" thing this way: if we went digging into the history of the tulip bulb thing, or the subprime mortgage crisis, or a handful of other things, is it possible for us to find a few cases where the net result was positive for a person or a family? I would say yes; in fact, I would be deeply shocked if genuinely 0 ordinary people came out of the subprime mortgage thing with more than they started with. Even something as utterly awful as the Great Depression almost certainly did actually benefit a small number of ordinary people at least early on, while it was still just a speculative bubble. (The systemic problems caused by the unwise practices of the day were a lot harder to avoid.)

The problem is, NFTs are not yet at the "system of problems that affect everyone who use them" stage. They are at the "rampant unwise practices that can still have positive consequences" stage. That's a big part of why critics are so vocal and so tired of mild-seeming statements about how it "could be used for good" or "isn't inherently a scam" etc. Because that's exactly the justification that has been used, time and time again, rephrased in various ways. "There's no problem with having no minimum wage--no company would be stupid enough to ruin their own future by not paying their workers enough to keep them!" (As our current so-called "labor shortage" shows, that's emphatically not the case.) Or, "Banks can be trusted even if they only keep a small fractional reserve on hand. As long as people don't behave like idiots, nothing will go wrong and we'll be able to do so much more with the money we lend out. Everything will be fine." Or, "Yes, we're giving house loans to people at high risk of default, but it's fine, property always goes up in value no matter what, because there's only finite land and a growing population! We'll always make more money in the end, so a few dud loans won't hurt us." Etc., etc., etc. This process isn't new, isn't even modern.

Again, this does not mean that SOME folks can't dip in their toes, make some (relatively) legitimate money, and leave. That happened with the tulip bulbs, it happened with the Dot Com Bubble, and I'm sure it will happen with whatever the next speculative economic craze will be. Likewise, it does not mean that digital ledgers and verifying claims via (decentralized) cryptographic records is useless or the like. Such tools may prove extremely useful if, for example, we begin to change to a world where most contracts are digital rather than physical, which could support a so-called "paperless society" more easily. (I doubt we'd truly _abandon_ paper, but digital ledgers could certainly reduce the amount we use.)

But in the form NFTs currently take, where their implementation depends on unswerving creator honesty (since your "receipt" only points to a link, which could always be changed), eternal support of (usually) third party hosts (since your "receipt" has a link, not actual data, and link rot is a serious issue), ballooning processing costs (since proof-of-work is excessively wasteful by competing "after" the work is done rather than "before"), and the extreme ease of predatory practices (as others have said, this technology is utterly _sodden_ with unnecessary jargon that makes it easy to misunderstand and easy to "defend" from "inaccurate" criticism)...no, I don't see them being good for the world, I don't even see their good impact being more than a single-digit percent of their overall impact.

The whole point of NFTs is to create scarcity out of things that are inherently not scarce, such as data, in order to extract value from folks who would want that scarce thing. There is a relatively straightforward argument for why that is, of its own merits, at least adjacent to scams: it is inherently saying, "yeah, I know you could breathe boring old _air_ anywhere, but this is Bio-Active* OxyPlus™, guaranteed* to have scientifically-tested** Ener-Fuel Technology™ in every breath, featuring a verified collection of trace gases to Maximize Performance*!! _Breathe Fresh®_ today!"
*These claims not verified by the FDA. Bio-Active OxyPlus™ is not intended to examine, diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any disease. If you suffer one or more hypoxic episodes while using this product, discontinue use immediately and consult a physician. Breatheasy Co. and its parent company, Eudaimonia Enterprises LLC, disclaim any and all liability for your use of this product outside of stipulations in the Safe Handling and Usage Guide, available wherever fine Breatheasy Co. products are sold. Offer not available in Saskatchewan.
**Scientific testing performed by Eudaimonia Laboratories, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Eudaimonia Enterprises LLC. Results published in the Journal of Aerobiological Chemistry, which may be available upon request from FullFlourish Scientific Publishing, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Eudaimonia Enterprises LLC.

Is it possible for a well-meaning person to make money for honest, sincere goals by selling homeopathic products? Yes. Does this make homeopathy anything less than flagrant pseudo-science exploiting the ignorance of others and the ease with which humans fall into fallacious thinking? No. Homeopathic products may help put food on a starving child's plate. Doesn't make them any less dubious, nor provide even the smallest shred of evidence that homeopathy "can be used for good." NFTs, at least in their current form, look a hell of a lot like homeopathy, and not very much like (say) nuclear energy, where there are clearly bad applications but also applications that, while tricky and requiring high responsibility, _can_ be very good IF, and ONLY if, handled with appropriate care and caution.


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## aramis erak (Feb 13, 2022)

Dire Bare said:


> We have another thread with folks swearing off Chaosium products until they walk back their foray into NFTs mentioned in the OP. I just don't get the upset. I'm not going to be purchasing any NFTs anytime soon, but I don't have a problem with companies like Chaosium or WotC exploring the market. If folks out there want to buy digital artwork and collectibles, I have no problem with companies and artists catering to those demographics.



It's really quite simple: the typical RPG consumer expects most of the industry to not engage in toxic behavior. And a large chunk are willing to boycott those engaging in or endorsing toxic behavior. A smaller subset are willing to boycott for mere failure to condemn toxic behavior.

Many consider NFTs an obvious scam. And willfully engaging in scamming is considered toxic by many. (Me included.) How toxic? Varies. Me boycotting WotC is non-significant. Chaoisum? might cost them a few products (KAP 6E core, KAP samurai version). Us all boycotting them?

Most won't boycott WotC - various reasons - and it would take a huge or a very visible boycott to get them to notice. And they're considered pretty evil by many already. And a big enough boycott would trigger HasBro to simplyu shut down D&D as a line.

Chaosium, however... A serious boycott could hurt them. Badly. 

Now, some companies/independents are noted for toxic behavior, or have fans that ignore their toxicity... But most of us want to patronize companies that appear to share our values. Boycotts and emailing campaigns are the best method.


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## Umbran (Feb 13, 2022)

Professor Murder said:


> Yes. Opinions are set. That is a thing that happens when people learn things and form opinions. What is visibly disingenuous is a claim that one just wants things explained and claims to have no dog in the race and gets defensive when their claim of having no opinion of their own on the issue is nakedly false. If you had no opinion, why would changing anyone else's matter?




*Mod Note:*
With the site owner and a moderator active in the thread, making insulting personal insinuations against folks in the discussion was... a remarkably unwise move on your part.

Be better, please.


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## aramis erak (Feb 13, 2022)

EzekielRaiden said:


> But in the form NFTs currently take, where their implementation depends on unswerving creator honesty (since your "receipt" only points to a link, which could always be changed), eternal support of (usually) third party hosts (since your "receipt" has a link, not actual data, and link rot is a serious issue), ballooning processing costs (since proof-of-work is excessively wasteful by competing "after" the work is done rather than "before"), and the extreme ease of predatory practices (as others have said, this technology is utterly _sodden_ with unnecessary jargon that makes it easy to misunderstand and easy to "defend" from "inaccurate" criticism)...no, I don't see them being good for the world, I don't even see their good impact being more than a single-digit percent of their overall impact.



It is quite possible for a blockchain to contain data, not just a ledger; a ledger is, after all, just data. It ups the energy costs, data costs, and requires (essentially) paying for chain storage space. 

Essentially, the first widely adopted blockchain-like data sharing was BitTorrent... which has been sharing pirated IP for a decade+... (and occasionally, legit distribution, especially of large opensource projects.


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## EzekielRaiden (Feb 13, 2022)

aramis erak said:


> It is quite possible for a blockchain to contain data, not just a ledger; a ledger is, after all, just data. It ups the energy costs, data costs, and requires (essentially) paying for chain storage space.
> 
> Essentially, the first widely adopted blockchain-like data sharing was BitTorrent... which has been sharing pirated IP for a decade+... (and occasionally, legit distribution, especially of large opensource projects.



I mean...I did explicitly say "in the form NFTs currently take," as in, it could possibly be done differently, it just isn't right now. But frustrating to be given a "well _actually_..." when I intentionally accounted for such a possible difference of implementation in the future.

Though even that has its serious faults. Because you can't revoke the past chain, only amend it, there are...certain awful things out and about, permanently encoded into certain blocks put there, that cannot be deleted. Objectively vile stuff, which can be tricky to deal with depending on the specific implementation. If noting existing on the ledger can ever be edited or deleted, just amended by later things, then anyone who can trace the chain back to a block containing something legitimately awful can always access that legitimately awful thing, so long as that blockchains keeps operating. And this can have extremely serious legal consequences if those legitimately awful things have laws against their distribution or possession.

Also I'm 99% certain torrents are not blockchain...they don't actually use permanent ledgers, which is the whole point of blockchain. Otherwise ANY peer-to-peer communication is "blockchain," which doesn't seem accurate at all.


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## aramis erak (Feb 13, 2022)

There is one valid use for NFTs: proof of license. DRM.
An NFT is a 3rd party verifiable proof of purchase of digital rights.

The current US legal situation about most IP is summed up in the "first sale" principle: The author is only entitled to profit from the initial sale of licensed IP on a given media. (There are exceptions and interesting caselaw; IANAL, IANYL...) Generally, software is also under the first sale doctrine - the license attaches to the media unless otherwise explicitly licensed; sell the media, and the license goes with.

NFT's, being transactable, 3rd party verifiable, and resistant to tampering, provide a clean answer to the IP licensing. Store title and track checksum, and license, and you can transfer your license to some piece of software... First Sale Doctrine meets DRM...

The problem is that that's still scam-like... because it only works while the chain's severs continue to operate. Most blockchains will NOT be distributed across userbases like BitCoin; they'll be across authentification servers... and should those go down, first sale doctrine be damned, everyone's stuff from the chain is toast.



EzekielRaiden said:


> Also I'm 99% certain torrents are not blockchain...they don't actually use permanent ledgers, which is the whole point of blockchain. Otherwise ANY peer-to-peer communication is "blockchain," which doesn't seem accurate at all.




You missed a word: "-like" 

Blockchain is an evolution from bit torrent. It's a decentralized, peer to peer, ledger and data sharing and distribution. It even has authentication of transactions (checksums by block, file, and torrent). 
What it lacks is prior transaction records and permanence. 

Youtube documentarian Cold Fusion ( Dagogo Altraide) explains the links well.


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## darjr (Feb 13, 2022)

It’s worse than you don’t own anything.

Blockchains, by their very nature, have to be public and copyable. So I could clone a block chain and sell the “rights” ti those tokens to other people. 

This has actually happened multiple times. And will keep happening.

It’s a scam all the way down.


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## Umbran (Feb 13, 2022)

Dire Bare said:


> So far, no one has convinced me that NFTs are inherently scams (_not that it's anyone's responsibility to do so_).




Dire Bare has left the discussion, but I want to take a stab at noting why there's a scam here anyway.

NFTs for digital artwork are a scam simply because they increase the cost to the buyer without adding any value, without informing the buyer of the fact.  

NFT, as a technology, does nothing for digital art that is not handled better, more cheaply, and with less environmental impact than traditional technologies do.  If Chaosium wants to sell digital art, they can do it better without NFTs.  

In addition, among those who do not understand the technology, there is an impression that it being an NFT _adds value to the purchase_, and people are willing to pay more based on this unfounded perception.  Reliance on ignorance to charge the customer more is known as "scamming" the customer.

Now, for the most part, the people who are offering and dealing in NFTs are not actually writing the code for the systems supporting the NFT technology.  They make partnerships, and hire people to set up systems for them.  So, when considering, say, Chaosium, there are two possibilities:

1) They know the NFT doesn't really do anything useful, but the letters mean they can jack up the price of art.  If so, they are scamming.
2) They are ignorant of this, but someone has sold them on how NFTs are great ways to get revenue - and whoever is setting up the technology for them is not telling them of how it is a scam, but taking their money.  In this case, Chaosium is another victim of the scam, being used as a tool by the scammer up the line.


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## Galandris (Feb 13, 2022)

Umbran said:


> When you buy an NFT, you do not buy the actual artwork.  That's important.  You buy a unique token that is associated with a digital file.  However... the digital file the token refers to is not necessarily unique!
> 
> "NFT ledgers claim to provide a public certificate of authenticity or proof of ownership, but the legal rights conveyed by an NFT can be uncertain. *NFTs do not restrict the sharing or copying of the underlying digital files, do not necessarily convey the copyright of the digital files, and do not prevent the creation of NFTs with identical associated files.*"
> 
> That bolded bit is why they are a scam.  An artist can create a digital artwork, and sell you an NFT for it.  And you think you have something unique, but they can then sell NFTs for a million other copies of the exact same file.  The only unique thing is the token, not the art it refers to.




Indeed, if people are made to think they are buying a unique token associated with Mona Lisa, and they just buy one of an infinity of tokens associated with Mona Lisa, this is a scam (exactly as passing a copy of a painting for the original is). If people were informed that they are just buying a token that is related to a copy of Mona Lisa an infinity of which can be created by just, say, copying the file in another folder, then it's stupid to buy it, but wouldn't be a scam anymore than selling 100$ a glass of tap water would be. If I understand correctly, most NFT sellers aren't clear about that (or outright lying about the "scarcity" of the token they create), because if they were clear, nobody would buy NFT in the first place? And some people aren't just buying them as a speculative investment, but because they think they are trading a scarce ressource derived from a unique artwork, that isn't unique at all.

Thank you for making it clearer.


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## Ulfgeir (Feb 13, 2022)

Umbran said:


> Well, no. The point of using an NFT, and the blockchain under it, is that it isn't a _central_ database.  It is a _distributed_ database.  The difference being - if there's one central database, then really, your ownership is only as good as your trust of the people who own and control the central database.  Blockchain makes the database public, not subject to any singular owner or controller.  And not just publicly accessible - the database actually exists distributed out among the machines of the various people who use the blockchain.



I should have bolded the part "in most cases".  In the case here with Chaosium and VeVe, then VeVe certainly did not need to use blockchains, as their "collectables" is only available inside their app if I understand it correctly.  

When we are talking about digital ownership, your ownership is only good as long as the plattform the digital object is hosted on exists and they decide to honor your claims, regardless if they use a centralised database or a a public distributed one.  My opinion is that Blockchains and NFTs in many cases is a solution in search of a problem. And it is a solution that comes with a new set of problems of its own.


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## doctorhook (Feb 13, 2022)

diceexmachina said:


> This video from Folding Ideas does a pretty in-depth explanation of the problems with blockchain technologies and why they will never be what the evangelists claim.



Thanks for the link! I watched the whole thing last night (2+ hours). While I won’t pretend to understand everything discussed—especially in the later half, when my focus was waning—this video did a good job systematically describing the entire blockchain/crypto/NFT environment.

It definitely reinforced my belief that all of this technology is at best a wasteful bubble, and also usually a scam. Any confusion I had due to ignorance of crypto and NFT has been dispelled—there’s nothing worthwhile in these technologies, except for the slight possibility that some individuals might get lucky if they’re willing and able to find a bigger fool to dump their investment upon.

Our guts tell us that none of this seems useful, but most of us don’t really understand it. This video confirms for our heads that our guys were correct: none of this technology is useful.


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## Morrus (Feb 13, 2022)

Galandris said:


> Indeed, if people are made to think they are buying a unique token associated with Mona Lisa, and they just buy one of an infinity of tokens associated with Mona Lisa, this is a scam (exactly as passing a copy of a painting for the original is). If people were informed that they are just buying a token that is related to a copy of Mona Lisa an infinity of which can be created by just, say, copying the file in another folder, then it's stupid to buy it, but wouldn't be a scam anymore than selling 100$ a glass of tap water would be. If I understand correctly, most NFT sellers aren't clear about that (or outright lying about the "scarcity" of the token they create), because if they were clear, nobody would buy NFT in the first place? And some people aren't just buying them as a speculative investment, but because they think they are trading a scarce ressource derived from a unique artwork, that isn't unique at all.
> 
> Thank you for making it clearer.



I think it's important to note that 'scam' is not a legal phrase. What folks mean by this is that largely they feel that the issue is one of ethics, not one of legality. They're not alleging actual fraud.


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## eyeheartawk (Feb 13, 2022)

overgeeked said:


> Sorry, what?


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## eyeheartawk (Feb 13, 2022)

The problem with this implementation, for those following along at home, has not been mitigated by the VeVe corporate babble. 

They are offsetting their carbon impact by buying carbon credits, which is just a way for polluters to escape their actual impact.

They say they are simply cool things to buy and look at, with no way to resell them. Which is true, for now. 

But the underlying problem is that engaging with NFTs, even in this limited form, leads to more minting of NFTs and cryptocurrency, which in turn leads to more environmental damage and even more people left holding the bag at the bottom of the pyramid.


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## Zehnseiter (Feb 13, 2022)

doctorhook said:


> It definitely reinforced my belief that all of this technology is at best a wasteful bubble, and also usually a scam. Any confusion I had due to ignorance of crypto and NFT has been dispelled—there’s nothing worthwhile in these technologies, except for the slight possibility that some individuals might get lucky if they’re willing and able to find a bigger fool to dump their investment upon.




Imho what will kill it at the end is the massive carbon footprint and that it can overload electricity grids. It a matter of time before more countries forbid it it. If I remember correctly so far its Iran, Kosovo and China. More will follow. Especially in countries where green parties are a part of the government. My guess is that the EU will sooner or later regulate or even forbid it. There are already calls for it from politicians in Sweden, Spain, Norway, Germany and Hungary.

So the scam has a time limit.
Can't happen soon enough. I want to buy graphic cards for a normal price again.


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## Dausuul (Feb 13, 2022)

A lot of folks peddling crypto crap are themselves true believers. Others know perfectly well it's garbage. So you could call it a cult or you could call it a scam, depending on who you're talking to.

The one consistent thing is that crypto (including NFTs) has no applications that other technology can't do better, except one: It provides a means for people who have money, but are shut out of conventional banking systems, with a way to conduct online business. Conventional banking systems generally want people with money--it's kind of their thing--so the overwhelming majority of people who meet this description are criminals.


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## sevenbastard (Feb 13, 2022)

The simple question everyone should ask before they make any decision to see if it is the moraly right one is "will this get us closer to getting Spelljammer for 5e"

There is a world were if we all use that model that by 2024 when 6e is released Spelljammer will be it's default setting.


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## Staffan (Feb 13, 2022)

Dausuul said:


> A lot of folks peddling crypto crap are themselves true believers. Others know perfectly well it's garbage. So you could call it a cult or you could call it a scam, depending on who you're talking to.
> 
> The one consistent thing is that crypto (including NFTs) has no applications that other technology can't do better, except one: It provides a means for people who have money, but are shut out of conventional banking systems, with a way to conduct online business. Conventional banking systems generally want people with money--it's kind of their thing--so the overwhelming majority of people who meet this description are criminals.



I read a hypothesis the other day that the rise of weird investments these days (like cryptocurrency and NFTs) is related to the way the current economy strongly benefits those who are already rich. The TL;DR version is that the richest are so flush with cash that the investment opportunities in traditional areas (like the stock market) can't really absorb that sort of money, so instead they go looking for other places to invest.


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## darjr (Feb 13, 2022)

"You can't do anything big so do nothing" is how grass roots movements die.

Send a signal to Chaosium. The RPG sphere will notice. That includes people at WotC who are now in charge of Hasbro.


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## UngainlyTitan (Feb 13, 2022)

Staffan said:


> I read a hypothesis the other day that the rise of weird investments these days (like cryptocurrency and NFTs) is related to the way the current economy strongly benefits those who are already rich. The TL;DR version is that the richest are so flush with cash that the investment opportunities in traditional areas (like the stock market) can't really absorb that sort of money, so instead they go looking for other places to invest.



I think the fact that the rich are so flush with cash and lack of investment opportunities is why we have general high asset prices. But crypto present the ideal conditions for "pump and dump operations". This is a rich mans game, or at least a game for the well capitalised.


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## Umbran (Feb 13, 2022)

Staffan said:


> I read a hypothesis the other day that the rise of weird investments these days (like cryptocurrency and NFTs) is related to the way the current economy strongly benefits those who are already rich. The TL;DR version is that the richest are so flush with cash that the investment opportunities in traditional areas (like the stock market) can't really absorb that sort of money, so instead they go looking for other places to invest.




I find the idea that the stock market can't absorb that kind of money... odd, seeing as most of the money is already in the stock market.  There is no upper limit on the amount of money the stock market can absorb, because there's no cap on the price of stocks.

I expect the NFT phenomenon is driven by the same psychology as the "get rich quick" scheme, but is a legal, and easy to enter.  It is the "lifehack", the "one weird trick", of finances.  It is presented as a way that anyone with money can make money out of the magic of computers.  Since to most people they are new, it feels like getting on the "ground floor", which will of course pay out like Apple stock did if you bought it back in the beginning, before the iPod.


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## Jd Smith1 (Feb 13, 2022)

Staffan said:


> I read a hypothesis the other day that the rise of weird investments these days (like cryptocurrency and NFTs) is related to the way the current economy strongly benefits those who are already rich. The TL;DR version is that the richest are so flush with cash that the investment opportunities in traditional areas (like the stock market) can't really absorb that sort of money, so instead they go looking for other places to invest.



Every economy favors the rich.

But as to the hypothesis, I would say nonsense. The truly wealthy's money is not in speculative areas (things which may or may not increase in value). Their bedrock surety is in a variety of the things that can be counted on: land, blue chip stocks, precious metals, rarities.

The people desperately chasing the high-growth options such as playing the stock market, investing in crypto currencies, and the like, are gambling, pure and simple. And the first, and really only, rule of gambling is that the house never loses.


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## doctorhook (Feb 13, 2022)

Staffan said:


> I read a hypothesis the other day that the rise of weird investments these days (like cryptocurrency and NFTs) is related to the way the current economy strongly benefits those who are already rich. The TL;DR version is that the richest are so flush with cash that the investment opportunities in traditional areas (like the stock market) can't really absorb that sort of money, so instead they go looking for other places to invest.



Yeah Dan Olson makes the same point quite explicitly (in the 2hr video linked in the first comment). Not only is the current situation favouring the already-wealthy, but that it was inevitable and by-design in most crypto designs. He calls crypto a fight between the 5% and the 1%; it’s never truly been for “average” or working class individuals.

Crypto and NFTs are hyped for security, privacy, and democratizing finance… but Olson clearly illustrates how it provides less of all those things than we already have. He points out that most of the problems crypto solves were created by other cryptos, and that they mostly don’t do a damn thing to address underlying issues with the banking and finance industries—it just moves them away from regulators.

Frankly, the whole concept functions as an anarcho-capitalist dream of having an unregulated and unregulatable currency underpinning the economy. (I will make no further political comments about this per the rules, but it’s hard to separate the political motive from that design so I had to mention it. Suffice it to say this technology sounds like a big mistake to me.)


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## THEMNGMNT (Feb 13, 2022)

Money has no inherent value. It's just a social construct. I don't find it strange that some people are now trying to assign a value and build social equity in another imaginary thing.


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## Jd Smith1 (Feb 13, 2022)

eyeheartawk said:


> They are offsetting their carbon impact by buying carbon credits, which is just a way for polluters to escape their actual impact.



Didn't the ruling last week from the Western District of Louisiana put an end to carbon tax issues?

Especially since Trump's bill went down in the same court, and the USSC killed Obama's law.

Side issue, I know, but I was literally just reading about it.


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## Beleriphon (Feb 13, 2022)

Crusadius said:


> The stupid thing is that you are buying proof of ownership of a thing, not ownership of the thing itself.
> 
> And the thing? You want to show it to someone then the technology they use (usually a web browser) will create a copy of it on their device so they can view it.... so then they have ownership of a copy of the thing without buying an NFT.
> 
> That is, NFTs are proof of ownership but not ownership of a thing that can only be displayed/shown to others by creating a copy because of how the internet and web browsers work.




Which is all true, thus why I followed up with Not Direct At Morrus part. NFTs are just dumb, you're buying a receipt to something.

Blockchain in and of itself isn't actually a bad idea. Using it as proof of ownership of say a land deed is very helpful. Assuming it was run by a trustworthy agency, like say the government.


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## Cergorach (Feb 13, 2022)

> Blockchain technology is environmentally damaging and is of limited use.



Then you claim you don't understand the subject matter, if that is the case, maybe do not make claims like the above...

Blockchain technology is not crypto or nft, they both use blockchain technology, but that doesn't make blockchain technology by definition environmentally damaging and of limited use, quite the contrary. The current implementation of the most well known crypto and nfts is environmentally damaging and of limited use.

In the same way that nuclear fission doesn't equal Chernobyl. Nuclear reactors are just one aspect of the nuclear fission technology. If you only look and use Chernobyl as the example of nuclear fission, everyone will see it as 'bad'. But the reality is, that probably this site is power by nuclear power (~16% of power generation in the UK is from nuclear reactors). Is it dangerous? Fnck yeah! But so is crossing the street...

BTC and it's ilk are like Chernobyl reactors, poorly run and poorly implemented systems that are damaging/dangerous, that does not mean that the technology behind it is 'bad', it isn't.

The current issue is that to many parties have a stake on either side of the fence, government/banking want crypto gone asap as it infringes on their classically held power. Everyone making money off or are investing in crypto, don't want to hear anything bad and ignore anything bad and only see their perceived advantages. In the meantime we're having power shortages due to (in part) of crypto mining, in computer land we have a shortage of GPUs because of huge demand from the crypto miners, making the chip shortages an even bigger issue (there's a huge investment in more GPU/ASIC production facilities)...

Keep in mind that the Bitcoin was the first working model of a blockchain and people now value it at ~$800 billion, that's pretty nuts if you think about it... Look folks, this half-baked concept car (pre-1900) we made is now the standard model car we'll forever use! The car industry is worth $3.8 trillion/year. Doing a bit of math, we spend *14 million* times more energy per year making cars then what BTC currently costs in power, that's not even including the driving around and servicing the things... 110 Terrawatts sounds like a LOT, it is a LOT, and it's touted as using more like a small country, like the Netherlands. That might be true, we're tiny, we only have around 18 million people living here, that's like 0.0225% of the world population. I would prefer it if we would stop mining BTC to conserver power, but I would thing that we would save a TON more energy if we stopped producing 91 million cars per year...


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## darjr (Feb 13, 2022)

“Oh hey this bad thing you’re discussing that is on topic for this place? Ignore it because there is another bad thing that isn’t on topic for this place.”

Uh. No.


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## dragoner (Feb 13, 2022)

I think crypto is a rip-off, the whole tulip bubble for this generation, and I think the financial markets prey on people anyways, I mean it has a huge "grey-zone". I'll never use something like this, and give certain companies other activities, maybe it is time for them to go. I mean, honestly, if Cthulhu disappeared tomorrow, it was fun while it lasted, except maybe he could take zombies with him when he goes.


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## doctorhook (Feb 13, 2022)

Cergorach said:
			
		

> Keep in mind that the Bitcoin was the first working model of a blockchain and people now value it at ~$800 billion, that's pretty nuts if you think about it... Look folks, this half-baked concept car (pre-1900) we made is now the standard model car we'll forever use! The car industry is worth $3.8 trillion/year. Doing a bit of math, we spend *14 million* times more energy per year making cars then what BTC currently costs in power, that's not even including the driving around and servicing the things... 110 Terrawatts sounds like a LOT, it is a LOT, and it's touted as using more like a small country, like the Netherlands. That might be true, we're tiny, we only have around 18 million people living here, that's like 0.0225% of the world population. I would prefer it if we would stop mining BTC to conserver power, but I would thing that we would save a TON more energy if we stopped producing 91 million cars per year...



The difference is that cars fulfill a need and have a clear use for most people. Bitcoin only exists as an investment security. It provides no value to its owners, but it costs a lot due “proof of work” by the network (which comes in the form of energy costs and environmental impacts). It has no clear advantages for conducting transactions either—it’s slow and expensive (due to the validation process) and has no mechanism for easy reversals in the case of undoing transactions. It’s too expensive to use Bitcoin once per day for a transaction, much less for the myriad daily purchases some people make. Ethereum makes no improvements upon these except for shuffling the issues around. 

Ultimately the question about these is “why bother?” This is just a worse version of assets that already exist. If you want untraceable currency, start trading gold or Pokémon cards.


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## Abstruse (Feb 13, 2022)

Staffan said:


> I read a hypothesis the other day that the rise of weird investments these days (like cryptocurrency and NFTs) is related to the way the current economy strongly benefits those who are already rich. The TL;DR version is that the richest are so flush with cash that the investment opportunities in traditional areas (like the stock market) can't really absorb that sort of money, so instead they go looking for other places to invest.



So this is complicated and it's a topic I don't claim to fully understand myself, so grain of salt on this explanation...but what's going on right now is that federal interest rates are 0%. That means that the traditional places to keep your money aren't good values. When the interest rate was higher than zero, you could put your extra money in government bonds or CDs or savings accounts and, in a decade or two, you'd get back that much money plus a lot more from the compounding of the interest. With rates at 0%, there's no incentive to do that. However much money you put in is how much you get out, which makes it a bad investment because natural inflation is going to mean you technically get back _less _than you put in.

So the wealthy are looking for other places to park their money. And to be clear, we're talking about their extra money after they buy their fifth vacation mansion and the yacht so big it has a pool with its own, smaller yacht. If you've seen the memes online of "If Insert Billionaire Here spent Insert Really High Dollar Amount Here a day every single day since Insert Historical Event Here, he'd still be a billionaire", we're talking about all that extra money. This is the money that they don't care if it grows and don't need to spend it on anything, it's money they want to sit there and not do anything dangerous and just slowly grow over time.

Now with interest rates at 0%, the most obvious place to put that money is the stock market. Except some companies have started doing really weird things that make this not a good idea. I mean the stock market is always volatile, but there are some stocks that are considered good long-term investments. You don't hear a lot about them because the day-trader types and the media that caters to them don't care about "constantly performs to expectations nothing more nothing less", they want the high-risk high-reward stuff. But even THOSE stocks have had problems as one considered a venerable "solid investment" was AT&T. Which decided "The telecom interesting is boring, let's be the new Netflix instead!" then bought a bunch of media companies including HBO and had no idea what to do with them because, well, they're a telecom company not a media production company. Because of their buying spree, they're not seen as a solid investment anymore. Everybody needs a phone and phone service, but not everybody wants to go see Insert DC Movie You Personally Dislike Here so when it flops, it affects stock prices. This means a lot of people who have a lot of money to park are now side-eyeing all these companies that used to be solid investments in case they might decide to do something to get exponential growth that then might blow up in their faces.

And that's when they start looking for other places to park their money. Real estate, art auctions, commodities like gold or silver, stuff like that. They're buying stuff that has no real value for them just because it's worth money. They buy entire highrise buildings and don't lease them out because they don't care about being landlords, they just want to park their money somewhere. They buy gold and silver and platinum and just let it sit in vaults because they don't want to sell it to jewelers or electronic companies that need it to make stuff. They don't even look at the art they buy, they just buy it then "lend" it to galleries with massive insurance policies on them in case some bored security guard decides to draw googly eyes on their $1 million piggy bank (yes, that happened).

So what if you could buy something that has a high value that won't take up any space and doesn't need to be managed? Well then let me tell you about NFTs! Then they give a spiel that sounds like a late-night commercial for Colombo Collectible Plates. "The value will only go up!" When you're a billionaire, investing $50 million in something that might or might not be a stable investment isn't a big deal, but it's a HUGE deal for people who need $50 million in capital for their pyramid scheme.

And to play both sides, the same people selling NFTs as solid, non-volatile investments are also selling businesses on NFTs as the "next big thing" they don't want to miss out on, talking up all the huge gains and sewing fear of missing out in executives trained for business who don't understand technology whatsoever but are in charge of massive tech companies. "This is the new trend so we must follow it or we'll be left behind!" because tech companies are on the other end of the investing spectrum from those other stocks because their entire ecosystem is based on constant quarter-over-quarter growth. So these companies rise fast and fall fast and there's a constant fear among the executives they're standing on crumbling ground so they _have _to move onto the next big thing before it's the next big thing. And right now, they're being sold that NFTs are the next big thing.

If you want to know how all this is based around the federal interest rate, the current tanking of crypto prices coincided with a drop in the stock market, both of which came on reports that the FOMC was _considering _raising the federal interest rate. Not they'd done it, not that they decided to do it, but just _even them just thinking about maybe doing it _was enough to cause a crash. Because it means all these rich people can buy bonds and CDs and the like again instead of putting their money in stocks and commodities and everybody who lives on that volatility wants to cash out before everyone else can cash out and tank all the prices.

So yeah, the TL;DR: Saving bonds suck now, so all the rich people are buying anything they can that might be valuable instead because they have too much money and not enough to spend it on.


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## J.Quondam (Feb 13, 2022)

Sometimes I really hate being stuck in this timeline.


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## Snarf Zagyg (Feb 13, 2022)

J.Quondam said:


> Sometimes I really hate being stuck in this timeline.




Coming on to Enworld and learning that there is a TTRPG maker that is interested in NFTs...


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## Staffan (Feb 13, 2022)

Abstruse said:


> So this is complicated and it's a topic I don't claim to fully understand myself, so grain of salt on this explanation



Thank you. That was a far more cogent explanation than my own vague recollection of twitter and blog posts that sounded like they knew what they were talking about.


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## darjr (Feb 13, 2022)




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## cthulhureborn (Feb 13, 2022)

overgeeked said:


> Someone used the older SRD of BRP and made a free Cthulhu game. Looking it up, it was called Open Cthulhu, now called Cthulhu Reborn, apparently. Chaosium went after them like rabid dogs and got several forums to block their content. It was entirely ugly.




Hi, I'm the publisher of Cthulhu Reborn .... just wanted to point out one small thing. We are separate from the group of fine folks who created Open Cthulhu. Yes, we wrote a bunch at the time about that system (and Chaosium's reaction to it) on our blog, but the Open Cthulhu SRD was someone else's creation.

Since then, however, we HAVE taken the lessons from that whole debacle and created some all new SRDs which go under the name Cthulhu Eternal. These navigate the intricacies of D100 OGL inheritance in a different way than Open Cthulhu. FWIW the excellent German folks who created the FHTAGN RPG last year did exactly the same (via the same pathway as us).

That minor point aside ... we are in violent agreement with the general anti-NFT stance voiced by many people in this thread. We wouldn't touch them (not even with a large bhole).


Dean (from Cthulhu Reborn)


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## overgeeked (Feb 13, 2022)

cthulhureborn said:


> Hi, I'm the publisher of Cthulhu Reborn .... just wanted to point out one small thing. We are separate from the group of fine folks who created Open Cthulhu. Yes, we wrote a bunch at the time about that system (and Chaosium's reaction to it) on our blog, but the Open Cthulhu SRD was someone else's creation.
> 
> Since then, however, we HAVE taken the lessons from that whole debacle and created some all new SRDs which go under the name Cthulhu Eternal. These navigate the intricacies of D100 OGL inheritance in a different way than Open Cthulhu. FWIW the excellent German folks who created the FHTAGN RPG last year did exactly the same (via the same pathway as us).
> 
> ...



I appreciate the correction. Thank you.


----------



## Abstruse (Feb 14, 2022)

Okay, so this popped up on my Twitter feed from Dan Olson (the guy who made the video linked way at the start of the thread) in reference to a DAO minting NFTs based on Magic: The Gathering cards:


The image is from their mission statement:





This is absolutely hilarious, but requires a bit of knowledge to understand why.

A DAO which stands for "Decentralized Autonomous Organization" and is hard to describe but it's basically a way to pool cryptocurrency together into a single account like contributing to a pot for a single goal, the most famous was the recent purchase of a copy of the filming bible for Darren Aronofsky's cancelled adaptation of Dune. Then said, because they bought the book, they were going to sell scans of the book as NFTs and make their own movie based on Dune not understanding that buying a book, no matter how rare, does not give you the copyright of the book. Like just because I have a first printing of Deities & Demigods on my shelf doesn't mean that I now own Dungeons & Dragons.

So this DAO wants to "bring the concept of sound money to the Magic economy--" because every game store on the planet doesn't exist apparently "--so players can trust the scarcity of their investments." It's a _collectible card game_. The cards are _already scarce_. There was an auction last year for an Alpha Black Lotus that sold for over $500,000 and people are _constantly _complaining about the Reserve List. This isn't even a solution looking for a problem, this is a solution looking for a problem that already has a solution.

But my favorite line is this one:



> In the long run, I think there's a chance we can buy the Magic brand from Wizards of the Coast.



This was posted _the same week_ that Hasbro released its annual financial report showing that Wizards of the Coast made up 72% of the company's operating profit. And these guys think they're just going to _buy Magic: The Gathering_. I'm not saying it's impossible for Hasbro to sell M:TG. Highly unlikely since it's propping up the company right now, but possible. But it would cost _tens of billions of dollars _because you'd not only be buying what the brand is worth right now but all future profits the brand would generate. And when you're talking hundreds of millions in profits a year, that's a lot of future profit you're trying to buy off them. Oh, and Hasbro would want real-world actually-existing dollars, not "this public ledger says I own a bunch of these digital tokens that are worth real money because I and a couple thousand other people say so." Normally my go-to analogy for buying and selling real-world items using cryptocurrency is "Imagine trying to pay for your tab in a restaurant using Magic: The Gathering cards, then having to explain to the disinterested waiter what Magic: The Gathering is and how the cards are totally worth more than the bill", but that doesn't work because it's the company that makes Magic: The Gathering cards!


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## darjr (Feb 14, 2022)

Those DAO folks?

Wow! Scam, all the way down.

I dunno if those folks were delusional, just didn't know, or where lying through their teeth to prop up "value".

which is the one of the central problems with dealing with many of these folks.


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## Charwoman Gene (Feb 14, 2022)

Dire Bare said:


> And it was a good post, with excellent (and hilarious) examples. Honestly, best post in the thread so far.
> 
> It convinced me that the tech is wild and unregulated, and a perfect playground for scammers. But it did not convince me that the tech is, by it's nature, a scam. That all NFTs are scams.



Of course, the US dollar and all other currencies in use, including metal based ones like gold are scams too.


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## Mistwell (Feb 14, 2022)

"Blockchain technology is environmentally damaging and is of limited use... my understanding of blockchains, NFTs, cryptocurrencies, and related technologies is very, very limited."

OK, fair enough that you feel you don't understand the topic well. So why start with a purely opinion-based comment that they are of limited use? You literally can't know if their uses are limited or not if you have a very limited understanding of the topic.

When the personal computer came out, a lot of people (most of them old white people in suits) said they wouldn't last and were a fad. They said people wouldn't buy them and they were overpriced calculators with such limited memory they would be nothing more than a toy. Their entire argument was, "It's of limited use." There was even a lot of "computers use too much electricity and are bad for the environment."

Same thing happened with video games.

Same thing happened with the internet.

Same thing happened with the world wide web.

Same thing happened with online shopping.

Same thing happened with social media.

It's become super trendy lately for people who don't know much about crypto currencies and related topics to bash them and then pat each other on for also bashing them. I see a lot of "hur hur hur, Crypto is a scam, amIrightoramIright?"

You guys are likely the old white dudes (not in suits) complaining about those young kids and their rock music of this era. Twenty years from now, your kids will look back on these kinds of comments and laugh about it, while a huge portion of the economy runs on crypto currencies.

It's not ever going away and it will continue to grow at an extraordinary rate. You don't have to adapt to changes in society, but at least take a moment to acknowledge the possibility that "I don't fully understand this new thing" might be a sign you probably shouldn't be judging it as a fad or a scam.


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## Abstruse (Feb 14, 2022)

Mistwell said:


> It's become super trendy lately for people who don't know much about crypto currencies and related topics to bash them and then pat each other on for also bashing them. I see a lot of "hur hur hur, Crypto is a scam, amIrightoramIright?"



I wrote a 2500+ word post explaining the technology step-by-step. I understand cryptocurrency, the blockchain, and NFTs.

It's a scam. All of it.


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## Abstruse (Feb 14, 2022)

Charwoman Gene said:


> Of course, the US dollar and all other currencies in use, including metal based ones like gold are scams too.



This is a common argument in favor of crypto that doesn't work for many reasons.

1) Cryptocurrency is not a currency. It is a commodity. It has value solely on the word of other people saying it has value. Gold, silver, and platinum have value because they are metals that are easy to work with that do not corrode or rust and are good conductors of electricity. Through most of human history, those metals have been effectively worthless except for their use as currency, but following the industrial and technological revolutions of society in the last century, that is no longer the case. Those metals have practical value and use.

2) The Dollar (and the Euro and the Yen and so on) are fiat currencies, which means they are not backed up by the value of a commodity. One pound-sterling is no longer worth a certain amount of gold or silver. However, that does not mean they are valueless because they are backed by the country that issues the currency. The US dollar will have value so long as the US remains a country, and will retain value so long as other countries continue to trade with the US. Cryptocurrency, as I said above, is not even a fiat currency. It is a fiat commodity. Actually, I'm not even sure if that's true because "fiat" requires a consensus that the item has value due to its use as a medium of exchange and there's no consensus that cryptocurrency has even that value - it only has value because a small niche says it has value and only among those in that group agree.

3) "This system we have in place now has problems!" is only an indictment of that system. It is not a defense of a separate system. Especially when that new system has all of the exact same problems and a whole host of new problems. It would be like saying "Insurance companies are exploitative! I have a solution, give everybody cyanide they can take when they get sick! What, are you against poisoning people? What are you, a shill for Big Pharma?!"

And that's just for a start. I'd keep going, but I've written enough huge posts for this thread as it is.


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## Mistwell (Feb 14, 2022)

Abstruse said:


> I wrote a 2500+ word post explaining the technology step-by-step. I understand cryptocurrency, the blockchain, and NFTs.
> 
> It's a scam. All of it.



OK. And if, in 20 years, it's still here and ubiquitous, then what? There were entire interviews with higher-ups at IBM who said the personal computer was never going to go beyond a toy. There were huge articles about the web claiming it was useless in computer magazines. Don't you even pause for a moment to consider even the slightest possibility you're them?


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## doctorhook (Feb 14, 2022)

Mistwell said:
			
		

> "Blockchain technology is environmentally damaging and is of limited use... my understanding of blockchains, NFTs, cryptocurrencies, and related technologies is very, very limited."
> 
> OK, fair enough that you feel you don't understand the topic well. So why start with a purely opinion-based comment that they are of limited use? You literally can't know if their uses are limited or not if you don't have a very limited understanding of the topic.
> 
> ...



All of the nascent industries you mentioned offered some value to adopters. Crypto and NFTs don’t _do_ anything except exist to be traded. NFTs aren’t even the art they claim to be—it’s just a holder for a link to an image, which can still be unhosted or swapped for another image on the hosting server, meaning the person buying the NFT hasn’t bought anything at all.

Blockchain might have some uses, but crypto and NFT are dead ends.


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## Abstruse (Feb 14, 2022)

BTW, anytime you see someone trying to dodge criticism of cryptocurrency by saying "You just don't understand! It'll be around forever! You sound like an old person angry at the kids these days!", mentally replace every time they say "cryptocurrency" with "pogs" or "beanie babies" or "double polybagged and boarded mint condition copy of Youngblood #1/2". Then remember at least with those, you actually got the pog or beanie baby and not a digital receipt saying you own a comic book or pog or a beanie baby.


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## Mistwell (Feb 14, 2022)

doctorhook said:


> All of the nascent industries you mentioned offered some value to adopters. Crypto and NFTs don’t _do_ anything except exist to be traded. NFTs aren’t even the art they claim to be—it’s just a holder for a link to an image, which can still be unhosted or swapped for another image on the hosting server, meaning the person buying the NFT hasn’t bought anything at all.
> 
> Blockchain might have some uses, but crypto and NFT are dead ends.



They DO offer lots to people. Maybe not you. And I really don't want to get into the debate as to whether something I and many other value should have value to you. You don't have to value it. Heck, I have a couple of friends who place zero value on social media platforms and message boards. I am not going to try to convince them that social media and message boards have value - they just accept it has value to me and I accept it does not have value to them.

But there is a meaningful difference between "This thing has no value to me," and "This thing has no value to anyone." The later is false. It has value to many people. The number of people who consider it valuable increases every day. The number of people who think it has no value to them decreases every day. That trend doesn't appear to be changing, and its been going on for many years now.


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## Mistwell (Feb 14, 2022)

Abstruse said:


> BTW, anytime you see someone trying to dodge criticism of cryptocurrency by saying "You just don't understand! It'll be around forever! You sound like an old person angry at the kids these days!", mentally replace every time they say "cryptocurrency" with "pogs" or "beanie babies" or "double polybagged and boarded mint condition copy of Youngblood #1/2". Then remember at least with those, you actually got the pog or beanie baby and not a digital receipt saying you own a comic book or pog or a beanie baby.



The original poster, the person who wrote the article which starts this thread, SAID THEY DON'T UNDERSTAND IT VERY WELL. Which is why I directly quoted them and responded to them directly about that statement. And now you're trying to spin that as me manufacturing that claim?

It's been 14 years now of a world with crypto, and it hasn't peaked, is the major advertisements during the Super Bowl and major permanent sports arenas are being named over it. A single type of crypto is currently worth over a trillion dollars. How many years and how much impact on society does it take before you consider it more than pogs?


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## Abstruse (Feb 14, 2022)

Mistwell said:


> The original poster, the person who wrote the article which starts this thread, SAID THEY DON'T UNDERSTAND IT VERY WELL. Which is why I directly quoted them and responded to them directly about that statement. And now you're trying to spin that as me manufacturing that claim?
> 
> It's been 14 years now of a world with crypto, and it hasn't peaked. How many years before you consider it more than pogs?



Yes, Morrus stated he doesn't understand cryptocurrency. I have offered to explain it to him many times. He understands "This is all nonsense and I want nothing to do with it". That's all he needs to know, so like most people, he doesn't care to look into it more. He runs a news site so has to report on the news and, as an editor, knows he has reporters like me who have done the research he can lean on if necessary.

I also notice that in none of your posts, you have not refuted a single criticism anyone has made of cryptocurrency, the blockchain, or NFTs. All you've done is insult us and dismiss us as old people who just don't get it.

Wait, sorry, that's not entirely true. You said



> But there is a meaningful difference between "This thing has no value to me," and "This thing has no value to anyone." The later is false. It has value to many people.



As of January 2022, only 400,000 cryptocurrency wallets (the accounts online that hold assets on the blockchain) have ever held an NFT, and 80% of all NFTs are held by only 40,000 wallets. That is a very, very small minority. To put that in perspective, more people own copies of Sonic Boom for the Nintendo WiiU than own NFTs. So no, this is not the "next big thing".


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## aramis erak (Feb 14, 2022)

darjr said:


> Those DAO folks?
> 
> Wow! Scam, all the way down.
> 
> ...



A lot depends upon how they set it up. If they do an escrow account with refund on fail, it might not end as a scam.

HasBro isn't a non-profit, nor a public benefit corporation (PBC), so they have to take the highest financial benefit to individual shareholders as the bar. A combined boycott & purchase offer at a credible offer... HasBro would legally be required to either accept it or put it to the board.

The amount needed, however, would be much easier achieved by creating a PBC which is dedicated to buying up HasBro stock so as to effect changing HasBro to a PBC focused upon the gaming industry.

Note that PBCs are a bit of a problem in the US, as many states don't actually differentiate them from for-profits.  At present, it looks like 37 states have enacted enabling legislation, and the feds make no distinction. Canada makes no federal distinction and only BC does at a territorial level.
WotC is registered in Washington, which lacks a benefit corporation option.


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## Athiev (Feb 14, 2022)

Dire Bare said:


> Yes, if you are buying an NFT, you are buying a "token" . . . how is that different from buying a license? Honest question.




An important difference is that an NFT doesn't automatically include a license. The terms of use of OpenSea, the main NFT marketplace, make clear that NFTs convey no rights beyond fair use unless there is an explicit contract alongside the NFT. Most NFTs don't have that, which means most NFTs convey more or less the same package of rights to a piece of media that everyone else on Earth has.


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## Abstruse (Feb 14, 2022)

aramis erak said:


> HasBro isn't a non-profit, nor a public benefit corporation (PBC), so they have to take the highest financial benefit to individual shareholders as the bar. A combined boycott & purchase offer at a credible offer... HasBro would legally be required to either accept it or put it to the board.
> 
> The amount needed, however, would be much easier achieved by creating a PBC which is dedicated to buying up HasBro stock so as to effect changing HasBro to a PBC focused upon the gaming industry.



That's not entirely true. Corporations do not have to take what is the "highest financial benefit", they are just beholden to shareholders who can recall them from the Board of Directors if they believe actions taken will damage the company.

And even _if _that were true, I'd also like to remind you that Wizards of the Coast is responsible for 72% of the operating profit at Hasbro. And that Magic: The Gathering makes the vast majority of Wizards of the Coast's profit. Magic: The Gathering made many, many, MANY times more money for Hasbro than any other single property they own. If they think they can just up and buy the brand that made the company $547 million of the $763.3 million of the company's profits for 2021, it would have to be an offer that would make the recent video game corporate acquisitions by Sony and Microsoft look paltry in comparison.


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## Mallus (Feb 14, 2022)

I can’t get past the fact crypto uses real non-renewable resources to create artificial scarcity. Who invented this? Victor von Doom?

(Satoshi von Doom?)


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## AtomicPope (Feb 14, 2022)

There's two things that are quite glaring in these arguments against Block Chain and Crypto Currency:
1) Detractors rely on Fear Mongering - Bad for the environment is not a valid argument, especially on the internet.  It absolutely reeks of fear mongering.
2) Global Finance Opposes Them - The same global financial institutions and politicians who oppose Crypto Currency also supported subprime mortgages and crashed the economies of several countries.  I'm done listening to anything they have to say, or anyone who parrots their talking points.  The IMF didn't see any problems with subprime mortgages yet they're terrified of Crypto and want to regulate it.


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## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

Mistwell said:


> You guys are likely the old white dudes (not in suits) complaining about those young kids and their rock music of this era.



Not to nit-pick, but it was old white dudes (as you so eloquently put it) who made most of the money off rock & roll. 

For every anecdote about old people mocking personal computers or Elvis is a dozen who mocked emu farms, beefalos, and an endless variety of other 'next big thing' plans, and were right.

However, cryptocurreny has one angle going for it that literally no one on this thread has touched on:

It is a power hog (that part has been noted). Much like electric cars, it puts a heavy burden on the power grid. A grid, I might add, which is barely keeping up with demand, and which (in the USA) relies almost exclusively on coal and oil, and will for the foreseeable future.

Which means as a concept, it has powerful friends. Fossil fuel providers, quite possibly the most powerful economic/political bloc in the USA, know that the dream is to put them out of the power generation business. Nuclear power generation could have already done it, being a mature and safe (as practiced in the USA) technology, but bad media and NIMBY effectively stopped it cold decades ago. Solar and wind are not technologically ready to shoulder the load, especially since both are very vulnerable to drastic weather conditions. So anything that increases the demand for electricity extends the lifespan of the fossil fuel power generation. Computers, cell phones, social media, climate control...the demand for electricity is second only to the demand for potable water in urban planner's minds.


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## Smackpixi (Feb 14, 2022)

AtomicPope said:


> 1) Detractors rely on Fear Mongering



Don’t supporters use fear as well?  Fear of missing out?


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## Malmuria (Feb 14, 2022)

Mistwell said:


> OK. And if, in 20 years, it's still here and ubiquitous, then what? There were entire interviews with higher-ups at IBM who said the personal computer was never going to go beyond a toy. There were huge articles about the web claiming it was useless in computer magazines. Don't you even pause for a moment to consider even the slightest possibility you're them?



Criticizing a technology is not the same as dismissing it.  Indeed, it’s a sign that people are taking the technology, along with its uses or misuses very seriously.  Similarity, just because a technology has and will be around isn’t a counter argument to those criticisms.  I’m sure many technologies will be around in the future: social media, drones, nanotechnology, sophisticated robots, AI, biometric surveillance; neither the prevalence nor the longevity of those technologies are counter arguments to the many legitimate criticisms of them.

Case in point, much of the concern around crypto and nfts centers around their carbon usage.  This is because climate change, too, will be a thing that is around in 20 years.


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## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

Mallus said:


> I can’t get past the fact crypto uses real non-renewable resources to create artificial scarcity. Who invented this? Victor von Doom?
> 
> (Satoshi von Doom?)



You're using a device, power, and infrastructure created with real non-renewable resources for entertainment, and you're surprised?


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## Abstruse (Feb 14, 2022)

Mallus said:


> I can’t get past the fact crypto uses real non-renewable resources to create artificial scarcity. Who invented this? Victor von Doom?
> 
> (Satoshi von Doom?)



"We are now using more energy than the entire country of Switzerland and all the pollution it causes to do nothing and make money!" sounds over the top for an episode of Captain Planet.


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## kenmarable (Feb 14, 2022)

AtomicPope said:


> I'm done listening to anything they have to say, or anyone who parrots their talking points.  The IMF didn't see any problems with subprime mortgages yet they're terrified of Crypto and want to regulate it.



This is getting off topic, but personally I'm done listening to anyone who spouts inaccurate revisionist history like this.


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## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

Smackpixi said:


> Don’t supporters use fear as well?  Fear of missing out?



That is a sales pitch as old as time. 

Because it works.


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## Abstruse (Feb 14, 2022)

In case anyone reading this wants to know how scripted the "arguments" are in response to criticism of cryptocurrency/blockchain/NFTs, AtomicPope literally made an argument I already refuted ten posts above theirs.


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## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

Abstruse said:


> "We are now using more energy than the entire country of Switzerland and all the pollution it causes to do nothing and make money!" sounds over the top for an episode of Captain Planet.



According to a recent report from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, about *10% of* the world's total electricity consumption is currently used by the Internet. The figure has risen from 8% in 2012 and may reach 20% by 2025.


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## Mallus (Feb 14, 2022)

AtomicPope said:


> 2) Global Finance Opposes Them - The same global financial institutions and politicians who oppose Crypto Currency also supported subprime mortgages and crashed the economies of several countries.  I'm done listening to anything they have to say, or anyone who parrots their talking points.  The IMF didn't see any problems with subprime mortgages yet they're terrified of Crypto and want to regulate it.



Except that the crypto space replicates every sin committed in traditional finance, with the added bonus of the being completely unregulated.

It also severs investment from anything that has use-value. A diehard Marxist science fiction writer couldn’t have come up with a better satire of late-stage capitalism.


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## AtomicPope (Feb 14, 2022)

Smackpixi said:


> Don’t supporters use fear as well?  Fear of missing out?



And what would that be?  Inflation?

Sure, call me a fEAr mOngEr because I'm saying inflation is a problem with Fiat Currency.


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## AtomicPope (Feb 14, 2022)

Mallus said:


> Except that the crypto space replicates every sin committed in traditional finance, with the added bonus of the being completely unregulated.
> 
> It also severs investment from anything that has use-value. A diehard Marxist science fiction writer couldn’t have come up with a better satire of late-stage capitalism.



You're really posturing hard.

Subprime mortgages were completely regulated.  How did that work out for the Marxist science fiction writers?


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## AtomicPope (Feb 14, 2022)

Abstruse said:


> In case anyone reading this wants to know how scripted the "arguments" are in response to criticism of cryptocurrency/blockchain/NFTs, AtomicPope literally made an argument I already refuted ten posts above theirs.



In case anyone reading this wants to know how scripted the "arguments" are in response to the critics of cryptocurrency/blockchain, Abstruse literally ignored the fact that I never once mentioned NFTs, yet lumped everything together.


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## Abstruse (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> According to a recent report from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, about *10% of* the world's total electricity consumption is currently used by the Internet. The figure has risen from 8% in 2012 and may reach 20% by 2025.



To compare two things using statistics and get relevant information, those two things must start from the same foundation. That's why statistics list "per capita" rather than the entire population because some places have more people than other places. If your 10% of the world's power statement is accurate, that means that 10% of the world's power is being used by (as of January 2021) 4.6 billion people with a wide variety of uses (education, work, record storage, and yes, entertainment among others). Meanwhile, Bitcoin alone uses 0.5% of the world's power for at most 100 million people to say they own digital tokens that they claim have value.


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## Mallus (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> You're using a device, power, and infrastructure created with real non-renewable resources for entertainment, and you're surprised?



I’m currently using a computing device that I use for a variety of purposes every day, including my job. It’s not a virtual asset invested in with the hope it explodes in value. So, yes? Not surprised, just kinda ticked off. It’s like… anti-engineering.


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## Abstruse (Feb 14, 2022)

AtomicPope said:


> In case anyone reading this wants to know how scripted the "arguments" are in response to the critics of cryptocurrency/blockchain, Abstruse literally ignored the fact that I never once mentioned NFTs, yet lumped everything together.



1) The subject of this post is NFTs and the blockchain. It's in big letters at the top of the page in case you missed it.

2) I literally said in the post you quoted NFTs/blockchain/cryptocurrency, which are three interrelated but different things. So your attempt at a typical counter-argument that I'm conflating the three doesn't work because, if you go through the thread, you'll notice I differentiate between them repeatedly and am very clear on which one I'm referring to at any given time.


----------



## Mallus (Feb 14, 2022)

AtomicPope said:


> You're really posturing hard.



I like to think I’m pointing out the obvious.


AtomicPope said:


> Subprime mortgages were completely regulated.  How did that work out for the Marxist science fiction writers?



Badly. This is an argument for more and better financial regulation, BTW. Not the Wild West of the NFT & crypto world.


----------



## AtomicPope (Feb 14, 2022)

Abstruse said:


> 1) The subject of this post is NFTs and the blockchain. It's in big letters at the top of the page in case you missed it.
> 
> 2) I literally said in the post you quoted NFTs/blockchain/cryptocurrency, which are three interrelated but different things. So your attempt at a typical counter-argument that I'm conflating the three doesn't work because, if you go through the thread, you'll notice I differentiate between them repeatedly and am very clear on which one I'm referring to at any given time.



1) If you quote me then at least make it relevant to my post.
2) They are different things, and I'm not talking about NFTs.  You'll notice I'm still not.  You are.



Abstruse said:


> Meanwhile, Bitcoin alone uses 0.5% of the world's power...



And this is exactly what I mean by fear mongering.

What's the source on that claim?  

Saying something and proving it are two different things.  Lots of people made "predictions" about the environment and the goalposts have been moving for five decades: Global Warming, Global Cooling, Climate Change.  We were warned ad nauseum and none of it came true.  The "Great Die-Off" Paul Ehrlich "predicted" in 1970 never happened.  The colossal amount of embarrassing predictions about the environment would be fun to bring up to remind people there is a long history of fear mongering about the environment.


----------



## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

Abstruse said:


> To compare two things using statistics and get relevant information, those two things must start from the same foundation. That's why statistics list "per capita" rather than the entire population because some places have more people than other places. If your 10% of the world's power statement is accurate, that means that 10% of the world's power is being used by (as of January 2021) 4.6 billion people with a wide variety of uses (education, work, record storage, and yes, entertainment among others). Meanwhile, Bitcoin alone uses 0.5% of the world's power for at most 100 million people to say they own digital tokens that they claim have value.



I wasn't comparing them. My point was that condemning crypto-currency for wasting electricity when social media, which has no real value at all, burns far more, seems odd.


----------



## AtomicPope (Feb 14, 2022)

Mallus said:


> [Subprime mortgages] is an argument for more and better financial regulation, BTW. Not the Wild West of the NFT & crypto world.




Thanks for the fear mongering.  Sounds like a very well constructed talking point.


Meanwhile, all of us were forced to pay for very well regulated economic crashes in the not-so-Wild West.  If Bit Coin crashes none of us will be forced to bail it out by our wise and benevolent rulers and financial institutions who only have our best interest at heart.


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## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

Mallus said:


> I’m currently using a computing device that I use for a variety of purposes every day, including my job. It’s not a virtual asset invested in with the hope it explodes in value. So, yes? Not surprised, just kinda ticked off. It’s like… anti-engineering.



Isn't music, literature, and gaming products produced in electronic format simply virtual assets invested in with the hope they explode in value?

I know I shelled out a hundred bucks for the right to use Roll20 more effectively. I doubt their business is exploding, but from what I read they're doing all right.


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## doctorhook (Feb 14, 2022)

AtomicPope said:
			
		

> Lots of people made "predictions" about the environment and the goalposts have been moving for five decades: Global Warming, Global Cooling, Climate Change.  We were warned ad nauseum and none of it came true.  The "Great Die-Off" Paul Ehrlich "predicted" in 1970 never happened.  The colossal amount of embarrassing predictions about the environment would be fun to bring up to remind people there is a long history of fear mongering about the environment.



Climate change denialism is not a good look, not when it’s widely accepted as fact by the overwhelming majority of climate scientists (who surely have the best understanding of it). 

Meanwhile, we’re in the middle of the first winter Olympic Games with no natural snow, but you’re defending the process of burning fossil fuels to make electricity to “mine” fake digital tokens for rich people to speculate upon. Why?


----------



## Malmuria (Feb 14, 2022)

AtomicPope said:


> 1) If you quote me then at least make it relevant to my post.
> 2) They are different things, and I'm not talking about NFTs.  You'll notice I'm still not.  You are.
> 
> 
> ...



Do you…not think that the earth is getting warmer?


----------



## Mallus (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> My point was that condemning crypto-currency for wasting electricity when social media, which has no real value at all, burns far more, seems odd.



Saying social media has no real value is kinda weird in 2022. It’s like saying television had no real value in the 1970s. What has real value? Steel mills?


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## AtomicPope (Feb 14, 2022)

doctorhook said:


> Climate change denialism is not a good look, not when it’s widely accepted as fact by the overwhelming majority of climate scientists (who surely have the best understanding of it).



Denialism is a religious statement, not a scientific one.

Science is not a matter of lots and lots of people wearing the same coat agreeing, nor is science a fallacy from authority.  Those things you described are closer to a religious cult than repeatable, predictable, real world methodology and that garners results.


----------



## Smackpixi (Feb 14, 2022)

I guess what I don’t understand is why supporters of crypto think that even if in 20 years we‘re all going to be buying our D&D books with crypto, the currency that’s going to be used is going to be any of the ones in existence now?  The big banks and governments don’t control them.  I know that’s considered a great fantastic thing by crypto fans, but the idea that the people and institutions in control of everything now are just going to let that change seems…well, unlikely.

So, again, in 20 years, let’s say I’m given a choice, would I like to be paid in dollars, the bank run crypto all the corporations i rely on to supply me with my daily needs will accept, or some crypto currency that is a “great” store of value but can’t be used for exchange except with marginal players off the grid of the mainstream economy…what am I going to choose and thereby give value to?


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## Mallus (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> Isn't music, literature, and gaming products produced in electronic format simply virtual assets invested in with the hope they explode in value?
> 
> I know I shelled out a hundred bucks for the right to use Roll20 more effectively. I doubt their business is exploding, but from what I read they're doing all right.



Errr... no? I just bought a movie on iTunes (Titane). To watch it. Not on the expectation it would increase in value. Unlike the mutual fund shares I just bought with my 401K contributions. Are we talking about the same things?


----------



## AtomicPope (Feb 14, 2022)




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## Mallus (Feb 14, 2022)

AtomicPope said:


> If Bit Coin crashes none of us will be forced to bail it out by our wise and benevolent rulers and financial institutions who only have our best interest at heart.



That depends entirely on how many institutional investors get into crypto. Which is happening, I believe...


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## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

Mallus said:


> Saying social media has no real value is kinda weird in 2022. It’s like saying television had no real value in the 1970s. What has real value? Steel mills?



Steel mills? Absolutely. Creates jobs, provides tax revenues...there's no down side.

But if you really believe in climate change being brought on by carbon emissions, would not giving up social media and the like in order to stave off certain doom make sense?


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## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

Mallus said:


> Errr... no? I just bought a movie on iTunes (Titane). To watch it. Not on the expectation it would increase in value. Unlike the mutual fund shares I just bought with my 401K contributions. Are we talking about the same things?



Do you think the movie on iTunes was made in the hopes of a profit?


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## MGibster (Feb 14, 2022)

If Mike Pondsmith knew that this would be the future I don't know if he would have ever written _Cyberpunk._


----------



## J.Quondam (Feb 14, 2022)

Welp, at least there's no anti-vaxxer tripe in this thread. Yet.


----------



## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

J.Quondam said:


> Welp, at least there's no anti-vaxxer tripe in this thread. Yet.



The 'vaccine' is the causative effect for the impending zombie outbreak.


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## AtomicPope (Feb 14, 2022)

Mallus said:


> That depends entirely on how many institutional investors get into crypto. Which is happening, I believe...



Governments, and who controls them, decide who qualifies for bailouts.  And I say "who" and not "what" because that's what happens.  People are getting bailed out of bad decisions they made.  Not the people of the countries who are forced to pay for the bailouts.  Regular people don't want it because they're not getting bailed out.  I highly doubt we can find a majority of regular people on any forum that wanted the banks bailed out for a financial crisis the banks created.  Yet the banks were "saved."  Whenever you have a "well regulated" sector that fails, they also get bailed out at the expense of everyone else.

There's no indication than an unregulated currency will qualify for bailouts or that any financial institution or global bank will push for crypto bailouts.  And I'm OK with that.  I have no problem with people making bad investments or purchases so long as I'm not forced to bail them out.


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## eyeheartawk (Feb 14, 2022)

For all this talk of regular people, it will absolutely be regular people who will get left holding the bag in the end. Not the hucksters pushing for this. Whether they are wearing a Brooks Brothers suit or sweatpants in a basement, both are contemptible.


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## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

eyeheartawk said:


> For all this talk of regular people, it will absolutely be regular people who will get left holding the bag in the end.



Welcome to the entire width and breadth of Human history.


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## Levistus's_Leviathan (Feb 14, 2022)

And, of course, the people are supporting crypto/NFTs and denying of climate change are exactly the ones that I had expected based on my previous experience on this site. Oh, well. I guess this is why we can't have nice things. Because people don't care about destroying the environment solely to make the rich people richer, and don't believe that our 100+ years of post-Industrialization pollution can affect the planet in any way.

If you still somehow do not believe in/are not worried about climate change . . . you're clearly extremely misinformed. If you can somehow still support Crypto/NFTs after this video has been linked_ multiple times _. . . you've got something wrong with you. They give all their sources (there are nearly 20 links of sources in the video's description), explain thoroughly all of the current problems with Cryptocurrency and NFTs, and describe the many ways that these sorts of things are both bad for the Earth environmentally, and for us and the economy at large in the long-run.

Stop trying to "do your own research", and start listening to the people that bother to properly do theirs. NFTs and Crypto are scams, blockchain is _terrible _for the environment, the current systems in place to self-regulate and keep track of both Crypto and NFTs are incredibly unfair to people without lots of money, and they don't do anything revolutionary. This is not the "new internet" or "new social media", it's a scam, and you guys are falling for it. Stop shilling scams and stop pretending like you have to defend Crypto/NFTs. You don't.


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## Abstruse (Feb 14, 2022)

So here's how arguments with cryptobros typically goes. Note that I'm not saying that anyone in this thread is doing this, I'm just describe in general how the arguments go. Feel free to draw whatever conclusions from that you choose.

First, they will make statements from the assumption that anyone critical of the blockchain, cryptocurrency, or NFTs are ignorant of what any of those three are. Ways that will do this is shift topics from NFTs to cryptocurrency, then when someone conflates the two (which is easy because the two are interconnected but are not the same thing (cryptocurrency is a fungible token while NFTs are non-fungible tokens because one Bitcoin or Ethereum or Dogecoin or whatever is exactly the same as every other one (fungible) while each NFT is unique (non-fungible)), they will pounce on the confusion as "proof" the critic doesn't understand the topic and thus anything else they say should be dismissed.

Second, you'll notice they never make claims themselves. They only dispute other people's claims. They'll handwave them away or compare them to other topics (either barely related or completely unrelated, like fiat currency or issues with the current financial system). If sources are provided, those sources will be attacked as biased. Because they want to put any critics on the defensive by having to support their statements while not making any claims of their own to defend. "You keep calling them a scam but you don't say how they're a scam" even when the person has given several examples of scams. This is also where you'll end up debating completely unrelated things like the stock market or the subprime housing bubble of the late 2000s or how much energy the modern banking system or the internet as a whole uses (always done without any scale*).

Then we get to the implied insults. They will never outright insult anyone because that means the moderators can punish them for it, but they will specifically phrase things to insult any critics. They're old, they're dumb, they're luddites, they're jealous they missed out. This is also when they'll start making blanket statements, like "Oh, why do you support the banking system?" implying that anyone who is critical of cryptocurrency supports the current financial system. The idea is to put the idea of the insult in your mind, both for the person they're responding to and for anyone else not involved in the discussion that is reading it.

That's because they're interacting with two audiences but only performing for one. When they perform these implied insults or blanket comparisons, it's not meant for the person they're replying to but for other people reading the thread, the non-participant third parties. They know anyone who knows anything about the blockchain, cryptocurrency, or NFTs isn't going to suddenly become a True Believer just as much as they're never going to be critical of them. The idea is to attack the person stating the criticisms in order to undermine their authority for the third parties. They also hope to get under the skin of the critic and cause them to respond to the insults, further undermining their previous statements and giving the crypto supporter the opportunity to report them to the moderators for violating the rules.

The entire time, they want to appear as disinterested in the discussion and as aloof as possible. "I don't _really _care about any of this, but this critic is saying stuff that demands a response. I'm just asking the questions everybody else has about these claims you're making." They're _reasonable_, you see. Not like these critics who, who they will describe as "ranting" or "angry" or otherwise characterizing even bland statements of fact as someone red-faced and shouting.

This is driven by the mentality behind a lot of groups involved in the blockchain, cryptocurrency, and NFTs. There is extreme social pressure within these groups to immediately quash any criticism because it sows "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt". If you see the acronym "FUD", that's what that means. Doubting cryptocurrency or NFTs might cause you to sell, which lowers the price. So it becomes imperative they quash any criticism lest a sell-off start. You'll also see this with BTD or "buy the dip", where when prices start to fall they encourage one another to start buying because the value will go back up. Which then becomes an entire culture of toxic positivity - supporting one another in even bad decisions like "I just cashed out my 401K to buy NFTs" or "I took out a second mortgage to BTD". Saying "Hey, woah, that might be going a bit too far" is FUD. And FUD is bad because wgtmi (we're going to make it), and if you sell then you're ngmi (not gonna make it). That's why Dan Olson's video linked at the start of this thread is titled "Line Goes Up".

They also need more people to buy in because if they need to sell for any reason, you have to have somebody to sell to. And if everybody's already invested everything that have in crypto or NFTs, they don't have more they can buy with. So they're becoming increasingly aggressive if not downright evangelical in promoting crypto and NFTs. Super Bowl ads, celebrity endorsements**, brigading any critics, making big announcements before deals are closed (like saying you're going to start an NFT-based streaming service for music without actually licensing any of the music and yes, that happened too).

The whole combination means that arguments are meant to leave any third parties reading to be even more confused than when they started and to frustrate and exhaust any critics so they're less likely to make further criticisms in the future just to not get dragged into another long-running argument full of snide half-insults and constant goalpost-shifting to make any attempts to just back out of the discussion next to impossible***. Because like I said way back in my original post explaining all this, the confusion is the point. If people are confused, they're going to listen to whoever seems like the most reasonable expert talking. If the critics are all framed as unreasonable and don't know what they're talking about, then the people supporting the blockchain, cryptocurrency, or NFTs probably does. It doesn't work most of the time, but it doesn't. It just has to work sometime. Then someone else buys in, and the line goes up.

* ie They'll say that cryptocurrency uses less electricity than Visa cards without mentioning the hundreds of millions of people have Visa credit and/or debit cards and that those cards are used for constant everyday purchases like groceries, bills, rent, etc. while less than 100 million people use cryptocurrency and cryptocurrencies are rarely traded because of the "gas price" (the price to post a transaction to the blockchain, which fluctuates wildly between $50-200 depending on the day) and the waiting time between the purchase being agreed upon and the actual transfer of the currency means the currency's value can swing wildly. This is why companies that, in the mid-2010s, allowed people to make purchases using Bitcoin and later Ethereum like the electronics site Newegg stopped doing so, because the value of the cryptocurrency would change between the customer pushing "Buy Now" and the actual transaction going through that they could not be sure they weren't selling a brand new laptop for hundreds less than it was worth.

** The owner of Creative Artists Agency, a large talent agency for actors and musicians, is a major investor in OpenSea, the largest marketplace for buying and selling NFTs. Which is the sort of thing you'd think would be disclosed in all these tweets where they say they "bought" some NFT but for some reason never is...

*** At least until the crypto supporter realizes they aren't making the progress they should, in which case they'll attempt to retain their neutrality and reasonableness while throwing out another half insult like saying something that sounds like a gracious exist, but then explaining why they're leaving the conversation is that they don't think any useful discussion can happen when one side is obviously so biased against the other (with the obvious implication that only the critics are biased and not the crypto/NFT supporters).


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Feb 14, 2022)

Mistwell said:


> You guys are likely the old white dudes (not in suits) complaining about those young kids and their rock music of this era…



*Mod Note:*

You were mostly OK up to this point.  Then you got insulting and snide.  You know better, so do better.


----------



## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

So, after eight pages, let's try to center the topic again.

Now: if crypto currencies fail, a few hundred thousand people will lose money they voluntarily risked.

If they don't fail, but do not take off, tens of thousand of people will lose money they voluntarily risked, and hundreds of thousands of people will have struck out in an investment venture.

If they succeed, hundreds of thousands of people will make a nice sum of money, and the world economy will get a bit more complex.

I think it is safe to say that the experiment/scheme of crypto currency will continue until one of those three outcomes is reached.

Given that participation is voluntary, and we've established that the power consumption is but a tiny fraction of that of social media, where is the point of concern?


----------



## Justice and Rule (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> So, after eight pages, let's try to center the topic again.
> 
> Now: if crypto currencies fail, a few hundred thousand people will lose money they voluntarily risked.
> 
> ...




I mean, couldn't you make this argument with any ponzi or investment scheme?


----------



## Tally Isham (Feb 14, 2022)

I am a big believer in crypto.
I think Magic the Gathering and DnD crypto/NFTs are coming. It's just inevitable and I will be buying.




Abstruse said:


> (cryptocurrency is a fungible token while NFTs are non-fungible tokens because one Bitcoin or Ethereum or Dogecoin or whatever is exactly the same as every other one (fungible) while each NFT is unique (non-fungible)),




I would just like to point out that this is common misunderstanding. Bitcoin is a NFT. Every bitcoin has a unique history that can be traced to genesis. A bitcoin can be tainted, so a bitcoin is not the same as every other bitcoin (not fungible) . If you obtain a tainted bitcoin off the dark web, no legit exchange will hold or buy it from you

Anyway, these are the best videos I think that exist for crypto if anyone is interested.

MIT Lecture series by Gary Gensler, current head of SEC. 24 parts.

Congressional hearing with crypto CEOs:

Congressional hearing on bitcoin mining:


----------



## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

Justice and Rule said:


> I mean, couldn't you make this argument with any ponzi or investment scheme?



Well, a ponzi scheme is illegal. So far, crypto currency is not.

But yes, you are right, at this point it is simply an investment scheme which is either innovative or stupid.

After all, someone said, "You know, I think there is a demand for brightly-colored notepaper that sticks to things'. That one turned out to be innovative.

Someone else pointed out that Emus produce a low-fat meat more efficiently than cattle, and also both feathers and high-quality boot material, so why don't we raise them commercially, in bulk? The numbers sounded great. Turned out to be a stupid idea.


----------



## Abstruse (Feb 14, 2022)

Tally Isham said:


> I would just like to point out that this is common misunderstanding. Bitcoin is a NFT. Every bitcoin has a unique history that can be traced to genesis. A bitcoin can be tainted, so a bitcoin is not the same as every other bitcoin (not fungible) . If you obtain a tainted bitcoin off the dark web, no legit exchange will hold or buy it for you



But one unit of a cryptocurrency has the exact same value as any other. Just like a crisp new dollar bill and a wrinkled, tattered dollar bill that someone has written a phone number on are both worth $1. That's what makes the fungible.


----------



## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

Abstruse said:


> But one unit of a cryptocurrency has the exact same value as any other. Just like a crisp new dollar bill and a wrinkled, tattered dollar bill that someone has written a phone number on are both worth $1. That's what makes the fungible.



A US dollar has a different value than a British Pound or a Canadian dollar or a Mexican peso. 

So if a bitcoin has a different value than different NFT, wouldn't that be similar?


----------



## Justice and Rule (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> A US dollar has a different value than a British Pound or a Canadian dollar or a Mexican peso.
> 
> So if a bitcoin has a different value than different NFT, wouldn't that be similar?




No, that'd be completely different. The difference between a US Dollar and a British Pound would be like the difference between different cryptocurrencies, not different coins within a currency. Every Dogecoin will be the same because it's meant to specifically *be fungible*, otherwise it wouldn't work as a currency. That'd be like if I had 5 quarters and each one was worth different amounts.

On the other side, NFTs are meant to be unique items and thus cannot have any sort of shared value; one NFT will not necessarily have the same value of one within the same set, even if it right next to it in the order. Hence why they are _*non-fungible.*_ This isn't disputable, because we're talking about the undisputed definition of the words "fungible" and "non-fungible".


----------



## Abstruse (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> Well, a ponzi scheme is illegal. So far, crypto currency is not.



A ponzi scheme is illegal. Nobody has been charged with one yet. Just because nobody has been arrested or prosecuted yet does not mean something is legal. Enron ran a ponzi scheme for many years before anyone was arrested. Doesn't mean it wasn't a ponzi scheme before they were.

But we're talking about two different things here really. NFTs and cryptocurrency may or may not be a ponzi scheme, but a ponzi scheme is a very specific form of fraud, where the capital from new investors is used to pay dividends to previous investors to show profits that the company has not actually generated. No scheme is going to exactly match that definition except for the one run by Charles Ponzi in 1920. What people are saying when they call cryptocurrency and NFTs a ponzi scheme or a multilevel marketing scheme or a pyramid scheme is not "This meets exactly the technical definition of those other types of scams in order for them to be illegal", they are saying "This is the same general scam being run here that is similar to these other scams in how it functions". There are many ways to run ponzi schemes or pyramid schemes or MLMs that are technically legal. But that doesn't make them ethical nor does it make them suddenly not scams just because they're not technically illegal.


----------



## Tally Isham (Feb 14, 2022)

Abstruse said:


> But one unit of a cryptocurrency has the exact same value as any other. Just like a crisp new dollar bill and a wrinkled, tattered dollar bill that someone has written a phone number on are both worth $1. That's what makes the fungible.




Again, not every bitcoin is the same as every other bitcoin.
A bitcoin can become tainted. You would not want to be holding a tainted bitcoin.
Every bitcoin has a history that cannot be erased and easily searchable with an explorer. If it was used in a crime, it becomes tainted.
Legit exchanges like Coinbase would know and not buy, sell or hold them.


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## Abstruse (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> A US dollar has a different value than a British Pound or a Canadian dollar or a Mexican peso.
> 
> So if a bitcoin has a different value than different NFT, wouldn't that be similar?



No, because those are not the same thing. One US dollar bill is worth the same amount as any other US dollar bill of the same denomination. One British Pound Sterling coin is worth the exact same as every other British Pound Sterling coin. That is what "fungible" means, it can be replaced by another of the same thing and have the same value. A bitcoin is not an NFT so they do not have the same value, but one bitcoin is worth exactly the same as every other bitcoin and thus bitcoin is fungible. Each NFT is unique, there will only ever be one of that particular token on that particular blockchain minted at that particular time. It has a unique value that is not equivalent to every other NFT. Therefore it is non-fungible.

That's why I used the poster example earlier. If I have a poster of the cover of the original Dragonlance novel, it can be replaced by any other poster of the cover of the original Dragonlance novel. If mine gets torn or damaged or lost, I can buy another and it will have exactly the same value. It is fungible. However, if I take that poster to a convention and get it signed, it is not the same as every other poster. It is the only poster of the cover of the original Dragonlance novel that was signed by Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman, and Larry Elmore at Gen Con in 2004 with those exact signatures (which will not be the exact same signature in the exact same place if another person got their poster of the cover of the original Dragonlance novel also signed at the same convention). If it is lost, I cannot replace it with a different print of that same poster signed by those three people at that same convention because it is not exactly the same. It is non-fungible.


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## Justice and Rule (Feb 14, 2022)

Abstruse said:


> A ponzi scheme is illegal. Nobody has been charged with one yet. Just because nobody has been arrested or prosecuted yet does not mean something is legal. Enron ran a ponzi scheme for many years before anyone was arrested. Doesn't mean it wasn't a ponzi scheme before they were.
> 
> But we're talking about two different things here really. NFTs and cryptocurrency may or may not be a ponzi scheme, but a ponzi scheme is a very specific form of fraud, where the capital from new investors is used to pay dividends to previous investors to show profits that the company has not actually generated. No scheme is going to exactly match that definition except for the one run by Charles Ponzi in 1920. What people are saying when they call cryptocurrency and NFTs a ponzi scheme or a multilevel marketing scheme or a pyramid scheme is not "This meets exactly the technical definition of those other types of scams in order for them to be illegal", they are saying "This is the same general scam being run here that is similar to these other scams in how it functions". There are many ways to run ponzi schemes or pyramid schemes or MLMs that are technically legal. But that doesn't make them ethical nor does it make them suddenly not scams just because they're not technically illegal.




Yeah, I was making a generalized comparison based on the idea that "people are voluntarily giving their money", not an actual comparison between the two. One is a commodity, one is a(n illegal) investment technique strategy. If all we need to say is "Well, they weren't coerced into giving their money", then basically nothing is forbidden, everything is permitted. That, to me, is just opening the doors for fraud and other schemes, which are currently rife within the crypto ecosystem because it's largely unregulated.



Tally Isham said:


> Again, not every bitcoin has the same as every other bitcoin.
> A bitcoin can become tainted. You would not want to be holding a tainted bitcoin.




No, this doesn't track: a "tainted" bitcoin is not its natural or proper state, in the same way illegally-obtained funds might also be seized by the government if they find out about it. If everything goes as planned, you have no "tainted" bitcoins. Being "tainted" is not an actual function of a bitcoin, but a designation of something happening with it that _isn't meant to happen_. By design, a designated bitcoin is meant to be worth the same as every other one in its grouping. Again, it's meant to be a _currency, _which needs to be *fungible to work*. NFTs are specifically _not fungible_ because each NFT is meant to have a unique price and to be viewed as an individual piece.


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## Abstruse (Feb 14, 2022)

Justice and Rule said:


> Yeah, I was making a generalized comparison based on the idea that "people are voluntarily giving their money", not an actual comparison between the two. One is a commodity, one is a(n illegal) investment technique strategy. If all we need to say is "Well, they weren't coerced into giving their money", then basically nothing is forbidden, everything is permitted. That, to me, is just opening the doors for fraud and other schemes, which are currently rife within the crypto ecosystem because it's largely unregulated.



Again, you're focused on "Well actually if you're technical about it..." arguments about general statements. By that definition, Enron was not a ponzi scheme because it was a corporation that traded in energy, so therefore we're talking about a corporation and a commodity and not a scheme. The SEC disagreed in 2001 and two of the top executives of that company went to prison. When someone says "Enron was a ponzi scheme", they are saying that the corporate activities of the Enron corporation used the tactics of an illegal ponzi scheme. Just like when someone says "NFTs/cryptocurrency is a ponzi scheme", they are saying not saying the tokens themselves are a ponzi scheme but that the manner in which they are minted, sold, and traded are comparable to the methods used in ponzi schemes.


----------



## Justice and Rule (Feb 14, 2022)

Abstruse said:


> Again, you're focused on "Well actually if you're technical about it..." arguments about general statements. By that definition, Enron was not a ponzi scheme because it was a corporation that traded in energy, so therefore we're talking about a corporation and a commodity and not a scheme. The SEC disagreed in 2001 and two of the top executives of that company went to prison. When someone says "Enron was a ponzi scheme", they are saying that the corporate activities of the Enron corporation used the tactics of an illegal ponzi scheme. Just like when someone says "NFTs/cryptocurrency is a ponzi scheme", they are saying not saying the tokens themselves are a ponzi scheme but that the manner in which they are minted, sold, and traded are comparable to the methods used in ponzi schemes.




Sure, but my point was that I wasn't actually making that comparison, but pointing out about how terribly low a bar was being set for a proper economic exchange. I do agree with you, I just wasn't making the comparison because I was more focused on something else in the statement.


----------



## Tally Isham (Feb 14, 2022)

If Hasbro minted a few Magic the Gathering NTFs and a few kids brought, played, and traded them...
what exactly is the problem here?


----------



## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

Abstruse said:


> No, because those are not the same thing.



Actually, they are. They are an item which has value based on public acceptance, and which is vaguely tied to a belief in the issuing government. In and of themselves, they have little or no value. Moreover, a dollar in New York City has a different purchasing power than a dollar in Mule Shoe, Texas (yes, that is a real town). If you doubt that, check gas prices.

Back in the early days of the Republic, both states and banking institutions issued legal currency.

Since money is based on little more than faith, why can't a cryto currency flourish? All it would seem to need is consumer confidence.


----------



## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

Tally Isham said:


> If Hasbro minted a few Magic the Gathering NTFs and a few kids brought, played, and traded them...
> what exactly is the problem here?



Good question.

Would it diminish the value of the paper cards?


----------



## AtomicPope (Feb 14, 2022)

Kickstarter and blockchain were part of the Enworld discussion a while back when it was first rumored.  I supported Kickstarter using blockchain way back when it was just a rumor because I've had problems with purchases that extended offsite.  That is not Kickstarter's fault but it could be their problem with the issues in the global supply chain.  The problem I ran into was in production delay.  In some cases I had to contact the company offsite, fill out an online form, and then resolve the problem via email for a KS that took place a year ago or more.  There was constant problems with proof of purchase.  Since this is a hobby and not a business it's easy for me to lose track of minor purchases.  Having a unique ledger that will identify my purchase offsite would be a big help.  It's bookkeeping that I don't need to worry about.


----------



## Abstruse (Feb 14, 2022)

Tally Isham said:


> If Hasbro minted a few Magic the Gathering NTFs and a few kids brought, played, and traded them...
> what exactly is the problem here?



Because the minting process would cost between $50-200 alone and use more electricity than the average household does in an entire week just to make the NFT exist (then all of that again each time it's traded or sold), and there's nothing to "play" because the person buying it wouldn't get an actual physical card (and updating Magic: The Gathering Arena to recognize NFTs would be a massive undertaking to update the game requiring a large investment in coding time that could be used to fix bugs or improve the user interface or more optimize the game assets or any of the other dozens of small tasks any video game needs).


----------



## Justice and Rule (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> Actually, they are. They are an item which has value based on public acceptance, and which is vaguely tied to a belief in the issuing government. In and of themselves, they have little or no value. Moreover, a dollar in New York City has a different purchasing power than a dollar in Mule Shoe, Texas (yes, that is a real town). If you doubt that, check gas prices.




Purchasing power is different from each coin having different values. If I have 5 coins in Mule Shoe, they aren't worth different amounts. My five Quarters will be worth 25¢ each, just like in New York. They will have a different purchasing power, but they will all still have a value of 25¢. You keep conflating different things that are not the same, to the point that it doesn't seem like you actually know what you are talking about.



Jd Smith1 said:


> Back in the early days of the Republic, both states and banking institutions issued legal currency.




Yes, but those would be individual currencies and each bill would be worth the same _within that currency_*. *I do not know how that how to make that any clearer; by definition, banking notes issued by an individual bank would be worth the same as long as they carried the same denomination. Every $5 bill from the Bank of Wherever would be worth the same, rather than each bill having an individual, unique value. This is the difference between fungible and non-fungible.


----------



## Rabulias (Feb 14, 2022)

Mistwell said:


> It's not ever going away and it will continue to grow at an extraordinary rate. You don't have to adapt to changes in society, but at least take a moment to acknowledge the possibility that "I don't fully understand this new thing" might be a sign you probably shouldn't be judging it as a fad or a scam.



Longevity is not a reliable index of "scamness." Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme operated for _decades _before his scam was exposed, and he is not the only one. I think many grifters and con artists never get caught.

Blockchain _may _turn out to be a useful technology for something someday (on a more limited scale than a currency),  but I remain unconvinced. Computers, the Internet, video games, and the other innovations you mention did have naysayers, but also had visionaries who saw potential they could deliver. Yes, there are costs (energy usage and environmental impact are major ones), but there have been valuable contributions from them (well, maybe not social media so much... :-\ ).

A major difference to note for those technologies you list is that as they became more widely used and accepted, they became _cheaper _and _more accessible _to people with less money. Cryptocurrencies and NFTs (unless they fail) seem to get more expensive as time goes on, almost like they were predicated on that...


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Feb 14, 2022)

AtomicPope said:


> What's the source on that claim?



In non mod voice: that claim is supported by articles in the NYT, Harvard Business Review and other easily found sources.  
Bitcoin Uses More Electricity Than Many Countries. How Is That Possible?








						How Much Energy Does Bitcoin Actually Consume?
					

Today, Bitcoin consumes as much energy as a small country. This certainly sounds alarming — but the reality is a little more complicated. The author discusses several common misconceptions surrounding the Bitcoin sustainability debate, and ultimately argues that it’s up to the crypto community...




					hbr.org
				





AtomicPope said:


> Saying something and proving it are two different things.  Lots of people made "predictions" about the environment and the goalposts have been moving for five decades: Global Warming, Global Cooling, Climate Change.  We were warned ad nauseum and none of it came true.  The "Great Die-Off" Paul Ehrlich "predicted" in 1970 never happened.  The colossal amount of embarrassing predictions about the environment would be fun to bring up to remind people there is a long history of fear mongering about the environment.



*Mod Note:*

And this is pure politics.  Don’t go there again.


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Feb 14, 2022)

AtomicPope said:


> Denialism is a religious statement, not a scientific one.
> 
> Science is not a matter of lots and lots of people wearing the same coat agreeing, nor is science a fallacy from authority.  Those things you described are closer to a religious cult than repeatable, predictable, real world methodology and that garners results.



Seeing as how the consensus has been in growing and not declining- currently at 28 climate skeptical papers out of 88,125 peer reviewed papers overall, per the study below- it’s looking like the case for anthropogenic climate change is pretty well supported.





__





						ShieldSquare Captcha
					






					iopscience.iop.org


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Feb 14, 2022)

AtomicPope said:


> Governments, and who controls them, decide who qualifies for bailouts.



*Mod Note:*

That phrasing is _dangerously_ close to dog-whistle territory.  Based on the number and nature of reports you’re generating, I strongly recommend you consider re-evaluating how you’re communicating in this thread if you wish to continue communicating in this thread.


----------



## Charwoman Gene (Feb 14, 2022)

AtomicPope said:


> Having a unique ledger that will identify my purchase offsite would be a big help.  It's bookkeeping that I don't need to worry about.



So, you think it is worth paying lots of money for a service to keep track of your receipts for you.  Wonderful.  There are loadsof ways to do that do not require the energy costs of these technologies and would show no additional security or convenience hurdles.


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## AtomicPope (Feb 14, 2022)

Charwoman Gene said:


> So, you think it is worth paying lots of money for a service to keep track of your receipts for you.  Wonderful.  There are loadsof ways to do that do not require the energy costs of these technologies and would show no additional security or convenience hurdles.



Well they maybe you should pitch that to Kickstarter.  Really compelling stuff here.  In the meantime, they have no electronic ledgers that can be used offsite.


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## Charwoman Gene (Feb 14, 2022)

AtomicPope said:


> Well they maybe you should pitch that to Kickstarter.  Really compelling stuff here.  In the meantime, they have no electronic ledgers that can be used offsite.




Wow. Too bad y'now, you're just too important to keep track of receipts.


----------



## AtomicPope (Feb 14, 2022)

I did track the "0.5%" source back to a prediction that was repeated as a fact in many articles.  That was my point for asking the source.  Here's the prediction:








						Bitcoin estimated to use half a percent of the world's electric energy by end of 2018
					

Bitcoin's burgeoning electricity demands have attracted almost as much attention as the cryptocurrency's fluctuating value. But estimating exactly how much electricity the Bitcoin network uses remains a challenge. A new methodology helps pinpoint where Bitcoin's electric energy consumption is...



					www.sciencedaily.com
				




Predictions are not facts, especially when they don't come true.  And it's clear that there's a strong narrative bias on these forums that is openly enforced, so I'm unwatching.


----------



## Crusadius (Feb 14, 2022)

Abstruse said:


> And these guys think they're just going to _buy Magic: The Gathering_.



I think this is a prime example of what Dan Olsen mentioned he encountered in discords: big talk about the future value of the NFTs - they're all going to be swimming in money bins full of cryptocoins, so full that they'll be farting out enough change to buy M:TG.


----------



## MGibster (Feb 14, 2022)

The common refrain used to be, "The best way to become wealthy with RPGs is to start out wealthy."  In twenty years time it might be, "The best way to become wealthy with RPGs is to get into NFTs."  Sometimes businesses pivot to the point where they're no longer doing what they originally did.  Hasbro started out as Hassenfeld Brothers back in 1923 selling textiles, moving on to pencils, and by the early 1940s was primarily a toy company.  I find it unlikely that Hasbro would pivot to the point where they'll stop being a toy company, but who knows about Chaosium?  If this works out well for them then RPGs might become an afterthought for the company as they focus on more profitable endeavors.


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## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

Justice and Rule said:


> Purchasing power is different from each coin having different values. If I have 5 coins in Mule Shoe, they aren't worth different amounts.



Actually, they do. What a dollar will buy in Muleshoe in terms of gasoline (to keep it easy) is different that what it will buy in terms of gas in New York. The fact that in either place you can swap it for four quarters is meaningless.


----------



## UngainlyTitan (Feb 14, 2022)

First off I do not think that crypto will replace money, it is not flexible enough. Crypto is based on the belief that what makes money valuable is scarcity. 
This a recipe for permanent deflation. That would be bad, not least because it would be an investment and innovation killer.
We switched to fiat currency for very good reasons and there is a lot of value to be able to adjust the money supply to the economic circumstances.
The other big issue I see are transaction speed and costs. The cost per transaction are very high and the speed is very slow, somewhere about 4 order of magnitude slower than VISA, with comparable power consumption. I am not sure there is a way to get real scalability, I think the issue is inherent in the nature of the blockchain.

Now, the question has been asked, why not let this thing run its course, what harm can it do to the real economy. Well the issue here, is if a big player in the real economy becomes/is a true believer and bets the company/hedge fund on crypto they could take down the whole economy with them

The South Sea Bubble was not illegal at the time and did not begin as a Ponzi scheme, it became one but the fallout was so severe that it crashed trade investment in the UK, to the point that the government had to invent the limited liability company to restore investor confidence.


----------



## darjr (Feb 14, 2022)

The gentleman that did the l
“Line goes up” video wasn interviewed on NPR


----------



## eyeheartawk (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> Actually, they do. What a dollar will buy in Muleshoe in terms of gasoline (to keep it easy) is different that what it will buy in terms of gas in New York. The fact that in either place you can swap it for four quarters is meaningless.



For the, I've lost track of how many times this has been told to you, purchasing power being different from one geographic location to another does *not* mean that money itself is non-fungible. Any $1 note is worth exactly the same as any other $1 note. Currency is explicitly fungible. That is one of the core things that makes it work. It's baked into the thing.


----------



## Justice and Rule (Feb 14, 2022)

AtomicPope said:


> I did track the "0.5%" source back to a prediction that was repeated as a fact in many articles.  That was my point for asking the source.  Here's the prediction:
> 
> 
> 
> ...




There are other places that have been updated that have similar estimations.

And this wasn't hard to find, so I'm not sure why you went with the older estimation.



eyeheartawk said:


> For the, I've lost track of how many times this has been told to you, purchasing power being different from one geographic location to another does *not* mean that money itself is non-fungible. Any $1 note is worth exactly the same as any other $1 note. Currency is explicitly fungible. That is one of the core things that makes it work. It's baked into the thing.




lol, they quoted me and then apparently blocked me right after.


----------



## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

eyeheartawk said:


> For the, I've lost track of how many times this has been told to you, purchasing power being different from one geographic location to another does *not* mean that money itself is non-fungible. Any $1 note is worth exactly the same as any other $1 note. Currency is explicitly fungible. That is one of the core things that makes it work. It's baked into the thing.



I have never questioned the status of fungible. I question the claim made that any $1 note is worth exactly the same as any other $1 note. It is not. 

In short, I am pointing out that the example being offered is not proof. It is the _transactionable _nature of the $1 bill that is common to all $1 bills, and therefore, why such bills are fungible. 

Not the _value_, which is not static or uniform from place to place or day to day.


----------



## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

UngainlyTitan said:


> We switched to fiat currency for very good reasons and there is a lot of value to be able to adjust the money supply to the economic circumstances.
> The other big issue I see are transaction speed and costs. The cost per transaction are very high and the speed is very slow, somewhere about 4 order of magnitude slower than VISA, with comparable power consumption. I am not sure there is a way to get real scalability, I think the issue is inherent in the nature of the blockchain.



How slow? The slowest thing about VISA IME is the cashier input and customer signature. And technology will certainly speed that along. 



UngainlyTitan said:


> Now, the question has been asked, why not let this thing run its course, what harm can it do to the real economy. Well the issue here, is if a big player in the real economy becomes/is a true believer and bets the company/hedge fund on crypto they could take down the whole economy with them



Interesting point. But isn't that true of any new investment scheme?  

However, even if every RPG maker bet the house on blockchains and crypto currency, and it tanked, the economy wouldn't even notice.

I don't know about the UK or Europe, but in the USA, banning a particular investment scheme is a complex undertaking, and despite the fact that bitcoin has been around for quite a while, there doesn't appear to be any serious move to try to close it off. My white collar law is rusty and low-level, but the sellers are not being overtly deceptive about the product, so unless they are juggling the books (and said books are in US territory), the Federal Code doesn't seem to come into play.


----------



## eyeheartawk (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> In short, I am pointing out that the example being offered is not proof. It is the _transactionable _nature of the $1 bill that is common to all $1 bills, and therefore, why such bills are fungible.



That just simply isn't true.


----------



## UngainlyTitan (Feb 14, 2022)

darjr said:


> The gentleman that did the l
> “Line goes up” video wasn interviewed on NPR



The anti government and anti society ideology that drives this stuff is reflected in the nature of the whole technology and is the source of of much of the issues structurally build into crypto.

It would be my opinion that Anarcho-Capitalism has a failure mode of Oligarchical Tyranny, whose failure modes are well known.


----------



## Mortus (Feb 14, 2022)

Why have a decentralized ledger? Couldn’t a company like WOTC create an official ledger for those that want digital collectibles?


----------



## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

eyeheartawk said:


> That just simply isn't true.
> 
> View attachment 151825



Same quality, same time, same place. Exactly what I said in post #189 and numerous other posts.


----------



## Cadence (Feb 14, 2022)

Mortus said:


> Why have a decentralized ledger? Couldn’t a company like WOTC create an official ledger for those that want digital collectibles?




There aren't nearly as many FOMO sales for something done the old fashioned way?


----------



## darjr (Feb 14, 2022)

Mortus said:


> Why have a decentralized ledger? Couldn’t a company like WOTC create an official ledger for those that want digital collectibles?



Might as well be just a database then. Which when you realize that, you are close to realizing it’s kinda a pointless tech in search of a problem.


----------



## UngainlyTitan (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> How slow? The slowest thing about VISA IME is the cashier input and customer signature. And technology will certainly speed that along.



The cashier input and customer signature is immaterial to considerations here. This is about millions of customers at millions of counters entering VISA transactions, Credit card transaction in the US exceed 100 million per day and are cleared at the rate of about 1 or 2 per millisecond.
Crypto in total has never exceeded 10 million daily transactions, clears a transaction at the rate about 1 every 4 to 5 seconds and sometimes significantly longer. This is unlikely to increase significantly due to structural issues in the design of blockchains and their distributed nature.

On energy 100k VISA transactions takes about 150 Kwh where a single crypto transaction takes somewhere from 1000 to 2000 Kwh or energy.




Jd Smith1 said:


> Interesting point. But isn't that true of any new investment scheme?



Not really, most new investment schemes take place on financial markets where the regulators can keep an eye on it and if necessary spank the players if thing get out of hand. The do not always do this but in theory they have the power to do so.



Jd Smith1 said:


> However, even if every RPG maker bet the house on blockchains and crypto currency, and it tanked, the economy wouldn't even notice.



it is not the game company (even the Video game companies) that they are worried about.


Jd Smith1 said:


> I don't know about the UK or Europe, but in the USA, banning a particular investment scheme is a complex undertaking, and despite the fact that bitcoin has been around for quite a while, there doesn't appear to be any serious move to try to close it off. My white collar law is rusty and low-level, but the sellers are not being overtly deceptive about the product, so unless they are juggling the books (and said books are in US territory), the Federal Code doesn't seem to come into play.



At the moment it is still pretty small but if big players on Wall Street become involved there may be some action, then again their may not, US politics is kind of weird.


Mortus said:


> Why have a decentralized ledger? Couldn’t a company like WOTC create an official ledger for those that want digital collectibles?



They could and that is what they do with Magic Online cards and is the big question that a lot of people that are sceptical of the whole thing ask. The thing is, a lot of this is driven by Anarcho-Capitalist Utopianism.


----------



## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

UngainlyTitan said:


> The cashier input and customer signature is immaterial to considerations here. This is about millions of customers at millions of counters entering VISA transactions, Credit card transaction in the US exceed 100 million per day and are cleared at the rate of about 1 or 2 per millisecond.
> Crypto in total has never exceeded 10 million daily transactions, clears a transaction at the rate about 1 every 4 to 5 seconds and sometimes significantly longer. This is unlikely to increase significantly due to structural issues in the design of blockchains and their distributed nature.



Doesn't sound long enough to be concerned about.



UngainlyTitan said:


> On energy 100k VISA transactions takes about 150 Kwh where a single crypto transaction takes somewhere from 1000 to 2000 Kwh or energy.



I don't see this being a issue. 


UngainlyTitan said:


> At the moment it is still pretty small but if big players on Wall Street become involved there may be some action, then again their may not, US politics is kind of weird.



Only to an outsider. Of course, I still can't grasp how the UK changes governments, either.


----------



## eyeheartawk (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> Same quality, same time, same place. Exactly what I said in post #189 and numerous other posts.



Okay. So your contention is that a New Mexico Dollar is not substantially equivalent enough to a New York Dollar to be interchangeable, and thus, at any given point we have, what millions of different versions of a Dollar floating around and we just all never realized it until just now, in this thread?  Even if that is your contention, I don't really see what really any of that has to do with why crypto and NFTs are bad. This is starting to read to me like a intentional thread derailment. 



Jd Smith1 said:


> I don't see this being a issue.



Seriously? Is this performance art?


----------



## UngainlyTitan (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> I don't see this being a issue.



You do not see a 6 million fold increase in the energy cost per transaction as an issue?


Jd Smith1 said:


> Only to an outsider. Of course, I still can't grasp how the UK changes governments, either.



 Not from the UK though, but when the UK first considered switching to Proportional Representation voting system one UK newspaper denounced the Single Transferable vote system, (which my country uses) as too complex for the average Englishman.


----------



## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

eyeheartawk said:


> Okay. So your contention is that a New Mexico Dollar is not substantially equivalent enough to a New York Dollar to be interchangeable, and thus, at any given point we have, what millions of different versions of a Dollar floating around and we just all never realized it until just now, in this thread?  Even if that is your contention, I don't really see what really any of that has to do with why crypto and NFTs are bad. This is starting to read to me like a intentional thread derailment.



I am wondering about your responses in the same way, but I will try one more time: as your own clip from wiki shows, the key word is _interchangeable_, not _value_. This is Economic terminology 101. The other poster kept saying that every dollar has the same _value_, which its patently untrue, as anyone who has speculated on currency exchanges can testify.

To repeat: the poster I had been discussing with kept stating that _value _was the fungible status of dollars, which in fact it is the _interchangeability_.

I never mentioned a New Mexico dollar. If you are going to try to try to use my posts, quote for accuracy. 



eyeheartawk said:


> Seriously? Is this performance art?



Yes, seriously. People do have opinions different from you or your circle of friends.


----------



## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

UngainlyTitan said:


> You do not see a 6 million fold increase in the energy cost per transaction as an issue?



No. It represents a tiny fraction of the power used by social media. Slash and burn farming in South and SE Asia alone puts more carbon into the atmosphere than the entire USA in a given year, so to me, it is just quibbling about ten snowflakes during a week-long blizzard.


UngainlyTitan said:


> Not from the UK though, but when the UK first considered switching to Proportional Representation voting system one UK newspaper denounced the Single Transferable vote system, (which my country uses) as too complex for the average Englishman.





They might have a point...


----------



## UngainlyTitan (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> They might have a point...


----------



## Snarf Zagyg (Feb 14, 2022)

So, a few thoughts about the overall concepts (NFTs, cryptocurrency) in general, and then I'll drill down into why these concepts aren't really applicable to TTRPGs.

First, I want to give a h/t to the many excellent commenters doing some great work in this thread. There's a lot of you, but I know that @Abstruse has had some posts of nearly-Snarfian length. Secondly, I also want to recommend the excellent video by Dan Olson (Line Goes Up). Yes, it is _very long_, but there's a lot of people that just throw their hands up when they hear about these ideas, or, worse, assume that because we now have Super Bowl ads and some celebrities shilling for these concepts, they must have a-ok. 

*1. NFTs.* (non-fungible tokens)

I normally go into great length, but this one is pretty simple. Just no. To borrow the name of Jordan Peele's upcoming movie, _NOPE_. Others have gone into length, but the basic issue is this- an NFT is simply a small bit of code. Because it is, by definition, so small, it can't really "be" much. So when you "buy" an NFT of, say, digital art, you aren't buying the art. What you are buying is, in effect, a receipt that says you bought something. They say it's a contract, but it's more like a record of a transaction. For digital art, that usually means that you have bought a link to a website- plus bragging rights that you bought it. You have no guarantee that the digital art will stay up. You have no guarantee that the art at the website won't be changed. You don't have exclusive rights to digital art- anyone can just copy your image. And finally, you have no guarantee that the artist who created the art is being compensated, or even knows that you bought it- or that you have any legal rights in the art. 

Now, if all of this is true, why have you heard of these crazy stories of some NFT going for thousands, or MILLIONS of dollars? Well, mostly because it's self-dealing (sometimes referred to as pump & dump). It's insiders selling each other the NFTs to create the illusion that they are worth money in order to drive the value of them, in the hope that they can unload them on bigger fools (or create value in the entire market) without taking on the possibility of loss. 

Next, you will occasionally here the pie-in-the-sky ideas like "Well, it's not just digital art. It can be anything. Soon, your medical records will be NFTs. All land sales and land registries will be NFTs. EVERYTHING WILL BE NFTs!" Putting aside for the second that this type of hysteria and hype is exactly what any investor knows to avoid, this makes as much sense as buying a rare book and assuming you have the rights to make the movie out of it (you don't). Anyone with a passing understanding of medical records, and how blockchain and NFTs work, immediately understands why you don't want a public ledger. And anyone who has bothered with land registries or title searches immediately appreciates that while a append-only database might possibly work in theory, the specific use of NFTs would be fatal in fact. 

From there, you have to go into another uncomfortable fact- as I wrote before, NFTs are small bits of code. And you know where this is going- where you have code, you have coders. Where you have coders, you have hackers. And yes, NFTs can hide exploits, and they are being used for just that purpose. So beyond the usual hacks (including phishing, etc.) you could be purchasing your very own malware.


*2. Cryptocurrency (that isn't currency).*

Next is crytpocurrency, like Bitcoin. I should start by saying that Bitcoin, for me, is bittersweet. In 2011, I became interested in TOR and the Silk Road and, by extension, Bitcoin ... you know, for a friend. I thought the whole thing was kind of interesting because I had a longstanding interest in these subjects ever since reading _Applied Cryptography_ when I was young(er). Anyway, I acquired some bitcoin back then, but after using it, chose to get rid of it as I realized that this wasn't a currency. So I could have acquired a fair amount of bitcoin in 2011, and didn't. 

Oh well! Sometimes being incorrect is worse than being right.   Point is, bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) have never been currencies in the way that we think of currency. Because it's not- it's an investment. I understand that this distinction is often lost on a lot of people- for example, a fungible commodity, like a common share, might be rapidly bought and sold by day traders. They are hardly "investing" in it. On the other hand, investment banks can, and do, take large positions in particular currencies assuming they will appreciate vis-a-vis other currencies - which is certainly a type of investment.

The primary distinction is that, for most people, currency is not something you hold on to for its intrinsic value- it's just a medium of exchange. I don't keep $80 in my physical wallet assuming that two years from now, it will be worth more. I keep it there to buy booze, books, and pizza slices that have no pineapple topping.  

That's not what is happening with crypto. _There is no use-case scenario for most people where crypto is better than "real currency." _I did emphasize "most people." If you are a country avoiding sanctions (like North Korea), laundering money (like a drug lord), or otherwise willing to engage in high transaction costs and less security - then crypto is fine. But that's because it's the same as providing any other "bartered good" that the value is indeterminate, but has the advantage that unlike physical bartered good (shipments of cocaine, weapons) it can be transacted digitally. But it doesn't work as a currency for almost any other good because the structural issues with crypto (which include rapidly fluctuating prices since, again, it's a volatile investment, and also include significant lag times in processing transactions which make the volatility worse) mean that merchants don't want to accept it. 

The best way to understand cryptocurrency, then, is this- it's just using increasing amounts of a real-life scarce resource (energy and time- aka computing power) to create digital scarcity. That digital scarcity is the investment you are making. What makes it somewhat ... questionable ... is that most investments, whether they are shares in a company, or even Beanie Babies, have some underlying value (however slight). The value of crypto is only that there isn't much of it, and people are willing to pay for it.

As long as more people keep coming into the market, it works out great. As long as people keep perceiving it to have value, that's awesome. And because it has utility (especially to non-state actors who are doing illicit thing, or state actors who want to avoid scrutiny, or people who are trying to keep things from prying eyes ... similar to the idea of bearer bonds ...) for people who are willing to overlook the transaction costs, it still has continuing vitality.


*3. Are these Ponzi schemes? Pyramid Schemes? MLMs? Scams?*

This is somewhat more complicated. Specific types of scams and frauds have specific definitions- it's never a good idea to get caught up in the Sealioning of certain supporters who want to debate the exact terms of a Ponzi scheme, or, for that matter, MLMs (which in the United States, are actually legal ... so long as they aren't illegal pyramid scheme ... GO AMERICA!). Instead, it's probably best to say the following:
If you are ever promised a guaranteed rate of return on something that is above the average return of the S&P 500 over time, you should run away. In addition, if you don't understand how something works, but think that Matt Damon saying "Fortune favors the brave," means that you need to be brave... run away. 

What you should know is the following- this area is currently filled with grifters, fraudsters, and marks. If you don't know who the mark is, you're the mark. It favors people who are already very very wealthy, and it favors people who are computer-literate (there is the constant danger of hacking). There is no consumer protection, so if you lose everything, you lose everything. 

(I am avoiding discussion of the many externalities of crypto, by the way, which I think others have sufficiently covered)


*4. What about the thing we come here for? You know, TTRPGs?*

At the most basic level, the problem with NFTs (especially), cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and some of the proposed Web 3.0 ideas is simple- they are trying to solve problems that don't exist, or solve simple problems in ways that are worse. If you are asking ... "But why,"
 the answer, as always, is money. It is an attempt to further monetize things that aren't, necessarily, monetizable. In an ideal world, if the underlying tech wasn't so problematic, you could have a company sell you the right to your NFT avatar, and then Morrus could charge you to put your NFT avatar next to your post, and everyone would be conducting the business in crypto. 

So when it comes to corporate entities, the idea that "blockchain" or "NFTs" is simply the idea that they could make more money- it's just a buzzword, similar to, "synergy," or "pivot-to-video," or "microtransactions," or "transition to the service model." Most of the decision-makers at large companies might parrot these words without a full understanding of what it means, other than it's what other people are doing. This is especially true of the world of NFTs and crypto. Heck, the history of Bitcoin is one of announcements of companies saying that they accept it, and then, a little later, quietly getting rid of it. 

Now, you have the backlash brewing. One of the most interesting is in the area of videogames- primarily because you have the CEOs looking for money and not fully understanding the tech, while the developers who make the games have a better understanding of the situation. One of my favorite ongoing stories is that Ubisoft has been publicly pushing for NFTs, while the people that, you know, actually write the code have been pushing back (best comment from an Ubisoft employee- "Are we competing with EA for the ‘Most hated Game Studio by the public’ title? Because this is how you do it.").

Simply put, there is absolutely no reason to use blockchain, crypto, or (ESPECIALLY) NFTs in TTRPGs. There is nothing that is done by this tech that cannot already be done, better and faster, by what we have. More importantly, people need to understand the severe issues that these products, ESPECIALLY NFTs have, given that the TTRPG and collectible market overlap. 

We need to look for ways to use technology to make sure that artists and other creatives in the TTRPG industry get paid. This isn't it. There are some artists that, as first movers, have made money in the NFT space. But there are many, many more who have paid the price to mint and have lost money (after all, look at the quality of the art of most NFTs). There is also no reliable way to ensure artists get paid or have their rights protected unless you use reliable third parties- which, you know, gets rid of the whole reason for NFTs and just shows that they are a technology that creates additional problems without solving the ones that are necessary.

And that's my final takeaway- engineers and problem solvers look at the problem and try to devise the best solution. Grifters and scammers will try to sell you a bad solution for your problems, while promising it can and will solve even more problems.


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## Umbran (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> I don't see this being a issue.




Then it is time to do some math. 

A single crypto transaction currently eats up 1000Kwh of electricity, at a cost of roughly $104.  At the moment, you don't see that cost, because it is distributed across the entire crypto network.  But, scaled up to US credit card levels, that would become visible, because it becomes about *$10 billion a day*, eating up almost _*ten times the current total US electricity generation*_.  

Is the issue more clear to you now?


----------



## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

Umbran said:


> Then it is time to do some math.
> 
> A single crypto transaction currently eats up 1000Kwh of electricity, at a cost of roughly $104.  At the moment, you don't see that cost, because it is distributed across the entire crypto network.  But, scaled up to US credit card levels, that would become visible, because it becomes about *$10 billion a day*, eating up almost _*ten times the current total US electricity generation*_.
> 
> Is the issue more clear to you now?



It wasn't unclear. I explained my view of it in post #202.


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## doctorhook (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:
			
		

> I don't see this being a issue.




You don’t see an issue that it costs an average of a million times more energy to process a single transaction? Energy is literally the bottleneck the limits human technology, and crypto is a spectacular waste of energy… with no advantages except for speculators who might make some money. Why should society condone this?



			
				Tally Isham said:
			
		

> If Hasbro minted a few Magic the Gathering NTFs and a few kids brought, played, and traded them...
> what exactly is the problem here?



I object to kids being sold financial securities, especially volatile ones and scams.


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## Abstruse (Feb 14, 2022)

Mortus said:


> Why have a decentralized ledger? Couldn’t a company like WOTC create an official ledger for those that want digital collectibles?



Honestly, this is the point I bring up when people talk about integrating NFTs into games (as opposed to simply selling NFTs of game art the way the makers of Dead by Daylight did via a cross-promotion with an NFT firm). NFTs mean that the company in question no longer controls the NFT, including where and by whom it can be sold, as opposed to the current system in most MMORPGs (I'm going to use Star Wars: The Old Republic as an example because it's the one I have the most personal experience with that's not over two decades old) where the assets and marketplace are controlled by the company.

If I want to buy an in-game item in SWTOR, I have three main options. The first are in-game vendors, which don't carry the rare and most desirable items. I mean obviously, they're not rare if the NPC in the major player hub is selling an infinite number of them. You purchase items from them using Credits, which is the base in-game currency. You get a lot of credits thrown at you for doing even the most basic missions so that, if you don't go buying anything extravagant like super-expensive speeders or unlocking areas of your player home, you've likely got at least 1 million credits if not a couple of million by the time you finish your class's base storyline.

The second option is the "cash store", which on SWTOR is the Cartel Market. The way these typically work is that you have Cartel Coins on your account that can be spent on items for sale in the Cartel Market. You get Cartel Coins by completing missions (which do not get you very many at all), by setting up two-factor authentication on your account (which gets you 50 coins per month which still isn't very much), or through paying money to BioWare, either by purchasing a subscription (which gets you 500 coins every 30 days while you're subscribed) or by buying them directly (at prices ranging from $2.99 for 250 coins to $39.99 for 5500 coins. You can then spend these coins on mostly cosmetic items - the armor and weapons you get are at best empty shells that must have accessories added to them to give them in-game bonuses but are typically just used as a cosmetic costume (you have the option for at least two sets of armor, one that you're wearing for bonuses and one that you put on in the Outfit Designer gives you no bonus but is the armor that everybody sees on your in-game avatar, allowing people to customize their appearance specifically without regard to the items' stats) - or a handful of very minor boosts, like getting 25% extra XP for an hour.

The third option is the in-game player marketplace called the Galactic Trade Network. This is where players can buy and sell any item in the game that is not locked to the account (some weapons, armor, and other items are locked to a specific character or to your account so you can't sell or trade them). You can list any item you want for sale at any price you want in Credits and the listing will stay active until somebody buys it or until the time runs you (you set the time limit, anywhere from 1 day to 7 days). The transaction is handled automatically so the seller does not have to be online, nor can the seller "scam" a user by posting something with an inaccurate description (every item has a unique name and is listed by that name) or by somebody taking their credits without giving them the item (the GTN "holds" the item while it's listed for sale and, if it sells, the buyer gets the item in their in-game inbox while if it doesn't sell, the item is returned to the seller. Also, each transaction on the GTN charges a certain percentage of the selling price in credits, so each transaction takes at least some credits out of the economy of the game. So if I get an item in the game that I don't want, I can sell it on the GTN for credits and if I want an item I can't find on my own, I can buy it on the GTN from another player for credits.

All of these items are managed on BioWare's servers. If I buy a subscription or buy Cartel Coins, I am paying money to BioWare. I cannot exchange real-world money for in-game items directly, but there are ways around that. I can buy Cartel Coins, then use those to buy items off the Cartel Market that are currently selling well on the GTN, sell them on the GTN, then use the credits I got from that sale to buy whatever I want off the GTN.

You'll notice a few things about this system.

1) All cash money is flowing into BioWare. Every cent of actual real-world US Dollars, British Pounds, etc. goes only to BioWare.

2) No cash money is leaving the ecosystem. No matter how I fudge the system, I cannot trade anything within the system for real-world money. Because the Cartel Market also sells randomized lootboxes of items and the loot from everything except quests and missions is randomized, this avoids any gambling laws because none of the items have a real-world value.

3) I can spend as much real-world money as I like and, possibly with a couple of added steps, buy any item I want within the game.

4) Everything is handled on the BioWare servers. You do not need to leave the game (except maybe to go to the official SWTOR website also hosted on BioWare servers) to do any of this, so BioWare has oversight of all transactions taking place.

5) While there is a "black market" of forums and other places where people can buy or sell in-game items for real-world money, BioWare monitors these sites pretty well and bans users who do so on a regular basis, making it a very risky proposition.

Now, if we switch this to NFTs, pretty much all of that breaks. Cash money can flow outside of BioWare controlled servers because NFTs can be traded anywhere since they're authenticated on distributed databases on the blockchain instead of by the databases on BioWare servers. Players can spend cash money for in-game items without it going to BioWare or even collecting a percentage of it as a trading fee. BioWare can no longer control the source of in-game items because their ownership is not saved on BioWare servers, meaning that if a player is banned from the game for whatever reason (such as violating the part of the ToS that bans buying or selling in-game items outside of the approved BioWare methods), that player can still sell their NFTs to other players.

Okay, that sounds great for players, doesn't it? You're freed from BioWare having as much power over your account and you have more options. But here's the problem:

_Why in the hell would BioWare agree to do this?!_

You're asking the company to give up that level of control over their own product for...what? What benefit does BioWare get out of this? They lose the ability to track which players have which items, they lose on the cash money being spent on items, they lose the ability to enforce their ToS on item sales, and - here's the big one - _the in-game items will now have a real-world cash value associated with them, which puts BioWare in violation of gambling laws in many jurisdictions_.

Then there's the basic coding problems. The game would need to be updated to authenticate NFTs. And it would need to perform these authentication requests constantly. Otherwise, what's stopping me from equipping my NFT gear on my character (with the game checking that I have the NFT in question first), then selling that NFT while I'm still logged into the game? How will the game know I no longer own this NFT? And what happens when the player I sold it to logs in and equips the same NFT item I sold them? These are all coding problems that will have to be solved requiring I can't even guess how large of a team working for I can't even guess how long to implement and test it all (because the last thing you want in a situation like this is a duping bug), both of which means spending a massive amount of money.

What benefit is there to BioWare to spend that much money on development in order to lose part of their revenue stream, their control of in-game items, and possibly run afoul of gambling laws? If they cared that much about player convenience, they wouldn't have taken seven years to implement weapons into the Outfit Designer (a feature that _still _isn't live until the next major update which has already been delayed twice).

So far, I haven't gotten a single answer to that question about any game company. And as if they were trying to prove me right, Ubisoft minted 2250 NFTs for in-game cosmetic items for Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint. Of those 2250 NFTs, they have sold a grand total of...15. For a total of less than $400...in Tezos, a cryptocurrency people who don't regularly follow cryptocurrency probably don't even know exists.


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## Jer (Feb 14, 2022)

The thing that all of these conversations always boil down to is that there is so much technology out there around these things that scammers are able to exploit that to muddy the conversations up.

The tech is what we used to call "peer-to-peer" but that name isn't sexy enough to get investors to buy into it. In fact all of these new terms are basically branding exercises rather than techology (except for the underlying distributed database idea that blockchain is built on - that's actually a clever bit of tech).

*Blockchain* - it's just a distributed database where you don't have to trust a central database. That's all it is. It requires multiple systems to be running the database for it to work because it's a peer-to-peer technology (and they're crucial for having enough nodes to make the tech work without some kind of central authority) but at the end of the day all it is is a distributed database that records transactions. The distributed database uses a lot of power because it's running redundant databases on many systems all over the world to work.

*Bitcoin* - a convoluted system for generating tokens to be entered into the distributed database that is guaranteed to make those tokens rarer and rarer as time goes on. Unlike similar systems in the real world (such as, say, Collectible Card Game manufacturers) the system for generating tokens is distributed across the peer-to-peer system but controlled algorithmically to guarantee increasing rarity over time. Bitcoin is the thing that uses TONS of power because the algorithm that generates tokens is designed to basically make computers waste a whole lot of time in the hopes of getting lucky and generating a new token.

*Non-fungible token* - a fancy way of saying "a receipt for your transaction that can't be faked".  The idea is that instead of generating tokens algorithmically, you allow people to create collectibles and "sell" them - but the NFT software only tracks the sales receipts, not the actual item itself.  So if you buy a jpeg what the NFT software is actually giving you is a receipt that says you purchased it, it's up to you and the previous "owner" to figure out what the heck "owning" a jpeg actually means.

All of these terms are straight up marketing terms.  It's a distributed network for tracking ownership of tokens and that's all it is.  The power that it gives over a central authority doing something like this is essentially there is no controlling authority over it to get sued or regulated (which makes it attractive to scammers, of course).

The thing that all of these companies that want to get into this blockchain environment never do is make the case for why whatever they're doing is better off on a distributed database with no central authority instead of being served from their own database servers. If you're running a game, you don't need a separate system to track the ledgers for who owns what on your system.  (I also have no idea what Kickstarter thinks they're getting from a blockchain either).

Frankly most companies talking about blockchain, NFTs or whatever hyped term is being used this week all feel to me like either companies looking to keep their investors happy by saying "we're looking into it", or companies looking to tweak their stock prices by getting some future investors excited that they're using the current hype.


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## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

doctorhook said:


> You don’t see an issue that it costs an average of a million times more energy to process a single transaction? Energy is literally the bottleneck the limits human technology, and crypto is a spectacular waste of energy… with no advantages except for speculators who might make some money. Why should society condone this?



For about the 20th time: no.

As to why society should condone this? In a free country, it is no one's business what a given customer does with the electricity they purchase. So I suppose it depends on where you live.



doctorhook said:


> I object to kids being sold financial securities, especially volatile ones and scams.




Do a lot of children invest in securities these days?


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## Umbran (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> No. It represents a tiny fraction of the power used by social media.




I'm sorry, but you are incorrect.  

Current estimates have Facebook using about 509 million kwh of electricity a year.  That's about half of a Twh (Terawatt hour).

Cryptocurrency mining?  About 64 Terawatt hours.  

So, no, cryptocurrency is no longer a fraction of the power used by social media.  









						Bitcoin Uses More Electricity Than Many Countries. How Is That Possible? (Published 2021)
					

The most popular cryptocurrency wastes energy by design. Why is that, and could it ever be greener?



					www.nytimes.com


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## Umbran (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> As to why society should condone this? In a free country, it is no one's business what a given customer does with the electricity they purchase.




It is no business of others, if your use is private and impacts nobody else.  What you do within your own home or business is your business so long as it doesn't spill out and become my business.

Like, say... noise.  Or pollution.  Or brownouts in the local power grid.  Or volatility in stock markets that muck with other people's financial security...


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## doctorhook (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:
			
		

> For about the 20th time: no.



 Well you’ve got a pretty incredible answer for it, so you might have to keep answering it until you say something believable.



			
				Jd Smith1 said:
			
		

> As to why society should condone this? In a free country, it is no one's business what a given customer does with the electricity they purchase. So I suppose it depends on where you live.



Umbran nicely calculated it out for you: if crypto were used as much as credit cards, the energy costs of that system would be ten times the available energy generating capacity of the USA—(ignoring every other use of power) only 1 out every 10 financial transactions would be able to be completed due to power constraints. The cost of transacting would become astronomical (people bidding on electricity to complete transactions) and the system would grind to a halt. That’s assuming crypto became as widespread as credit cards.

No reasonable society should ever allow itself to become so broken in pursuit of “personal liberty to spend money uninhibited”.




			
				Jd Smith1 said:
			
		

> Do a lot of children invest in securities these days?



Well when you start selling NFTs featuring characters from children’s games, it’s gonna happen. The real question is whether it should be allowed to. I vote No.


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## UngainlyTitan (Feb 14, 2022)

Abstruse said:


> snip  ....



some good stuff.


Abstruse said:


> Then there's the basic coding problems. The game would need to be updated to authenticate NFTs. And it would need to perform these authentication requests constantly. Otherwise, what's stopping me from equipping my NFT gear on my character (with the game checking that I have the NFT in question first), then selling that NFT while I'm still logged into the game? How will the game know I no longer own this NFT? And what happens when the player I sold it to logs in and equips the same NFT item I sold them? These are all coding problems that will have to be solved requiring I can't even guess how large of a team working for I can't even guess how long to implement and test it all (because the last thing you want in a situation like this is a duping bug), both of which means spending a massive amount of money.
> 
> snip



From my brief look at what NFT's can contain, I do not see anything that stops an NFT from returning some executable code, so any game that would accept NFT would have to screen from code injection attacks to the running game engine and to the underlying databases, not to mention any zero day exploits in the libraries used by the game devs.


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## Justice and Rule (Feb 14, 2022)

UngainlyTitan said:


> some good stuff.
> 
> From my brief look at what NFT's can contain, I do not see anything that stops an NFT from returning some executable code, so any game that would accept NFT would have to screen from code injection attacks to the running game engine and to the underlying databases, not to mention any zero day exploits in the libraries used by the game devs.




I believe this is a huge problem with NFT theft and such: in trying to inspect an NFT you can open yourself up to all sorts of things. Olson discusses it in the video, but this has been one way people steal NFTs.


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## Parmandur (Feb 14, 2022)

Dire Bare said:


> But here's an example of a pair of independent artists who created their own NFTs and saved their home. Is this a scam? Were these two artists scammed (by themselves), are they scamming their patrons? Or are they foolishly engaging in something that will come back to bite them?
> 
> CNBC.com - Dastardly Ducks
> 
> NFTs can and are being used for evil. Can they also be used for good? Or, just a neutral way to share digital art?



Yes, they are scamming their patrons, either consciously or because they were sold on the idea by someone taking advantage their desperate situation. That part of how pyramid scheme work, taking advantage a ge of desperate and hardworking people in the middle of the pyramid, often to their advantage.


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## UngainlyTitan (Feb 14, 2022)

Justice and Rule said:


> I believe this is a huge problem with NFT theft and such: in trying to inspect an NFT you can open yourself up to all sorts of things. Olson discusses it in the video, but this has been one way people steal NFTs.



Hmmm... I wonder, while I have read of reports of people that received a mystery NFT in their wallet, which when they try to sell they then find that all other NFTs in their wallet has walked off with it. 
I suppose that this could be achieved by executing some code from the NFT being sold that scans the wallet and add all found NFT to the transaction. By the time the transaction is completed it is too late. Remember, "No take Backsies" is built into the system (it is append only).
I could see that as working,


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## UngainlyTitan (Feb 14, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> Yes, they are scamming their patrons, either consciously or because they were sold on the idea by someone taking advantage their desperate situation. That part of how pyramid scheme work, taking advantage a ge of desperate and hardworking people in the middle of the pyramid, often to their advantage.



I would add that just because the overall thing is a scam, does not mean that, people that have been taken in cannot make money on it by getting in and out before it all blows up. People that know it is a scam, can also make money on it, if brave enough, or they can take the loss.


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## Parmandur (Feb 14, 2022)

aramis erak said:


> Most won't boycott WotC - various reasons - and it would take a huge or a very visible boycott to get them to notice. And they're considered pretty evil by many already.



I mean...not really? WotC not only isn't involved with any pyramid schemes, they print their products in the USA, which alone makes them the ethical leaders in the RPG industry.


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## Umbran (Feb 14, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> I mean...not really? WotC not only isn't involved with any pyramid schemes, they print their products in the USA, which alone makes them the ethical leaders in the RPG industry.




So, you live on a planet of some seven billion people.  They all gotta eat, so they all need jobs. Even if they live in China.


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## Rabulias (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> Actually, they do. What a dollar will buy in Muleshoe in terms of gasoline (to keep it easy) is different that what it will buy in terms of gas in New York. The fact that in either place you can swap it for four quarters is meaningless.



But the price of gas in a location has nothing to do with the value of that dollar. Rather, it has to do with a particular region's economic factors (state/local taxes on gas, local wages, local inflation, local cost of living, local supply & demand).

If you wanted to buy the _Player's Handbook_ from Amazon, it will cost you the same number of dollars whether you order it from New York City or Muleshoe. In fact, if Muleshoe had a FLGS you would pay the same number of dollars as you would in a FLGS in NYC (discounting loyalty discounts or limited sales, and again, local sales taxes might affect the final total slightly, but the _price of the item _is the same).


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## Parmandur (Feb 14, 2022)

Umbran said:


> So, you live on a planet of some seven billion people.  They all gotta eat, so they all need jobs. Even if they live in China.



Very true, and outsourcing manufacturing to China isn't something I hold against any of the Chinese workers: they are the ones being exploited. If they weren't being exploited, it wouldn't be cheaper.


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## Staffan (Feb 14, 2022)

An additional downside of cryptocurrencies: "mining" them doesn't only take a lot of *energy*, but also processing power. You ever wonder why the price of graphics cards have gone through the roof lately? Part is because of pandemic-related supply chain issues, but the big one is that crypto miners buy them which drives up the prices.


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## doctorhook (Feb 14, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> I mean...not really? WotC not only isn't involved with any pyramid schemes, they print their products in the USA, which alone makes them the ethical leaders in the RPG industry.



Technically not true. WotC prints Magic cards in the USA, Belgium, Japan, and perhaps other places I’m forgetting now.

EDIT: I realize MTG isn’t in the RPG industry. My bad.


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## Parmandur (Feb 14, 2022)

doctorhook said:


> Technically not true. WotC prints Magic cards in the USA, Belgium, Japan, and perhaps other places I’m forgetting now.
> 
> EDIT: I realize MTG isn’t in the RPG industry. My bad.



And they do print some in China...for selling in China, to my understanding. Point ua, they make use of relatively local printers, which is an ethical step past so very many companies these days.


----------



## eyeheartawk (Feb 14, 2022)

I've seen some version of the argument that "The regulated financial markets don't work for the little guy" posited as a problem with the stated solution being " A completely unregulated financial market does work _better_ for the little guy" in this thread a number of times and that's absolutely mind boggling.

Too many people die even though their car had seat belts, thus the answer is to remove the laws saying cars should have seatbelts.


----------



## eyeheartawk (Feb 14, 2022)

Umbran said:


> Then it is time to do some math.
> 
> A single crypto transaction currently eats up 1000Kwh of electricity, at a cost of roughly $104.  At the moment, you don't see that cost, because it is distributed across the entire crypto network.  But, scaled up to US credit card levels, that would become visible, because it becomes about *$10 billion a day*, eating up almost _*ten times the current total US electricity generation*_.
> 
> Is the issue more clear to you now?



And I think that's just running comparable numbers to Visa. The goal, presumably, would be to replace Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover, PayPal, Zelle, Cashapp, Venmo etc. Just all of it. I mean, once we build a Dyson Sphere around the sun that should work out fine.


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## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

Staffan said:


> An additional downside of cryptocurrencies: "mining" them doesn't only take a lot of *energy*, but also processing power. You ever wonder why the price of graphics cards have gone through the roof lately? Part is because of pandemic-related supply chain issues, but the big one is that crypto miners buy them which drives up the prices.



But is buying graphics cards illegal? No? Immoral? Again, no. Using electricity you purchased? In the USA, certainly not.

This entire thread seems to be hating crypto-currencies to such a degree that you also hate the brand of shoes they wear and the brand of periodical they're currently reading.

Myself, I'm not interested in any crypto-currency. They might be the next big thing, or not, but I'm not going to bother with them, except (after reading this thread) perhaps working them as background plot device into an upcoming campaign. 

But so far, no one here seems to have nailed down whether they are a scam or the next innovation.


----------



## Umbran (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> But so far, no one here seems to have nailed down whether they are a scam or the next innovation.




I think we nailed down that they are a technology that does not scale upwards much at all, and that is a problem for anything that wants to be a currency.  

Selling it on the basis that it will increase in value, when that value is dependent on perpetual growth of use it cannot have, probably counts as a scam.


----------



## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

UngainlyTitan said:


> Hmmm... I wonder, while I have read of reports of people that received a mystery NFT in their wallet, which when they try to sell they then find that all other NFTs in their wallet has walked off with it.
> I suppose that this could be achieved by executing some code from the NFT being sold that scans the wallet and add all found NFT to the transaction. By the time the transaction is completed it is too late. Remember, "No take Backsies" is built into the system (it is append only).
> I could see that as working,




On a side note: so the cyber-currency is a data packet, right? 

Could said data packets be used as a virus delivery systems?  I ask because I've got a thread about attacking the Net for a RPG campaign.


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## J.Quondam (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> On a side note: so the cyber-currency is a data packet, right?
> 
> Could said data packets be used as a virus delivery systems?  I ask because I've got a thread about attacking the Net for a RPG campaign.



Yes, NFTs at least could harbor malicious code, though my understanding is it's dependent on whatever platform being used to manage them. An exploit that could steal cryptocoin out of user's wallets was identified and fixed last year on the biggest platform, Open Sea:








						Bugs allowing malicious NFT uploads uncovered in OpenSea marketplace
					

Malicious NFTs could have become an attack vector for hackers trying to steal digital wallet funds.




					www.zdnet.com
				



Whether that sort of thing could be exploited for something more general across the internet, I don't know. But hackers and security people are always discovering new exploits.


----------



## jolt (Feb 14, 2022)

It's totally a scam because there is zero inherent value to it.  It's not even a license.  The closest equivalency that I can think of is an Internet link.  I can make an internet link to any webpage I want whether or not I'm involved in the website.  I then sell that link for $5 a pop.  The only way for someone else to make money is to sell it for more than they paid for it, which is a lot easier if you got in at the beginning, because an Internet link has no actual value - it's just a link.   Now, the company that owns the website I'm linking to isn't necessarily even going to be aware that I've made these links and are now selling them.  Then, that company closes and the website is gone.  What happens to those links?  Well, nothing; they're just not pointing anywhere anymore.  That's what an NFT is.  Buying one (or many) does not give you ownership of anything.  It doesn't give you a license.  It doesn't give you a claim.  All it does is to say that this particular link is yours (but there could be millions of other links) by assigning a very complex calculation number to your link.

In fact, it's even worse than that.  Let's say I invest $10,000 US in some cryptocurrency.  Someone else calculates that it might be worth $50,000 US now so I decide to sell.  Except I can't.  Yet again, there's no actual commodity with value here.  The company that created the cryptocurrency doesn't pay anything to anybody.  The only way I can make money is to find another buyer and convince them that my stuff is worth 50 grand.  Then, that person has to convince another buyer that's it's worth more than that.  And all you own is a link that may or may not still be pointing to something.

It is, in every way, shape, and form, a scam.


----------



## Mistwell (Feb 14, 2022)

Abstruse said:


> Yes, Morrus stated he doesn't understand cryptocurrency. I have offered to explain it to him many times. He understands "This is all nonsense and I want nothing to do with it". That's all he needs to know, so like most people, he doesn't care to look into it more. He runs a news site so has to report on the news and, as an editor, knows he has reporters like me who have done the research he can lean on if necessary.




Right. So this is where, normally, you'd apologize to me for claiming I made some broad statement that nobody here understands it and didn't realize I was responding directly to the quote from Morrus, which I quoted directly in my post.

Oddly, you didn't. In fact, you seem to be just running with it...even though it should be real clear by now (particularly given I had quoted him directly) that I hadn't made a broad statement but was specific to the article written here. Which...you are not the author of, right? Why did you try to spin that as something that it wasn't?



Abstruse said:


> I also notice that in none of your posts, you have not refuted a single criticism anyone has made of cryptocurrency, the blockchain, or NFTs.




Correct, and I explained why. I am not trying to persuade anyone to like cryto or blockchains or NFTs (and I didn't even comment about NFTs - I only mentioned Crypto). I find it perfectly fine that you don't like them and have your reasons for not liking them. This forum isn't really a place to just discuss that kind of topic anyway unless it relates to RPGs, right? My point was, others do like them and have their reasons for liking them as well, and it doesn't matter what their reasons are for liking them. And it's not really your place to tell them they're wrong for liking them, provided they're not evangelizing to you to like them.



Abstruse said:


> All you've done is insult us and dismiss us as old people who just don't get it.




I am old too  And I didn't say "you just don't get it" other than Morrus literally saying that. I did however say this whole trendy thing to be highly dismissive of these topics looks very much to me like the trends which took place throughout modern history where older-tech-oriented people were dismissive of new technology, and I listed several of those, and it turned out they were badly wrong and were not adapting to changes in society as they were happening.

Now there were other trends in history where those old white men turned out to be correct. People who dismissed 3D TVs for example, they were right. But the odds are usually against dismissing new technology, and I cannot think of many which got 14 years in and still were climbing, and which reached these financial heights, which ended up being a flaming out fade of the type y'all are claiming this one to be. Can you? I bet if you can, it's a pretty narrow exception to a fairly broad set of technologies which otherwise tended to be successful and not on the level of pogs.



Abstruse said:


> Wait, sorry, that's not entirely true. You said
> 
> 
> As of January 2022, only 400,000 cryptocurrency wallets (the accounts online that hold assets on the blockchain) have ever held an NFT, and 80% of all NFTs are held by only 40,000 wallets. That is a very, very small minority. To put that in perspective, more people own copies of Sonic Boom for the Nintendo WiiU than own NFTs. So no, this is not the "next big thing".



I didn't say ANYTHING about NFTs. If you think I did, look again. Are you confusing me with someone else? NFTs are to me a much trickier subject than Crypto Currencies, and the "trillion" number I mentioned was in reference to BitCoin and not Ether, and NFTs run almost entirely on Ether. If your response is about NFTs and Ether, well...I didn't really comment on those topics so OK I guess?


----------



## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

J.Quondam said:


> Yes, NFTs at least could harbor malicious code, though my understanding is it's dependent on whatever platform being used to manage them. An exploit that could steal cryptocoin out of user's wallets was identified and fixed last year on the biggest platform, Open Sea:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Close enough for RPG setting detail. Thanks!


----------



## UngainlyTitan (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> On a side note: so the cyber-currency is a data packet, right?
> 
> Could said data packets be used as a virus delivery systems?  I ask because I've got a thread about attacking the Net for a RPG campaign.



As far as I know (but I am not an expert) the currency token cannot deliver a virus, it is a unique identifier of some type as far as I understand it.
Now while NFT does not have the capacity to deliver one (a full blown virus) either but the NFT refers to an external url that could deliver a virus. 
Furthermore the NFT could deliver a text snippet that could be executed in the application (often the database) as a command.

Now a competent developer should not run any arbitrary piece of text received from the internet is a way that it would execute a command in their systems. However, a lot of people are using tools developed by total strangers to generate NFTs and there is no reason that those people could not include backdoor commands that could be activated by scanning the right NFT at some later time.


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## Gradine (Feb 14, 2022)




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## Staffan (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> But is buying graphics cards illegal? No? Immoral? Again, no. Using electricity you purchased? In the USA, certainly not.



Driving up the prices of entertainment and energy to the point where they are priced out of reach? Yes, I'll call that immoral. Not illegal (currently), but certainly immoral.

And we've already established that NFTs are a scam and that cryptocurrency is evil. This is just another bad side effect of them.


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## gamerprinter (Feb 14, 2022)

Intel and a smaller company is working, separately, on a low wattage server designed for crypto mining, though it probably won't be available for a year, but maybe crypto mining could become less environmentally impactful. I don't do cryptos, NFTs or any of that, but for those concerned, it might offer some hope... because crypto mining is not going to stop, anytime soon.


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## Umbran (Feb 14, 2022)

gamerprinter said:


> Intel and a smaller company is working, separately, on a low wattage server designed for crypto mining, though it probably won't be available for a year, but maybe crypto mining could become less environmentally impactful.




So, a long time ago, folks invented the fluorescent light bulb, and touted that its use in commercial lighting would allow for energy savings.

It didn't.  What happened is that, since it was cheaper, folks used _more of it_ - you started seeing buildings with more lighting, and leaving the lights on all night because it was cheap and made the building look impressive at night.

This fits a general pattern - improvements in energy efficiency do not generally lead to energy savings.  They lead to increased consumption due to the decrease in cost.  If you decrease the energy cost per server, folks will throw more servers at it because now they can get more calculation done per $$.


----------



## Mannahnin (Feb 14, 2022)

Abstruse said:


> A DAO which stands for "Decentralized Autonomous Organization" and is hard to describe but it's basically a way to pool cryptocurrency together into a single account like contributing to a pot for a single goal, the most famous was the recent purchase of a copy of the filming bible for Darren Aronofsky's cancelled adaptation of Dune. Then said, because they bought the book, they were going to sell scans of the book as NFTs and make their own movie based on Dune not understanding that buying a book, no matter how rare, does not give you the copyright of the book. Like just because I have a first printing of Deities & Demigods on my shelf doesn't mean that I now own Dungeons & Dragons.



Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune, but yes.  Hilarious.



Jd Smith1 said:


> Isn't music, literature, and gaming products produced in electronic format simply virtual assets invested in with the hope they explode in value?
> 
> I know I shelled out a hundred bucks for the right to use Roll20 more effectively. I doubt their business is exploding, but from what I read they're doing all right.



No, I don't think I've ever heard of anyone buying a digital copy of a song, book, or game in the hopes that it will increase in value, never mind explode.  They're not investment vehicles.  They're things we buy to use, for entertainment and enrichment.  I don't think you spent a hundred bucks on Roll20 in the hopes that you could resell your account to someone else down the line for two hundred bucks.  You spent it to increase the utility/enjoyment you get out of the product. No?

-----------------------------

One of the key takeaways of this thread is that NFTs don't actually have any practical use. They are functionally a net loss.  Tulip bulbs had more value, because you could grow a flower from them. NFTs are nothing but hype.

Blockchain theoretically has practical uses.  The most solid I've ever heard is a distributed property/deed ledger.  Where you don't have to rely on the authority of a (potentially corrupt) local government to register deeds and transfer of real property.  But the technology has been around for many years at this point, and no such practical use has yet come to fruition.  Often because there are other functional hurdles.  For example, in any circumstance in which the local government is corrupt and cannot be trusted to protect your land deed, having an online distributed proof isn't really going to help you enforce your claim, because said local government is going to be the ones with the legal authority and the cops with guns to do so. :/

As was discussed earlier in the thread, in theory cryptocurrency can have practical uses too, but in practice it simply hasn't worked out as a currency.  Vendors like NewEgg have stopped accepting Bitcoin, for example, in part because the transaction lag and volatility literally made it impractical to use as a medium of exchange.  The value could fluctuate between the transaction being agreed to and it being concluded, and to a much greater extent than happens with national currencies. 

I've known a bunch of technophile futurist folks who've had hopes for Blockchain and cryptocurrency to be leveraged for more human freedom of choice, and less reliance on corrupt central governments.  But so far none of that* has materialized, and instead cryptocurrency has become an investment vehicle.  And without practical use, it becomes a Bigger Fool investment, where the thing being bought and traded only has value as long as people think it does, and only increases in value as long as it's marketed to larger numbers of people, but you never get any value from the investment unless you duck out before the crash/find a "bigger fool" to liquidate to.

I do think some of the folks investing in crypto DO still have an idealistic component to it, and genuinely believe that it will eventually have practical uses.  But OTOH if they're deeply invested in it, it may be difficult to remain objective about those prospects.  "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -Mencken



(*well, ok, some edge cases like The Silk Road, as long as that lasted)


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## Dannyalcatraz (Feb 14, 2022)

Umbran said:


> Then it is time to do some math.
> 
> A single crypto transaction currently eats up 1000Kwh of electricity, at a cost of roughly $104.  At the moment, you don't see that cost, because it is distributed across the entire crypto network.  But, scaled up to US credit card levels, that would become visible, because it becomes about *$10 billion a day*, eating up almost _*ten times the current total US electricity generation*_.



Put differently, just converting all the credit card transactions in Texas to cryptocurrency transactions would crash the grid statewide and result in actual human deaths.


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## darjr (Feb 14, 2022)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Put differently, just converting all the credit card transactions in Texas to cryptocurrency transactions would crash the grid statewide and resul in actual human deaths.



While I’m on board I don’t think that’s the stretch it may seem to be.


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## Mannahnin (Feb 14, 2022)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Put differently, just converting all the credit card transactions in Texas to cryptocurrency transactions would crash the grid statewide and result in actual human deaths.



And of course, there's no physical way to flip a switch and convert all those over, and theoretically if we were to transition from one to the other, there would be some buildup of infrastructure....

But where would we _get_ that infrastructure and all that extra energy?  And why would we actually spend all the money and labor to build all the extra power generation to support it, when it's not actually doing anything useful?


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## Jacqual (Feb 14, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> You've just described money: strips of cloth-based material which can currently be exchanged for goods and/or services, but which have no intrinsic value. Money is simply an assumption that the government that issued it will continue to exist and people will continue to accept that it has value.
> 
> These days, most currency exists as electronic data as well.



Which is fine but which of these crypto things is backed by any nations government, uhm none so what's to stop anything like a hack to change the value of said electronic only funds.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Feb 14, 2022)

darjr said:


> While I’m on board I don’t think that’s the stretch it may seem to be.



No stretch at all.  We had deaths in the big winter outages of 2011 and 2020, and we get others when we have major brownouts during heat waves.  We really haven’t significantly improved our grid’s output or stability, despite our leadership’s finger wagging and speechifying.

So crypto putting a strain on the Texas power grid (_as it stands_) that is orders of magnitude greater than its already extant reasonable economic substitute would be catastrophic.


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## Umbran (Feb 14, 2022)

Jacqual said:


> so what's to stop anything like a hack to change the value of said electronic only funds.




Well, that's much of the point of having the blockchain distributed.  There's no one master location you can hack to change a value.  The records are spread all over the blockchain network, and protected by significant cryptography.


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## darjr (Feb 14, 2022)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> No stretch at all.  We had deaths in the big winter outages of 2011 and 2020, and we get others when we have major brownouts during heat waves.  We really haven’t significantly improved our grid’s output or stability, despite our leadership’s finger wagging and speechifying.
> 
> So crypto putting a strain on the Texas power grid (_as it stands_) that is orders of magnitude greater than its already extant reasonable economic substitute would be catastrophic.



Two reasons. 

It doesn’t take nearly as much to cause the Texas power grid enough issues to kill people, seeing that it’s happened before. What at least twice now?

And wasn’t there a story about  the krypto industry in Texas already causing issues straining the grid to the point they had to shut stuff down?

But yea, krypto use on the Texas grid would probably kill people and may very well do so soon. Wait till summer.


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## Cadence (Feb 14, 2022)

So @Abstruse and @Snarf Zagyg  , I thought I was following, but....  

When someone uses a Bitcoin to buy lunch at a place that accepts it - presumably neither the purchaser nor the restaurant are paying very much for a transaction fee.  But then Etherieum has the >$50 gas fee per transaction.   Does anyone take Etherium for regular payments like for food?  Does Bitcoin not have a gas price, and if not, why not? Help.


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## UngainlyTitan (Feb 14, 2022)

Cadence said:


> So @Abstruse and @Snarf Zagyg  , I thought I was following, but....
> 
> When someone uses a Bitcoin to buy lunch at a place that accepts it - presumably neither the purchaser nor the restaurant are paying very much for a transaction fee.  But then Etherieum has the >$50 gas fee per transaction.   Does anyone take Etherium for regular payments like for food?  Does Bitcoin not have a gas price, and if not, why not? Help.



I am neither of the people referenced but my understanding is that bitcoin has a transaction fee.


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## Umbran (Feb 14, 2022)

UngainlyTitan said:


> I am neither of the people referenced but my understanding is that bitcoin has a transaction fee.




Yes, it does.


----------



## Cadence (Feb 14, 2022)

UngainlyTitan said:


> I am neither of the people referenced but my understanding is that bitcoin has a transaction fee.






Umbran said:


> Yes, it does.




But it looks tiny (average of $1.75 or something?) compared to Etherium.   (Or am I reading that wrong Bitcoin Average Transaction Fee )


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Feb 14, 2022)

darjr said:


> Two reasons.
> 
> It doesn’t take nearly as much to cause the Texas power grid enough issues to kill people, seeing that it’s happened before. What at least twice now?
> 
> ...



No shutdowns that I know of, but residents of the suburbs of our bigger cities are raising a fuss about new crypto mining operations popping up like dandelions.  Part of this explosion is due to mining organizations looking for cheap power after getting booted from China.

There’s also a common (but not ubiquitous) mentality among Texas politicians that if you build it (cryptocurrency infrastructure), they (power supply investors) will come.  (While arguably true, it ignores what happens in the lag between the two…and that the second step isn’t guaranteed.)


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## Umbran (Feb 14, 2022)

Cadence said:


> But it looks tiny (average of $1.75 or something?) compared to Etherium.   (Or am I reading that wrong Bitcoin Average Transaction Fee )




So, if you look at the data below the chart, you'll see it is highly variable.  Yesterday, it was $1.75.  A few days ago, it was $3.30.  Back in April 2021, it was over $60.   They vary depending on the data volume in the transaction, and congestion on the network at the time.


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## UngainlyTitan (Feb 14, 2022)

Cadence said:


> But it looks tiny (average of $1.75 or something?) compared to Etherium.   (Or am I reading that wrong Bitcoin Average Transaction Fee )



It looks tiny at the moment but about a year ago it has a peak value of about 63. Since it is paid in fractions of the underlying crypto currency and the value of that can fluctuate wildly, the value of the transaction can also value wildly. Depend on the current hotness.


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## gamerprinter (Feb 14, 2022)

Block-chain is certainly more secure than the current internet. The current internet was designed for communication with security as an after market thing, whereas block-chain is a security system with a means of communication. That is the real difference between the two, and why block-chain is far, more secure.


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## Cordwainer Fish (Feb 14, 2022)

gamerprinter said:


> The current internet was designed for communication with security as an after market thing, whereas block-chain is a security system with a means of communication.



I've been using secure communication means over the net for more than thirty years, and it's never required burning an old growth tree per message sent.


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## gamerprinter (Feb 14, 2022)

Neither have I, I have no horse in this race, though. I don't do crypto, and I do not control the companies or governments that do. I don't like it, but I have no say. I was just pointing the difference between the two systems, nothing else.


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## Abstruse (Feb 14, 2022)

Mistwell said:


> Correct, and I explained why. I am not trying to persuade anyone to like cryto or blockchains or NFTs (and I didn't even comment about NFTs - I only mentioned Crypto).



Yet Mistwell has only replied refuting people with criticism about NFTs, cryptocurrency, or the blockchain. And Mistwell also made a point of implied that I was talking about NFTs when they were talking about cryptocurrency despite the fact I have been very clear which I am referring to at any one time.

Anyway, here's the post I made about 15 hours prior to Mistwell's reply where I talked about the typical pattern of talking with supporters of cryptocurrency and NFTs.


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## gamerprinter (Feb 14, 2022)

Truthfully, I've been using computers almost daily since the late 1970's, so while I've been an active computer user, I had zero need for the internet, and never even looked at it, until 2007, which was when I started my Gamer Printshop business, which was originally a map printing service for gamers, which evolved into a freelance cartography and small TTRPG publishing company - when I suddenly needed to promote, I went online for the first time. So I only have 14 years using it.


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## doctorhook (Feb 14, 2022)

gamerprinter said:


> Block-chain is certainly more secure than the current internet. The current internet was designed for communication with security as an after market thing, whereas block-chain is a security system with a means of communication. That is the real difference between the two, and why block-chain is far, more secure.



Tbh I think block-chain’s security is overhyped. All it really has going is that every user bears a copy of the entire ledger, meaning it has a pretty reliable decentralized method of preserving records. That’s fine, but it’s not the entirety of security. It doesn’t inherently protect transactions from parties misrepresenting themselves, nor does it offer any means of correcting erroneous transactions. The ledger preserves everything forever, so blockchain is a privacy nightmare too (the users aren’t anonymous, just pseudonymous). Finally, the lack of central oversight means there’s no authority to secure users against fraudulent use of the network. 

Overall, blockchain really doesn’t seem like an ideal security method at all.


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## gamerprinter (Feb 14, 2022)

doctorhook said:


> Overall, blockchain really doesn’t seem like an ideal security method at all.



I didn't say it was, rather it was more secure than the other - for what little that means.


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## doctorhook (Feb 14, 2022)

gamerprinter said:


> I didn't say it was, rather it was more secure than the other - for what little that means.



Fair enough! But I think that possibly undersells the significant security improvements that the “regular” internet now boasts.

Personally I’d love to see a better-structured internet, but I don’t know what that looks like. And I really can’t imagine blockchain being able to step up. It’s really just the wrong tool for transacting.


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## gamerprinter (Feb 14, 2022)

I make art, write and design, then publish and sell/.promote online - that's all I really do. Everything else is banter. I generally avoid "argument" threads, so just because I posted, doesn't mean I'm picking a side. Just stating facts, here and there.


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## Ovinomancer (Feb 14, 2022)

Firstly, I'm not a supporter of cryptocurrencies or NFTs.  I'm interested in blockchain conceptually, but haven't seen an implementation that's worthwhile (it's an interesting concept, but execution is lacking).  That said, there's quite a lot just wrong here:


Abstruse said:


> This is a common argument in favor of crypto that doesn't work for many reasons.
> 
> 1) Cryptocurrency is not a currency. It is a commodity. It has value solely on the word of other people saying it has value. Gold, silver, and platinum have value because they are metals that are easy to work with that do not corrode or rust and are good conductors of electricity. Through most of human history, those metals have been effectively worthless except for their use as currency, but following the industrial and technological revolutions of society in the last century, that is no longer the case. Those metals have practical value and use.



Cryptocurrency is absolutely, 100%, a currency.  This really isn't arguable.  It's traded on (some) currency exchanges and it used as a currency.  Both definitionally and in actual use, cryptocurrencies are currencies.

Cryptocurrencies are absolutely, 100%, NOT a commodity.  Commodities are raw materials or agricultural products that have inherent value for what they are -- food or things to make other things with.  They are not valued based on what other people say they are worth (well, they retain value no matter what, but are traded and the price fluctuates based on what people will pay for them, so this is slightly caveated).  The proof here is wheat -- a commodity that has value even if not on the market.

Gold, silver, and platinum have had historical value even before the minting of coins.  They were valued for their luster, their workability (you could make durable things with them), and their longevity.  All of this happened before and during their use to mint coins (which seems to be being confused with currency as a hasty generalization -- not all currencies have coins and not all coins are currency).  In fact, it was these qualities that caused them to be used to mint coins -- the coins held intrinsic value as a commodity.


Abstruse said:


> 2) The Dollar (and the Euro and the Yen and so on) are fiat currencies, which means they are not backed up by the value of a commodity. One pound-sterling is no longer worth a certain amount of gold or silver. However, that does not mean they are valueless because they are backed by the country that issues the currency. The US dollar will have value so long as the US remains a country, and will retain value so long as other countries continue to trade with the US. Cryptocurrency, as I said above, is not even a fiat currency. It is a fiat commodity. Actually, I'm not even sure if that's true because "fiat" requires a consensus that the item has value due to its use as a medium of exchange and there's no consensus that cryptocurrency has even that value - it only has value because a small niche says it has value and only among those in that group agree.



The value of a fiat currency is based on the same thing that cryptocurrency is (and crypto isn't a fiat currency but it's also not a commodity, see above) -- faith.  The value of the US dollar is entirely based on the faith of people that it's worth something.  Just like cryptocurrency is.  There's no magic actual promise behind the dollar that turns up at some point if you dig deep enough -- this is the point of fiat currency.  In fact, the only reason cryptocurrency isn't a fiat currency is because fiat currencies are defined as currencies issued by fiat of a state, which cryptos are not.  That's it.  

Now, the fact that the US dollar is backed by the US government, and the potential economic output of the USA has a major effect, but you see this in the fact that the US dollar is stable in value.  Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile.  This is because the basis of the faith in each is different and so has a different impact.  But they're still effectively the same -- you're kinda comparing a bridge made of toothpicks to a bridge made of steel and saying that one isn't a bridge.  They're both bridges, but no one has anywhere near as much trust or faith in the toothpicks over steel.  That's the effective difference here.


Abstruse said:


> 3) "This system we have in place now has problems!" is only an indictment of that system. It is not a defense of a separate system. Especially when that new system has all of the exact same problems and a whole host of new problems. It would be like saying "Insurance companies are exploitative! I have a solution, give everybody cyanide they can take when they get sick! What, are you against poisoning people? What are you, a shill for Big Pharma?!"



No arguments, here.  There are good arguments to be made for cryptocurrencies, though.  Primarily is the decentralized and open nature of the currency -- no one controls it directly and everyone can see what it's doing.  That may not be persuasive to you, but that doesn't remove it as a good argument that is different from other monetary systems.  I don't find it persuasive enough to overcome the problems with cryptocurrency, myself.  Those have been well covered -- volatility, high levels of speculation inflating the values, energy cost, problems with transaction speed, etc.


Abstruse said:


> And that's just for a start. I'd keep going, but I've written enough huge posts for this thread as it is.



Look, I'm sympathetic to your larger point that crypto is not the silver bullet anyone may say it is, and that it has serious problems.  But the arguments you've made here are incorrect and don't go to help that claim.  They harm your credibility with anyone that's managed to pay attention through ECON 101 and 102.  Granted, that's not a large section of the population.


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## gamerprinter (Feb 14, 2022)

Ovinomancer said:


> ... to pay attention through ECON 101 and 102.  Granted, that's not a large section of the population.



I had both, but Macro was problematic for me, at the time. There's a non-economist online that explains it well - now I understand, not then, though.


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## UngainlyTitan (Feb 14, 2022)

Currencies like the US dollar are not entirely based on faith. They are backed by the productive capacity of the US economy. If the supply of dollars was less than needed to support the capacity of the US economy for enough by long enough then that would depress demand. Not having enough dollars  to buy goods or services and prices would fall in a deflation. If the dollar supply exceeds the capacity again for long enough it would induce structural inflation.


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## Parmandur (Feb 14, 2022)

Ovinomancer said:


> Firstly, I'm not a supporter of cryptocurrencies or NFTs.  I'm interested in blockchain conceptually, but haven't seen an implementation that's worthwhile (it's an interesting concept, but execution is lacking).  That said, there's quite a lot just wrong here:
> 
> Cryptocurrency is absolutely, 100%, a currency.  This really isn't arguable.  It's traded on (some) currency exchanges and it used as a currency.  Both definitionally and in actual use, cryptocurrencies are currencies.
> 
> ...



I'm not set against blockchain and crypto entirely myself...in time, their value may become more clear and normalized.

But NFTs are bad news.


----------



## Ovinomancer (Feb 14, 2022)

UngainlyTitan said:


> Currencies like the US dollar are not entirely based on faith. They are backed by the productive capacity of the US economy. If the supply of dollars was less than needed to support the capacity of the US economy for enough by long enough then that would depress demand. Not having enough dollars  to buy goods or services and prices would fall in a deflation. If the dollar supply exceeds the capacity again for long enough it would induce structural inflation.



What percentage of that productive capacity does a dollar represent, then?  No, the productive capacity of the US doesn't back the currency, it supports the faith in the currency.  There's no backing here.  Backing has a specific meaning in currencies -- that the currency represents and is tradeable directly (ie, without purchase) for the backing.  I cannot trade my US dollar in for any portion of the productive capacity of the US.

And then you mention inflation, which is a faith problem in currency not one that is directly tied to supply vs capacity.  I'm not even sure how one would measure currency supply versus economic capacity.  What's the metric for this?


----------



## Ovinomancer (Feb 14, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> I'm not set against blockchain and crypto entirely myself...in time, their value may become more clear and normalized.
> 
> But NFTs are bad news.



NFTs are foundationally neutral.  They are, however, a weird concept, and one hard to explain, and one quite often poorly explained and even more poorly understood.  That, by itself, is still neutral, but it absolutely creates a situation where people make bad choices because they cannot understand the risk/reward picture at all and also one where predators can induce people into said bad choices.  The explosion of investment into NFTs baffles me, but like all speculative investment you shouldn't be betting money you aren't willing to burn.  The problem I see is that the NFT market has so suddenly expanded, and because of that influx has shown sudden inflation in some prices, such that it enticed people who can't afford to burn investment money to enter the market because of the lure of getting rich quick.  Frankly, though, the NFT market is still more understandable and more transparent than the subprime mortgage market of the aughts, and some of the current markets that exist at the periphery of the stock market.  I'm not sure why the much smaller NFT market is getting dogpiled while those are largely accepted as evils that no one can fix.


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## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

.


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## Jd Smith1 (Feb 14, 2022)

Staffan said:


> Driving up the prices of entertainment and energy to the point where they are priced out of reach? Yes, I'll call that immoral. Not illegal (currently), but certainly immoral.



Interesting.


Staffan said:


> And we've already established that NFTs are a scam and that cryptocurrency is evil. This is just another bad side effect of them.



Evil?


----------



## Staffan (Feb 15, 2022)

Jd Smith1 said:


> Evil?



Yes, evil. You're using up a lot of energy and processing power (thereby polluting the environment to a very high degree) to produce a completely virtual commodity whose only value is that some day you hope to find a bigger sucker to pay you more money than you spent for it.

If that was the plan of a Captain Planet villain, we'd tell the writer to dial it down a couple of notches because it's too on the nose.


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## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

Staffan said:


> Yes, evil. You're using up a lot of energy and processing power (thereby polluting the environment to a very high degree) to produce a completely virtual commodity whose only value is that some day you hope to find a bigger sucker to pay you more money than you spent for it.
> 
> If that was the plan of a Captain Planet villain, we'd tell the writer to dial it down a couple of notches because it's too on the nose.



This is the kind of over the top rhetoric that makes it hard to have anything resembling a discussion on these things.  Again, I don't support crypto or NFTs in their current form, so dispense with thinking I'm just a shill.  Crypto currency, at least the early ones, wasn't at all the edifice of evil you're constructing here.  There were a legitimate attempt to free currency from ownership by nations and instead have a useful currency that's decentralized (unowned by a single entity, nation or corporate) and have a more secure and transparent accounting for transaction with that currency.  These aren't evil goals, even if their persuasiveness is going to be contingent on whatever political ideology you might favor.  It's entirely fair to look at cryptocurrencies and note that they don't live up to the ideal they espouse (they're not at all useful for day to day use due to how they work) and you can absolutely criticize them for their energy consumption impacts and the follow-ons from that (although, it occurs to me that if we did go fully renewable, this argument disappears, so it's really not about crypto being bad but rather a failure in how we generate electricity and that it applies to any use of energy).  Cryptos certainly aren't immune to criticism.  But categorizing them as pure evil because people have decided to speculate with them (and your arguments for speculation go to anything that ever get involved in speculation, which, if you hold to that, is another of those political thingies, not an absolute fact)?  No, way overboard.  You might get closer with some of the more recent cryptocurrencies, but a lot of those have attempted to make improvements to how bitcoin operated and have addressed or attempted to address at least some of the criticisms.  However, at no point is the creation of a speculative market innately evil (unless you're making a political argument).


----------



## Jer (Feb 15, 2022)

doctorhook said:


> Tbh I think block-chain’s security is overhyped. All it really has going is that every user bears a copy of the entire ledger, meaning it has a pretty reliable decentralized method of preserving records.



Blockchain's security is entirely based on the fact that all information shared on the blockchain is completely public. Most security breaches on the internet involve getting ahold of private information, so blockchain is "more secure" by just not being a technology that you would use to try to actually protect information.

Where the security of crypto becomes an issue is where you have secret information that you don't want shared.  Like the password to your wallet that holds the information that proves you are the one who owns a particular token. A hacker gets ahold of that and now he owns all of your ape tokens, just as if he'd gotten ahold of your drivethru rpg password and now he's got access to all of your PDFs.


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## Jer (Feb 15, 2022)

Ovinomancer said:


> This is the kind of over the top rhetoric that makes it hard to have anything resembling a discussion on these things.  Again, I don't support crypto or NFTs in their current form, so dispense with thinking I'm just a shill.  Crypto currency, at least the early ones, wasn't at all the edifice of evil you're constructing here.  There were a legitimate attempt to free currency from ownership by nations and instead have a useful currency that's decentralized (unowned by a single entity, nation or corporate) and have a more secure and transparent accounting for transaction with that currency.



I think this polishes the origin of crypto way too much.  Crypto was designed to be an investment platform first - a currency that increased in value rather than depreciating.  It was designed for speculators by speculators and there's a reason that sites like mtgox became the early adopters of the bitcoin trading realm - they were already playing around with speculative markets, it was just a short hop skip and a jump to speculating about digital tokens instead.

The entire structure of Bitcoin, for example, makes it a horrible currency. You want currency to be easy to spend, bitcoin is designed to be hard to spend. The "mining" structure around bitcoin was specifically to make it easy for early adopters to accumulate tokens and harder for later adopters - keeping the value of earlier tokens artificially high.  It was attempting to replicate gold or silver except without the sudden shocks that would come to a metal-based economy when a new vein of ore is found so that the early adopters would never have to worry about a resource shock destabilizing their economy.

All the talk about having a government free currency is to attract noble-minded libertarian folks to buy into the idea.  It's a terrible currency and it's not going to be a currency any more than gold is a currency.  At best it's a commodity that someone could base a currency around, except that as a commodity it's the most ridiculous commodity anyone has ever dreamed up.  Commodities are supposed to be raw materials, bitcoin and other crypto are literally the byproducts of burning commodities but are useless themselves.


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## kenmarable (Feb 15, 2022)

MGibster said:


> The common refrain used to be, "The best way to become wealthy with RPGs is to start out wealthy."



The actual common refrain that has been told to me by multiple publishers over the past couple decades is "The best way to make a small fortune in RPGs is to start with a large fortune." which has a rather different meaning.


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## Abstruse (Feb 15, 2022)

Jer said:


> Blockchain's security is entirely based on the fact that all information shared on the blockchain is completely public. Most security breaches on the internet involve getting ahold of private information, so blockchain is "more secure" by just not being a technology that you would use to try to actually protect information.
> 
> Where the security of crypto becomes an issue is where you have secret information that you don't want shared.  Like the password to your wallet that holds the information that proves you are the one who owns a particular token. A hacker gets ahold of that and now he owns all of your ape tokens, just as if he'd gotten ahold of your drivethru rpg password and now he's got access to all of your PDFs.



Side note: This is why people get VERY upset at the idea of putting various records "on the blockchain". Medical records, financial records, tax records, even something like Kickstarter (to bring this back on topic) has personal information that people would not want shared publicly - payment methods, shipping addresses, etc. Which means that identifying information is now attached to your wallet (your account to hold assets on the blockchain like cryptocurrency or NFTs). No more anonymous wallets if Kickstarter just attached your real name and address to it, which can then be cross-linked with every single transaction you've made using that wallet for anything else.

BTW, this is how there are records of all the wash trades (you can see Wallet A transfer Wallet B 100 Ethereum, then "sell" an NFT to Wallet B who pays Wallet A 100 Ethereum for it) and what celebrities are doing with their highly publicized NFT purchases (selling them almost immediately and cashing out the cryptocurrency for real-world money).


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## Mortus (Feb 15, 2022)

From the great feedback on this post (thanks everyone) it seems to me that if WOTC or another RPG publisher wants to offer unique digital collectibles they could do it without NFTs. A combination of an online-only rule set (like Roll20’s Burn Bryte), an official VTT, and bring something like tournament play from back in the day back into vogue with big prizes and unique digital rewards. Having official sanctioned play where using all that is required to participate. They could also probably create shows and other cross-media out all that. NFTs seem pointless for TTRPGs when it can already be done with current technology. It would just take some effort over the course of a few years.


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## The Myopic Sniper (Feb 15, 2022)

Unofficial Magic: The Gathering NFT project interrupted as WotC summon lawyers (PC Gamer Magazine)

"WotC said it's currently looking at Magic-based NFT options of its own."


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## Abstruse (Feb 15, 2022)

The Myopic Sniper said:


> Unofficial Magic: The Gathering NFT project interrupted as WotC summon lawyers (PC Gamer Magazine)
> 
> "WotC said it's currently looking at Magic-based NFT options of its own."



The statement says that Wizards of the Coast has not made a decision one way or the other in a cease and desist letter to a DAO that was minting NFTs of Magic cards. Said DAO is the one I talked about before who said their goal in the long run was to "buy the Magic brand from Wizards of the Coast". This happened the very same week that Hasbro announced that Wizards of the Coast (whose primary revenue source is still tabletop Magic: The Gathering) made up 72% of operating profit for 2021 making the company over $500 million.


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## Parmandur (Feb 15, 2022)

The Myopic Sniper said:


> Unofficial Magic: The Gathering NFT project interrupted as WotC summon lawyers (PC Gamer Magazine)
> 
> "WotC said it's currently looking at Magic-based NFT options of its own."



Well, sure. They have to say that to issue the cease and desist. And any company right now has to tell investors they are looking into it, at least, to seem like they are on the ball. 

I wouldn't put it past WotC to actually do it if they think it would help their bottom line. Hence why it is important to clap back on stuff like this and make going down the rabbit hole less attractive for businesses.


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## MGibster (Feb 15, 2022)

kenmarable said:


> The actual common refrain that has been told to me by multiple publishers over the past couple decades is "The best way to make a small fortune in RPGs is to start with a large fortune." which has a rather different meaning.



Oh, wow!  It was even more bleak than I remembered!


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## Jd Smith1 (Feb 15, 2022)

Staffan said:


> Yes, evil. You're using up a lot of energy and processing power (thereby polluting the environment to a very high degree) to produce a completely virtual commodity whose only value is that some day you hope to find a bigger sucker to pay you more money than you spent for it.
> 
> If that was the plan of a Captain Planet villain, we'd tell the writer to dial it down a couple of notches because it's too on the nose.


----------



## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

Jer said:


> I think this polishes the origin of crypto way too much.  Crypto was designed to be an investment platform first - a currency that increased in value rather than depreciating.  It was designed for speculators by speculators and there's a reason that sites like mtgox became the early adopters of the bitcoin trading realm - they were already playing around with speculative markets, it was just a short hop skip and a jump to speculating about digital tokens instead.
> 
> The entire structure of Bitcoin, for example, makes it a horrible currency. You want currency to be easy to spend, bitcoin is designed to be hard to spend. The "mining" structure around bitcoin was specifically to make it easy for early adopters to accumulate tokens and harder for later adopters - keeping the value of earlier tokens artificially high.  It was attempting to replicate gold or silver except without the sudden shocks that would come to a metal-based economy when a new vein of ore is found so that the early adopters would never have to worry about a resource shock destabilizing their economy.
> 
> All the talk about having a government free currency is to attract noble-minded libertarian folks to buy into the idea.  It's a terrible currency and it's not going to be a currency any more than gold is a currency.  At best it's a commodity that someone could base a currency around, except that as a commodity it's the most ridiculous commodity anyone has ever dreamed up.  Commodities are supposed to be raw materials, bitcoin and other crypto are literally the byproducts of burning commodities but are useless themselves.



All money is speculative.  Creating something that has potential increase in value is kinda important if you want to introduce a currency that is not backed by a nation state.  If it didn't, then what's the point -- you lose value as soon as you touch it?  Of course it was built as something that could be invested in.  Your argument here attacks stock markets as well -- it's either political in nature or is ignoring how money works.  One of the reasons that nations whole-heartedly adopted fiat currency one after the other was, in part, because it creates a speculative currency market and encourages investment in the host countries.  The US dollar is the premier (for now) investment currency in the world not because it's not part of a speculative market but because it is!  You're casting a requirement for any non-commodity backed currency as an evil, and again go over the top.


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## Abstruse (Feb 15, 2022)

Ovinomancer said:


> All money is speculative.  Creating something that has potential increase in value is kinda important if you want to introduce a currency that is not backed by a nation state.  If it didn't, then what's the point -- you lose value as soon as you touch it?  Of course it was built as something that could be invested in.



Except people don't invest in currency. Nobody is going on financial advice shows saying "Now's the time to invest in the Yen!" They invest in stocks, bonds, securities, commodities, etc. A currency needs to have a value that does not radically change over a short period of time. In fact, if the value of a currency fluctuates greatly over a short period - which is defined in terms of months - that is a sign that there are significant issues with what is backing the currency in question (in the case of the majority of fiat currency, that would mean the economy of the country issuing the currency).

Cryptocurrencies fluctuate wildly in value over the course of a single day. This is why companies that previously accepted cryptocurrencies for payment in exchange for goods and services (like the electronics retailer Newegg) have stopped doing so because the value of cryptocurrency would fluctuate in value wildly in between the time the buyer clicked the purchase button on the website and the payment was processed. Which, for a retailer, it is a very bad thing if you never know if you're selling a high-end laptop for $2400 or $3100 because the transaction medium (the cryptocurrency) changes value randomly depending on what time of day the purchase is made.


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## Wolfram stout (Feb 15, 2022)

Abstruse said:


> Except people don't invest in currency. Nobody is going on financial advice shows saying "Now's the time to invest in the Yen!" They invest in stocks, bonds, securities, commodities, etc. A currency needs to have a value that does not radically change over a short period of time. In fact, if the value of a currency fluctuates greatly over a short period - which is defined in terms of months - that is a sign that there are significant issues with what is backing the currency in question (in the case of the majority of fiat currency, that would mean the economy of the country issuing the currency).
> 
> Cryptocurrencies fluctuate wildly in value over the course of a single day. This is why companies that previously accepted cryptocurrencies for payment in exchange for goods and services (like the electronics retailer Newegg) have stopped doing so because the value of cryptocurrency would fluctuate in value wildly in between the time the buyer clicked the purchase button on the website and the payment was processed. Which, for a retailer, it is a very bad thing if you never know if you're selling a high-end laptop for $2400 or $3100 because the transaction medium (the cryptocurrency) changes value randomly depending on what time of day the purchase is made.



Actually currency investing is huge. For both hedging and for speculation. The licensing for selling currency investments is part of the same license as commodity investing.

By the way, thank you for your post here. You have really shored up a lot of my understanding of the NFT issue.


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## darjr (Feb 15, 2022)

The thing that really messes up and ruins the communication about this topic, for me, are the folks who've got a vested interest in selling you that smoking monkey image they paid $500 for. Oh and the folks that sold it to them. That super duper ruins it for me.


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## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

Abstruse said:


> Except people don't invest in currency. Nobody is going on financial advice shows saying "Now's the time to invest in the Yen!" They invest in stocks, bonds, securities, commodities, etc. A currency needs to have a value that does not radically change over a short period of time. In fact, if the value of a currency fluctuates greatly over a short period - which is defined in terms of months - that is a sign that there are significant issues with what is backing the currency in question (in the case of the majority of fiat currency, that would mean the economy of the country issuing the currency).



Um, what?  No, speculation in currency is huge. The dollar is traded in massive amounts daily.  This is very incorrect.  


Abstruse said:


> Cryptocurrencies fluctuate wildly in value over the course of a single day. This is why companies that previously accepted cryptocurrencies for payment in exchange for goods and services (like the electronics retailer Newegg) have stopped doing so because the value of cryptocurrency would fluctuate in value wildly in between the time the buyer clicked the purchase button on the website and the payment was processed. Which, for a retailer, it is a very bad thing if you never know if you're selling a high-end laptop for $2400 or $3100 because the transaction medium (the cryptocurrency) changes value randomly depending on what time of day the purchase is made.



Yes, I've mentioned the volatility of crypto a few times as a major issue.  Honestly, though, what you're pointing to here isn't really volatility so much as it is the delay in transaction time.  Functionally, this is what high speed trading is about -- making trades fractions of a second faster so as to capitalize on micro movements in the market.  Bitcoin has the opposite problem in that you cannot make fast trades.  This is a serious flaw and drawback.


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## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

darjr said:


> The thing that really messes up and ruins the communication about this topic, for me, are the folks who've got a vested interest in selling you that smoking monkey image they paid $500 for. Oh and the folks that sold it to them. That super duper ruins it for me.



Who are these people?  Are they here?  I haven't seen anyone pitch an NFT for sale here, but I did skim some and a few people have me blocked that are posting (judging by the responses).  If they aren't here, what's the use in complaining about how those people ruin discussion which can be had right here without them?

And, no, they aren't selling you the image.  The image is almost irrelevant.  They're selling you the privilege of being the only person that can say they own the token for that image.  This is weird, for sure, but there's some interesting concepts in there.  I'm not sure how tokens really got associated with digital art, though, as that seems an odd mix and one ripe for terrible misunderstandings.  The Bored Apes are an interesting example, though -- owning an NFT for an Ape doesn't give you any rights to the image at all, but that NFT does give you access to a special club with special privileges in the real world -- it's a passport of a kind.  NFTs used this way make a kind of sense -- limited, transparent, hard to forge tokens that give a specific privilege or access.  But not paired with such value?  I'll admit I am not one that sees any kind of draw, here.

Full disclosure:  I have a close friend that is gaga over NFTs.  I mostly make fun of him.  I wish him well -- hell, I wish I'd have bought a bitcon at the bottom for the novelty so I could be fully financially independent these days and maybe he gets lucky.  That's the nature of speculation.  I'm just not willing to engage, and I don't have any burning money around at the moment.  He does have some (it's allocated in his investment plan), and is disciplined enough to only spend burning money.  Maybe in a few years I'll free up some high risk investment dollars and burn a few to see what I get, but I'm honestly more likely to just buy lottery tickets.  Seems about the same to me -- a terrible idea.


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## Dannyalcatraz (Feb 15, 2022)

*Mod Note:*



Dannyalcatraz said:


> *Mod Note:*
> 
> That phrasing is _dangerously_ close to dog-whistle territory.  Based on the number and nature of reports you’re generating, I strongly recommend you consider re-evaluating how you’re communicating in this thread if you wish to continue communicating in this thread.




AtomicPope chose to challenge moderation by using the laughing emoji to comment on this post regarding *HIS* posting habits.  The intent was immediately clear to the moderation staff; there was a discussion of how to handle it.  

This has earned him a warning point.


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## Staffan (Feb 15, 2022)

Ovinomancer said:


> Crypto currency, at least the early ones, wasn't at all the edifice of evil you're constructing here.  There were a legitimate attempt to free currency from ownership by nations and instead have a useful currency that's decentralized (unowned by a single entity, nation or corporate) and have a more secure and transparent accounting for transaction with that currency.  These aren't evil goals, even if their persuasiveness is going to be contingent on whatever political ideology you might favor.



"We should make our own currency beyond the control of nation states so we can use it to pay for crime and not have to pay taxes" is not the moral flex you seem to think it is.


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## Mannahnin (Feb 15, 2022)

Staffan said:


> "We should make our own currency beyond the control of nation states so we can use it to pay for crime and not have to pay taxes" is not the moral flex you seem to think it is.



Eh. I'm generally in favor of the concept of government, but some laws are immoral and many of the things governments spend taxes are too.


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## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

Staffan said:


> "We should make our own currency beyond the control of nation states so we can use it to pay for crime and not have to pay taxes" is not the moral flex you seem to think it is.



I'd think that an absolutely horrible moral flex.  Are you saying it's not, that it's a good thing?  Very weird. 

Still, crypto was not created for either of these goals.  Nations have long figured out how to tax money made in different currencies, and the absolute king of criminal currency is US dollars, by absolute volume and by percentage of volume.  Crypto, with open ledgers, is actually easier to trace criminal activity once identified.  As shown by how thoroughly the Silk Road was rolled up, where the crypto ledger was an absolute goldmine for investigators, this seems an odd claim to make, much less use as a rhetorical bludgeon to strawman someone else.

Cryptocurrency crime increased to it's highest volume last year, but it's a tiny fraction of the total volume -- a shockingly tiny fraction, about 0.15%.  And the vast majority of those crimes are theft of cryptocurrency and scams run using cryptocurrency.  So, not even really related to crypto as an enabler of large crime, but more entirely crime aimed at cryptocurrency itself.  This is like saying that the largest criminal acts, by far, using US dollars are people stealing US dollars (not goods, straight up dollars) in non-violent thefts and people getting tricked out of their US dollars (not goods, just dollars).  What an absolute hotbed of criminal activity cryptocurrencies are!


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## Snarf Zagyg (Feb 15, 2022)

Mannahnin said:


> Eh. I'm generally in favor of the concept of government, but some laws are immoral and many of the things governments spend taxes are too.




That's a good reason to work to change the laws.

It's not a good reason to say, "I don't like the consent of the governed. I'd much rather live in a lawless society where the very wealthy have absolutely no constraints whatsoever."

The trouble with cryptocurrency isn't simply that it's used to "buy drugs" and "evade taxes." I mean- you can already do that (as has been pointed out, cryptocurrency doesn't "solve" any problems that need solving, it just provides a bad solution to problems that have already been solved.).

What it does provide, and a predominant use-case scenario, is a digital medium that enables non-traceable and non-refundable/voidable payments for illicit activities across distance- which is why it's the preferred medium for ransomware, for extortion, for kidnapping, and is a major driver of criminal syndicates (both state-sponsored and otherwise).

Another popular use is, of course, for those countries and individuals that have been removed from the international financial markets- so while laws and government aren't always moral, cryptocurrency enables the most immoral of them.


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## Mannahnin (Feb 15, 2022)

Snarf Zagyg said:


> It's not a good reason to say, "I don't like the consent of the governed. I'd much rather live in a lawless society where the very wealthy have absolutely no constraints whatsoever."



I was thinking more along the lines of "I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.” 

I can work to change the laws while at the same time reserving and/or exercising the right to break the ones I find morally offensive or onerous, conscious of the potential consequences of so doing.


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## Snarf Zagyg (Feb 15, 2022)

Mannahnin said:


> I was thinking more along the lines of "I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”




I prefer to use the formulation -

_Anyone driving slower than me is a moron. Anyone driving faster than me is a maniac. _


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## Umbran (Feb 15, 2022)

doctorhook said:


> Fair enough! But I think that possibly undersells the significant security improvements that the “regular” internet now boasts.




Since blockchain operates over the internet, it is itself one of those security improvements.


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## Umbran (Feb 15, 2022)

Ovinomancer said:


> ... and have a more secure and transparent accounting for transaction with that currency.




When the users are anonymous, there's no real transparency.


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## Jer (Feb 15, 2022)

Ovinomancer said:


> All money is speculative.  Creating something that has potential increase in value is kinda important if you want to introduce a currency that is not backed by a nation state.  If it didn't, then what's the point -- you lose value as soon as you touch it?  Of course it was built as something that could be invested in.  Your argument here attacks stock markets as well -- it's either political in nature or is ignoring how money works.  One of the reasons that nations whole-heartedly adopted fiat currency one after the other was, in part, because it creates a speculative currency market and encourages investment in the host countries.  The US dollar is the premier (for now) investment currency in the world not because it's not part of a speculative market but because it is!  You're casting a requirement for any non-commodity backed currency as an evil, and again go over the top.



All money is speculative, but not everything that is speculative is money.  Cryptocurrency is not money - it's not built to be money.

Cryptocurrency is built to be gold.  Or more realistically, cryptocurrency was intended to be gold but is actually more like baseball cards.  It's a speculative enterprise not a currency.  People are trying their darndest to make it an actual currency but it's still too hard to spend by design and that's a huge flaw in the system.  It's like trying to pay for your dinner with baseball cards.


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## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

Umbran said:


> When the users are anonymous, there's no real transparency.



They aren't anonymous, they're pseudonymous.  This is the key way that law enforcement tracks and dismantles criminal activity with crypto.  If I make a buy with a known dealer using my bitcoin, I can now track that all the way through the system, and when it exits, I can look there.  While a number of exits are not easily tracked, eventually one is, and then the whole network is laid out via the blockchain and I have a piece of it.  From there, normal footwork gets huge information because I can expand what I know.  This is vastly more open to law enforcement (especially with more recent changes) than traditional currency laundering.  The pseudonymous nature of crypto appears to hide things, but is actually fairly easily manipulated.  Now that governments are requiring more reporting of crypto transactions, it's utility to hide transactions is rapidly diminishing, and it wasn't any better (worse actually) than traditional currencies which have known but still useable methods to launder huge amounts of money because it is so easy to hide transactions.

In other words, crypto isn't better than traditional currencies for hiding money.  It had a few loopholes due to governments not adapting reporting laws that were useful, but still not more useful that other currencies.  Even at it's height, Silk Road was still only a low-middling player in criminal enterprises, and it totally unraveled by tracking bitcoin transactions.  You can't even set that kind of enterprise up these days because it's so easy to take them down by tracking transactions.  It took a surprisingly small time for law enforcement to get savvy to cryptocurrency, and now it's much less useful for criminal activities than it was, which was not more than traditional currencies.  There's a reason that the US dollar is not about to be supplanted as the criminal currency of choice.


----------



## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

Jer said:


> All money is speculative, but not everything that is speculative is money.



Um, okay?  I never made such a claim, so what are you refuting, here?


Jer said:


> Cryptocurrency is not money - it's not built to be money.



It absolutely is.  I don't even know how this can be claimed.  I can exchange it for goods and services.  I have to report it's use to the IRS.  


Jer said:


> Cryptocurrency is built to be gold.  Or more realistically, cryptocurrency was intended to be gold but is actually more like baseball cards.  It's a speculative enterprise not a currency.  People are trying their darndest to make it an actual currency but it's still too hard to spend by design and that's a huge flaw in the system.  It's like trying to pay for your dinner with baseball cards.



No.  Gold is a commodity, and crypto is nothing at all like a commodity.  It's a currency.  That it has a speculative aspect, and that this is the primary way many are engaging with it doesn't change it.  This is like saying a baseball isn't a baseball if I'm using it as shot in a cannon.  It's still a baseball.  Crypto is a currency, it's money, and is most often used as money.  Speculation on crypto is a red herring -- it has nothing at all to do with what it is.

Look, this is very odd.  I agree that there are large problems with cryptocurrency, and I don't invest (at all and never have) and I'm not interested in investing because of the problems I see.  They're useless for buying groceries, for instance.  Their volatility make them extremely suspect as a place to park money or even, sometimes, to engage in large transactions because of the large swings in value.  I'm not a fan, at all.  But I'm also not going to make stuff up about crypto or agree with wild accusations of how evil/morally bad/terriblewrong they are.  There's plenty of good reasons to dislike crypto, to criticize crypto, and especially to get after NFTs that don't involve the kind of arm waving wild claims of evil that are being tossed around in this thread.


----------



## Umbran (Feb 15, 2022)

Ovinomancer said:


> They aren't anonymous, they're pseudonymous.




I'm not going to engage with your nitpick.  When the dominant use of the platform seems to be money laundering and other crime, because of the anonymity of the users, I don't buy that this is a "transparent" platform.

And yes, law enforcement solves crime through the platform, but not because it is super-easy and transparent, but because law enforcement is often about following the money, and the money is going to crypto.


----------



## Umbran (Feb 15, 2022)

Ovinomancer said:


> It absolutely is.  I don't even know how this can be claimed.  I can exchange it for goods and services.  I have to report it's use to the IRS.




The IRS wants to know about lots more than "money", because financial status is dependent on much more than liquid cash.  Stocks, bonds, real estate, commodities, various bundled financial packages are all reported.  So reporting it to the IRS doesn't speak to it really being money.


----------



## Ulfgeir (Feb 15, 2022)

Techdirt.com have an article comparing Web3 and the useage of Cryptocurrencies, Blockchains, and NFTS to the .COM-bubble...
Can We Compare Dot-Com Bubble To Today's Web3/Blockchain Craze?


----------



## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

Umbran said:


> I'm not going to engage with your nitpick.  When the dominant use of the platform seems to be money laundering and other crime, because of the anonymity of the users, I don't buy that this is a "transparent" platform.



1) it's not a nitpick.  There's a huge difference.  It's like social security numbers -- these are pseudonymous.  Once I've paired you to one, I can track it's use directly to you.  This is not possible with anonymous transaction.  Cash transactions, with traditional currency, are anonymous.  That's why laws of countries implement required reporting of cash transactions over certain amounts -- they're there to remove that anonymity and make tracking such transactions possible.

2) your claim about the primary use of cryptocurrency is woefully wrong.  Embarrassingly so.  It's fairly trivial to look up how crypto is largely used, and I just quoted above the reported statistics for the percent of transactions related to crime.  It's very small indeed.  You need to reorient to a different set of facts from the one you assume.  Crypto has loads of problems, but this isn't it.


Umbran said:


> And yes, law enforcement solves crime through the platform, but not because it is super-easy and transparent, but because law enforcement is often about following the money, and the money is going to crypto.



You've stated something that's a rather banally obvious thing -- cops investigate crime, so if crime is happening, cops investigate.  This doesn't support, at all, your assertion that crypto had features that make tracking illicit use easier than traditional currency.  It does.  Silk Road was brought down via analysis of the blockchain, and very successfully as well.  They're still recovering money from Silk Road as they follow up on small paths -- $1 billion just last year recovered from Silk Road investigations, all aided by better tools for analyzing the blockchain.  Tools that don't exist for traditional currencies.  In fact, tracking traditional currencies is only enabled by additional required reporting on transactions, and these are needed because traditional currencies are otherwise untraceable.  You're running on assumption, here, and it's not serving you well.  

Again, there's lots of good reasons to dislike crypto.  I don't like it.  But this doesn't justify sloppy and inaccurate statements about how crypto works.  It's not all bad -- almost nothing is all bad.  It has some serious problems, that appear insurmountable to me (volatility and transaction processing time/cost are the real killers), but this doesn't give leeway to just make stuff up about it.  Let's deal with how it actually is rather than an imagined villain.


----------



## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

Umbran said:


> The IRS wants to know about lots more than "money", because financial status is dependent on much more than liquid cash.  Stocks, bonds, real estate, commodities, various bundled financial packages are all reported.  So reporting it to the IRS doesn't speak to it really being money.



I'm not even sure how to engage with this.  Are you arguing that cryptocurrency isn't currency, or just throwing out a lot of chaff hoping that it won't be noticed that you didn't actually show anything that says cryptocurrency isn't actually a currency.


----------



## Mistwell (Feb 15, 2022)

Abstruse said:


> Yet Mistwell has only replied refuting people with criticism about NFTs, cryptocurrency, or the blockchain. And Mistwell also made a point of implied that I was talking about NFTs when they were talking about cryptocurrency despite the fact I have been very clear which I am referring to at any one time.
> 
> Anyway, here's the post I made about 15 hours prior to Mistwell's reply where I talked about the typical pattern of talking with supporters of cryptocurrency and NFTs.



Why are you replying to me but talking about me in the third person?

Here is Nate Silver this morning on the topic, which struck me as accurate:

"Is there any particular reason why everyone on the timeline is mad about crypto again? Is it just the ads? BAYC? Getting very ‘nouriel roubini in 2015’ vibes everywhere...People aren't reacting to the technology, they're reacting to the people they associate with the technology since everyone has to get divided into teams, and left-of-center political/social commentators have mostly decided that people into crypto are the Wrong Kinds of People."

You appear to be fitting that description. You seem to have decided I am "the Wrong Kinds of People" and are not even willing to talk directly to me anymore and think I can be handwaived as some "group all people who disagree with me together and dismiss them all as they're all identical." It's not just rude, it's deeply elitist.

For example, take how you just tried to set me up. First you said, "You must first persuade me to like Cryoto by refuting why I dislike Crypto!" to which I replied "No I don't I don't care that you don't like Crypto I just care that you act like I can't like Crypto without being some scammer". And then you replied to that with a "See! I said earlier people who defend Crypto won't ever actually refute any points!" as if you had just made some point. No, you didn't make any point, you just posited a circular argument, and ended it with dismissive snark.


----------



## Gradine (Feb 15, 2022)

Look I enjoy 538 as much as the next stats nerd, but when anyone calls on Nate Silver as a judge of the modern zeitgeist things have gone hilariously wrong.

I'm not saying it's as bad as, say, quoting Neil DeGrasse Tyson tweets in an argument about film criticism, but I'm not _not _saying that, either


----------



## Jd Smith1 (Feb 15, 2022)

Umbran said:


> The IRS wants to know about lots more than "money", because financial status is dependent on much more than liquid cash.  Stocks, bonds, real estate, commodities, various bundled financial packages are all reported.  So reporting it to the IRS doesn't speak to it really being money.




Ah, no.

The IRS tracks income, solely. Income means all sources, including but not limited to, interest, dividends, fees, sales, wages, benefits, and royalties, but only income, ie, money.

I pay my Federal taxes quarterly due to my various income streams, and that means four discussions with my CPA a year. So while I don't claim a detailed understanding of the current US Tax Code, I can say with complete accuracy that all the IRS tracks is money.

Now, when petitioning for deductions based upon losses and gains, an individual tax entity or his or her tax consultant can bring up the relative values of investments as evidence, but it is still a matter of income (ie, money).


----------



## Snarf Zagyg (Feb 15, 2022)

Sorry, but for anyone who actually care about, you know, what the law says-

The IRS treats "virtual currencies" (aka, crypto) as property. You know- like a stock, or gold, or like your house, or like a lot you bought to bury the bodies of the people that keep playing bards. In other words, like any investment, you have to pay the gains (or get credit for the losses) when you move to sell it. That goes back to 2014. It's not new.

So all this "IRS treats it just like cash, because that's all the IRS does" is not true. Which ... is obvious, right?

I think all of these vague, and incorrect, nitpickings were identified early in the thread by @Abstruse


----------



## Snarf Zagyg (Feb 15, 2022)

One more thing-

I don't know if anyone has posted this, but I highly recommend it if you're into reading (with hyperlinked sources) instead of watching videos.









						EE380 Talk
					

I was asked at short notice to fill in for a speaker in Stanford's EE380  course who had to cancel. Below the fold is a hastily updated vers...




					blog.dshr.org
				




Please be aware that while it is relatively short, it is fairly dense.

The final takeaway (prior to the endnotes) is this, which I largely agree with:

_I hope I've said enough to start some discussion. I think there are three basic lines of argument:_

_That the externalities I describe don't exist. You'll have a hard time proving that the waste of electricity and hardware, and the crime wave, are imaginary._
_That although the externalities do exist, the benefits of decentralization outweigh them. The problem here is that since the systems are not actually decentralized, we get the externalities but don't get the benefits._
_That although the externalities do exist, and the systems aren't decentralized, they're making so much money that we shouldn't worry. The problem here is that the amount of actual money you can get out of a cryptocurrency equals the amount of actual money that has been put in, minus the actual costs of mining. So the big picture is that although there may be winners, in aggregate the system loses money._


----------



## Umbran (Feb 15, 2022)

Snarf Zagyg said:


> _That although the externalities do exist, and the systems aren't decentralized, they're making so much money that we shouldn't worry. The problem here is that the amount of actual money you can get out of a cryptocurrency equals the amount of actual money that has been put in, minus the actual costs of mining. So the big picture is that although there may be winners, in aggregate the system loses money._




This is an excellent way to phrase the point.  Thank you for finding it.

Cryptocurrency does not create wealth.  It just helps money change hands, at orders of magnitude higher cost than traditional methods.


----------



## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

Umbran said:


> This is an excellent way to phrase the point.  Thank you for finding it.
> 
> Cryptocurrency does not create wealth.  It just helps money change hands, at orders of magnitude higher cost than traditional methods.



I don't know what point you're referring to, but if you second para is a restatement of it, it's a very weird thing to say as if it has any meaning at all.  No currency creates wealth.  It's not the point of a currency.  Pointing out crypto doesn't create wealth is like saying a baseball doesn't do the dishes.  Of course it doesn't.  Why is this even being mentioned as if it's meaningful?

You then go on to say that crypto does what it's meant to do -- enable commerce -- at a much higher cost than traditional methods.  This is a bad take as well.  Yes, I can absolutely point to where crypto costs hugely more in terms of energy to do business than other currencies.  Totally given, totally valid point.  But this isn't the end of a cost/benefit analysis, and it appears, given the growth of crypto for legitimate means, that the other costs of doing business in a given currency are low enough for crypto to continue to gather use.  Now, personally, I don't think this is so -- there are vanishingly small number of reasons I'd consider using a cryptocurrency over a traditional currency largely because none of the potential benefits accrue to me while many of the costs do.  But this is my analysis, and doesn't invalidate someone else's.  Nor does yours.

Again, can we discuss crypto in a way that deals with what it actually is instead of the continued portrayal of it as a cartoon villain?


----------



## Mannahnin (Feb 15, 2022)

Ovinomancer said:


> You then go on to say that crypto does what it's meant to do -- enable commerce -- at a much higher cost than traditional methods.  This is a bad take as well.  Yes, I can absolutely point to where crypto costs hugely more in terms of energy to do business than other currencies.  Totally given, totally valid point.  But this isn't the end of a cost/benefit analysis, and it appears, given the growth of crypto for legitimate means, that the other costs of doing business in a given currency are low enough for crypto to continue to gather use.  Now, personally, I don't think this is so -- there are vanishingly small number of reasons I'd consider using a cryptocurrency over a traditional currency largely because none of the potential benefits accrue to me while many of the costs do.  But this is my analysis, and doesn't invalidate someone else's.  Nor does yours.



I'm a little confused, Ovinomancer.

What use-case DOES crypto currently have, that doesn't fail a cost/benefit analysis test?


----------



## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

Mannahnin said:


> I'm a little confused, Ovinomancer.
> 
> What use-case DOES crypto currently have, that doesn't fail a cost/benefit analysis test?



Not one I care about, so I haven't researched it.  However, unless we're willing to say that every single person using crypto is a moron that can't do business (and given that it's growing in acceptance, despite recent dropping from some exchanges), there must be many.  I'm unwilling to call a $7+ trillion (with a t) currency exchange accepted worldwide as not having any usefulness to people using it not being served by other currencies.


----------



## UngainlyTitan (Feb 15, 2022)

Snarf Zagyg said:


> One more thing-
> 
> I don't know if anyone has posted this, but I highly recommend it if you're into reading (with hyperlinked sources) instead of watching videos.
> 
> ...



The linked blog is pretty damming.


----------



## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

Mannahnin said:


> I'm a little confused, Ovinomancer.
> 
> What use-case DOES crypto currently have, that doesn't fail a cost/benefit analysis test?



To follow up, many cryptocurrencies are actually easier and cheaper to trade within the currency, so that's something that could be attractive.  Also, it might be attractive that it is a decentralized currency and not one owned or regulated by a state entity.  If I don't have easy access to a dollar or euro market, then crypto become even more appealing.  I have easy access to the dollar market, so crypto actually has hurdles for me to overcome to engage in that market -- I have to do different things.  But, if I didn't, then crypto markets are no real extra work (and less work in many cases) to engage in.

So, ease of transfers and the low cost of transfers is a big deal*.

*On the cost of transactions in crypto, the evaluation of these that I've seen in this thread are misleading in a sense, and true in a different sense.  The actual cost of a transaction is very low in cryptos.  The costs cited are rolling in the minting costs and averaging that out over each transaction.  Minting in crypto is ridiculously expensive, yes, so if I'm interested in looking at a transaction in terms of total costs, those numbers make sense.  If I'm not, if I'm looking at crypto only to see what I actually pay for a transaction, then they're far cheaper than many other markets for transactions.  As a user and not a miner, the costs are low for crypto.  Whether or not that's a useful consideration is up to each person -- but I'd caution you to maybe consider the total cost of other systems where we're mostly just looking at momentary costs to use them.  The dollar market per transaction isn't cheap if you consider the entirety of the government's costs to maintain it.  This isn't to say that crypto isn't ridiculously expensive in terms of energy for what it is, mind.  That's one of my problems with it.  It's just to remind people that we we talk costs in things like this, it's rarely apples to apples.  It think crypto still fails when we do that, though.


----------



## Mannahnin (Feb 15, 2022)

Ovinomancer said:


> Not one I care about, so I haven't researched it.  However, unless we're willing to say that every single person using crypto is a moron that can't do business (and given that it's growing in acceptance, despite recent dropping from some exchanges), there must be many.  I'm unwilling to call a $7+ trillion (with a t) currency exchange accepted worldwide as not having any usefulness to people using it not being served by other currencies.



That seems like a logical fallacy.

My theory so far that it's currently held and traded by a) folks who have a sincere, but so far unfounded, belief that it WILL have a practical use along similar lines that you've suggested- something where independence of central governments is helpful (something democratizing, perhaps inspired by Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon), and b) speculators engaged in what's currently a Greater Fool investment. 

Some people are a combination of the two, definitely, as I've met a bunch of them.


----------



## This Effin’ GM (Feb 15, 2022)

Ovinomancer said:


> Again, there's lots of good reasons to dislike crypto. I don't like it.



Me neither, Crypto sucks. I think I missed it through my read through of 16 pages, what don’t you like about crypto


----------



## Cadence (Feb 15, 2022)

Ovinomancer said:


> Not one I care about, so I haven't researched it.  However, unless we're willing to say that every single person using crypto is a moron that can't do business (and given that it's growing in acceptance, despite recent dropping from some exchanges), there must be many.  I'm unwilling to call a $7+ trillion (with a t) currency exchange accepted worldwide as not having any usefulness to people using it not being served by other currencies.




What's the $7t?  (Googling around is the current market cap of all crypto's combined around $2 trillion-ish?).


----------



## Umbran (Feb 15, 2022)

Ovinomancer said:


> I don't know what point you're referring to, but if you second para is a restatement of it, it's a very weird thing to say as if it has any meaning at all.




What part of, "orders of magnitude higher cost than traditional methods," fails to have meaning?


----------



## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

Mannahnin said:


> That seems like a logical fallacy.
> 
> My theory so far that it's currently held and traded by a) folks who have a sincere, but so far unfounded, belief that it WILL have a practical use along similar lines that you've suggested- something where independence of central governments is helpful (something democratizing, perhaps inspired by Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon), and b) speculators engaged in what's currently a Greater Fool investment.
> 
> Some people are a combination of the two, definitely, as I've met a bunch of them.



It's not a logical fallacy.  It's making an assumption that not all people are clueless.  It's a statistical argument.  I cannot assume that those that engage in cryptocurrency all do so because they're morons and do not have a valid cost/benefit analysis behind their decision.  So long as one person exists that has a valid case, then the argument I've made is valid, logically.  Sure, we cannot say with absolute certainty that this is so, but the claim that it should be discarded because it's so vanishingly unlikely is the same kind behind a number of our scientific theories.  It could be little invisible gremlins make cause nuclear fission -- it hasn't been proved conclusively that it is not.  But it's not a logical fallacy to move forward smartly by discounting that as useful.  Nuclear fission works, and is predictable with the models and understand we have, so even if it is gremlins, it's functionally not important.  Similarly, people very clearly choose to use cryptocurrency for non-criminal activities, and postulating that there cannot be a good case made for doing so seems like arguing for gremlins.


----------



## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

Umbran said:


> What part of, "orders of magnitude higher cost than traditional methods," fails to have meaning?



It appears that you didn't read my entire post, as you've clearly chosen to snip and strawman instead of engaging the clear point I did make.  I would expect you to do better, given how often you chastise others for similar things, sometimes officially.


----------



## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

Cadence said:


> What's the $7t?  (Googling around is the current market cap of all crypto's combined around $2 trillion-ish?).



You're right, my bad.  Total transactions in crypto exceeded $15 trillion.  This is not the same thing as total value of all cryptocurrencies at a given moment.  The total existence amount is a bit over $2 trillion, but it's market -- how often it's getting used -- is over $15 trillion (for 2021).


----------



## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

This Effin’ GM said:


> Me neither, Crypto sucks. I think I missed it through my read through of 16 pages, what don’t you like about crypto



I've said it a bunch of times.  It's ridiculously volatile, and will remain so, because it's not tied to any economic base like traditional currencies.  The mining costs, both in opportunity and in energy costs, are outlandish and growing.  They're poorly understood by many which opens the door to easier malicious activity regarding them (as shown by the fact that the two largest categories of criminal use of cryptocurrencies are stealing them and fraud).  Engaging in that market requires me to extract money from the perfectly fine-for-my-needs dollar market, which is a barrier to entry.


----------



## Gradine (Feb 15, 2022)

To be fair, all money is made up


----------



## This Effin’ GM (Feb 15, 2022)

doesn’t a currency have to be tied to a particular country to be considered a currency?

not to be nit picky but I figure if we need to debate the use of Anonymous vs Paeudononymous, we probably should use the right words for what Crypto is and currency appears to be specifically country based (I could be wrong? Or rather the Oxford English Dictionary could be wrong)


----------



## This Effin’ GM (Feb 15, 2022)

Gradine said:


> To be fair, all money is made up



So are Tuesdays!


----------



## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

Gradine said:


> To be fair, all money is made up



No it's not!  I mean, pretty much all modern money is made up, but a gold coin was money and wasn't made up -- it's value was right there in the gold.  Today's money, though... yeah, pretty much just trading around 'this piece of paper represents a belief we've all agreed to share.'


----------



## Gradine (Feb 15, 2022)

This Effin’ GM said:


> So are Tuesdays!



Tacos are real though


----------



## Gradine (Feb 15, 2022)

Ovinomancer said:


> No it's not!  I mean, pretty much all modern money is made up, but a gold coin was money and wasn't made up -- it's value was right there in the gold.  Today's money, though... yeah, pretty much just trading around 'this piece of paper represents a belief we've all agreed to share.'



What's the difference between a gold coin and a piece of paper that represents the belief we've all agreed to share?


----------



## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

This Effin’ GM said:


> doesn’t a currency have to be tied to a particular country to be considered a currency?
> 
> not to be nit picky but I figure if we need to debate the use of Anonymous vs Paeudononymous, we probably should use the right words for what Crypto is and currency appears to be specifically country based (I could be wrong? Or rather the Oxford English Dictionary could be wrong)



Nope.  You seem to have picked up Oxford Learner's dictionary, maybe?  The OED clearly encompasses crypto as a currency.  



			https://www.oed.com/oed2/00150104


----------



## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

Gradine said:


> What's the difference between a gold coin and a piece of paper that represents the belief we've all agreed to share?



For one, if I throw the gold coin at you, it hurts in a different way than if I throw shared beliefs at you.

For another, I can make something out of the gold coin.  It's value in trade is based on it's usefulness.


----------



## This Effin’ GM (Feb 15, 2022)

Ovinomancer said:


> Nope.  You seem to have picked up Oxford Learner's dictionary, maybe?  The OED clearly encompasses crypto as a currency.
> 
> 
> 
> https://www.oed.com/oed2/00150104



That’s a dense link! Which number is saying Crypto is a currency?

An Oxford learners dictionary?


----------



## ehren37 (Feb 15, 2022)

Mallus said:


> I can’t get past the fact crypto uses real non-renewable resources to create artificial scarcity. Who invented this? Victor von Doom?
> 
> (Satoshi von Doom?)



Yes. 


Spoiler









Thank you Moon Knight Core


----------



## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

This Effin’ GM said:


> That’s a dense link! Which number is saying Crypto is a currency?



Are you looking for a statement that says "hey, TEGM!  Cryptocurrency is money?"  Otherwise, 1 sums it up nicely -- things used as a medium of exchange.  Cryptocurrency is used as a medium of exchange.

Alternatively, for anyone claiming cryptocurrency isn't actually a kind of money, what is it, and why can I spend it to buy things?


----------



## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

Mallus said:


> I can’t get past the fact crypto uses real non-renewable resources to create artificial scarcity. Who invented this? Victor von Doom?
> 
> (Satoshi von Doom?)



I had missed this.  You do know that there are tons and tons of examples of using real non-renewable resources to create artificial scarcity, right?  Most video games have large elements of this.  You have baseball card and their more recent cousin collectible card games.  Just tons of examples.  It's not the idea that really rankles with cryptocurrencies and NFTs, but the _scale_.


----------



## Gradine (Feb 15, 2022)

Ovinomancer said:


> For one, if I throw the gold coin at you, it hurts in a different way than if I throw shared beliefs at you.



The comparison here is paper money; a $10,000 wad of $20s won't leave a mark but it still has some decent heft to it.


Ovinomancer said:


> For another, I can make something out of the gold coin.  It's value in trade is based on it's usefulness.



Is there a less useful base metal than gold? I can fold a $1 bill into an origami giraffe, which has as much utilitarian value than basically anything made of gold. 

I can make something way more useful with an iron coin, should we trade?


----------



## Martyjopson (Feb 15, 2022)

The question at hand was, I believe, about the status of a cryptocurrency as a "currency" rather than a form of "money". Which is an interesting but entirely semantic question.

I don't buy that the value of gold is not "made up". Even if you can make something from it (or throw it at people) - the value of what you make is still always going to be based on a whole slew of value judgements by both the person using the gold as money and the person receiving it. The intrinsic worth of any physical unit of money is based on how a society sees and how we value the material it is made from. In a world with no trees, paper may be very valuable and a paper note may have more intrinsic worth than gold. Which means that gold as a form of money is just as made up as the Euro or the Yen.


----------



## BrokenTwin (Feb 15, 2022)

Gradine said:


> The comparison here is paper money; a $10,000 wad of $20s won't leave a mark but it still has some decent heft to it.
> 
> Is there a less useful base metal than gold? I can fold a $1 bill into an origami giraffe, which has as much utilitarian value than basically anything made of gold.
> 
> I can make something way more useful with an iron coin, should we trade?



Even completely ignoring its use as a currency standard and aesthetic, gold is still a REALLY useful metal for modern technology...




__





						Uses of Gold in Industry, Medicine, Computers, Electronics, Jewelry
					

Gold is the world's most useful metal.  Explore the many uses of gold in industry, medicine, computers, electronics, jewelry, dentistry, coins, space, art and more.



					geology.com


----------



## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

Gradine said:


> The comparison here is paper money; a $10,000 wad of $20s won't leave a mark but it still has some decent heft to it.
> 
> Is there a less useful base metal than gold? I can fold a $1 bill into an origami giraffe, which has as much utilitarian value than basically anything made of gold.
> 
> I can make something way more useful with an iron coin, should we trade?



Um, you don't seem to be aware of the many useful things that can be made of gold.  It's a malleable metal -- you could use it as a spoon, you could use it to pry things (not heavy or really stuck things), it's great to hold down your origami paper in a wind, and that's well before we get to electronics and how the thing you're typing on right now and the medium we're conversing on is literally on the back of gold.


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## This Effin’ GM (Feb 15, 2022)

Ovinomancer said:


> Are you looking for a statement that says "hey, TEGM!  Cryptocurrency is money?"  Otherwise, 1 sums it up nicely -- things used as a medium of exchange.  Cryptocurrency is used as a medium of exchange.
> 
> Alternatively, for anyone claiming cryptocurrency isn't actually a kind of money, what is it, and why can I spend it to buy things?



Oh my misunderstanding. So when you said your link “clearly encompasses” crypto you meant “I personally am inferring that” crypto is encompassed, my mistake!


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## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

Martyjopson said:


> The question at hand was, I believe, about the status of a cryptocurrency as a "currency" rather than a form of "money". Which is an interesting but entirely semantic question.
> 
> I don't buy that the value of gold is not "made up". Even if you can make something from it (or throw it at people) - the value of what you make is still always going to be based on a whole slew of value judgements by both the person using the gold as money and the person receiving it. The intrinsic worth of any physical unit of money is based on how a society sees and how we value the material it is made from. In a world with no trees, paper may be very valuable and a paper note may have more intrinsic worth than gold. Which means that gold as a form of money is just as made up as the Euro or the Yen.



The value of gold is not made up.  It's comprised on how useful it is to us.  Just like the value of a dollar.  We agree that a dollar is useful to us, and believe that it is so, but it's an idea -- it's literally made up.  A gold coin is not made up.  It has a value based on what it is, physically.  It is rare, and useful to make things with that are more useful.  That's not made up.


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## Gradine (Feb 15, 2022)

The historical overlap between "a relevant gold standard" and "electronics" is vanishingly small.

My point being that the gold standard has absolutely nothing to do with its utilitarian value and everything to do with society deciding that to place value in it because what else were we going to do with it? Throughout history a "gold coin" has value because of what it "represents (as) a belief we've all agreed to share" and we melted it down to make computers work. Same with silver, which historically spent much more time backing currency than gold.

The point being that all money is made up, whether it's backed by anything at all.


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## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

This Effin’ GM said:


> Oh my misunderstanding. So when you said your link “clearly encompasses” crypto you meant “I personally am inferring that” crypto is encompassed, my mistake!



Oh, my bad, I thought you were engaging in a serious discussion.  You're just playing definition games, and poorly at that.  Cryptocurrency was added to the OED directly, so if that's what you need, feel free to get your own subscription and pull it down.  I'm not required to do homework for you.


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## This Effin’ GM (Feb 15, 2022)

Ovinomancer said:


> Oh, my bad, I thought you were engaging in a serious discussion.  You're just playing definition games, and poorly at that.  Cryptocurrency was added to the OED directly, so if that's what you need, feel free to get your own subscription and pull it down.  I'm not required to do homework for you.



I’m just having a bit of fun. You really like being aggressive with how you approach people (people aren’t wrong but EMBARASSINGLY wrong, having a different definition based on a dictionary must be from a LEARNERS dictionary because anyone disagreeing must have a very basic understanding of the language, words like Anonymous and Pseudonymous have MEANING and must be debated unless you want to use a word and then it’s speculation and opinion, etc).

but I’ll stop playing and shoot straight.

I think you are a bad faith actor at best obviously pedantic, at worst deep down a crypto bro who realized the only way to engage in a discussion in a hostile environment to crypto and NFTs is to pretend you aren’t for them.


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## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

Gradine said:


> The historical overlap between "a relevant gold standard" and "electronics" is vanishingly small.
> 
> My point being that the gold standard has absolutely nothing to do with its utilitarian value and everything to do with society deciding that to place value in it because what else were we going to do with it? Throughout history a "gold coin" has value because of what it "represents (as) a belief we've all agreed to share" and we melted it down to make computers work. Same with silver, which historically spent much more time backing currency than gold.
> 
> The point being that all money is made up, whether it's backed by anything at all.



Do you need such caveats to have your point stand up?  Sure, but this doesn't touch the other uses gold had long before the modern era.  And yes, gold has utilitarian value and was widely used.  The utilitarian value of gold is that it's pretty, easy to work with, and is extremely durable (it tarnishes and degrades extremely slowly).  These are quire valuable traits.

Honestly, this sidebar is quite weird -- arguing that gold has no intrinsic value despite being clearly used and useful in almost every single culture that had even small access to it for things that aren't currency.


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## Martyjopson (Feb 15, 2022)

So if gold has an intrinsic value, why does the value change? If it had an intrinsic value that would be invariant as it was defined by the internal and intrinsic worth (or value). It has intrinsic usefulness but how we value that depends on who we are and what system of value judgement we operate under. Ultimately nothing can have an intrinsic value as “value” is defined societally. Thus all “money is made up” is a true if simplified statement. 

And yes this sidebar is peculiar, but then this is the internet.


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## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

This Effin’ GM said:


> I’m just having a bit of fun. You really like being aggressive with how you approach people (people aren’t wrong but EMBARASSINGLY wrong, having a different definition based on a dictionary must be from a LEARNERS dictionary because anyone disagreeing must have a very basic understanding of the language, words like Anonymous and Pseudonymous have MEANING and must be debated unless you want to use a word and then it’s speculation and opinion, etc).
> 
> but I’ll stop playing and shoot straight.
> 
> I think you are a bad faith actor at best obviously pedantic, at worst deep down a crypto bro who realized the only way to engage in a discussion in a hostile environment to crypto and NFTs is to pretend you aren’t for them.



Heh.  Okay.  I'm a secret crypto bro because I criticize crypto, explain what my issues with it are, but am not on a bandwagon of just making things up about crypto and bashing it for things it actually isn't.  

I mean, I've actually been clearly critical of cryptocurrencies.  I'm waaaaaaay more pissed I can't get a decent video card for a reasonable price (or at all, given current shortages) than I am at anything in this thread.


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## BrokenTwin (Feb 15, 2022)

@Gradine I agree with your larger point that money is made up, I just strongly disagreed with your opinion that gold is a useless metal.

But to the topic at hand, as far as made up concepts to hold relative value goes, I'd trust a Chuck E Cheese token to provide me a better return on investment than an NFT. They're like a MLM mixed with those old companies that used to sell people ownership of stars.


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## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

Martyjopson said:


> So if gold has an intrinsic value, why does the value change? If it had an intrinsic value that would be invariant as it was defined by the internal and intrinsic worth (or value). It has intrinsic usefulness but how we value that depends on who we are and what system of value judgement we operate under. Ultimately nothing can have an intrinsic value as “value” is defined societally. Thus all “money is made up” is a true if simplified statement.
> 
> And yes this sidebar is peculiar, but then this is the internet.



If I had a hamburger, I could eat, right?  And, if you were really hungry, the value of that hamburger would be pretty high, yeah?  What if you aren't hungry, or have a hamburger of your own?  Did anything about the hamburger change?  Nope.  Just your need for one.  Value is about supply and demand.  These fluctuate.  So value fluctuates.  But nothing about the gold coin changes.  It's physical value remains unchanged.  What I will pay for a thing and what a thing is worth in general are not exactly the same things.  Thus are markets created.


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## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

BrokenTwin said:


> @Gradine I agree with your larger point that money is made up, I just strongly disagreed with your opinion that gold is a useless metal.
> 
> But to the topic at hand, as far as made up concepts to hold relative value goes, I'd trust a Chuck E Cheese token to provide me a better return on investment than an NFT. They're like a MLM mixed with those old companies that used to sell people ownership of stars.



See, this I agree with.  I'd rather burn my money in a CEC (avoiding the travesty they call pizza) than invest in NFTs at the moment.  Although, for return on the CEC tokens, I have to engage in some gambling, er skill games, to exchange for a different currency, which I could then spend for wildly inflated knickknacks.  Still, better than NFTs.  In my opinion.

Oops, I didn't do secret crypto bro very well there.  Let's toss in a realistic discussion of how NFTs actually do offer at least a chance of a real return on investment, if you're lucky.  Kinda like playing Blackjack in Vegas.  You might make money....


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## This Effin’ GM (Feb 15, 2022)

Ovinomancer said:


> Heh.  Okay.  I'm a secret crypto bro because I criticize crypto, explain what my issues with it are, but am not on a bandwagon of just making things up about crypto and bashing it for things it actually isn't.
> 
> I mean, I've actually been clearly critical of cryptocurrencies.  I'm waaaaaaay more pissed I can't get a decent video card for a reasonable price (or at all, given current shortages) than I am at anything in this thread.



Naw I’m saying you may be cryptobro with how aggressively you approach others who criticize it in a way not to your specific liking.

I addressed you being critical, your version of critical mostly being it’s just inconvenient as it stands right now. You even quoted me addressing what I think about your critiques.


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## Ovinomancer (Feb 15, 2022)

This Effin’ GM said:


> Naw I’m saying you may be cryptobro with how aggressively you approach others who criticize it in a way not to your specific liking.



Dude.  Have you seen the way those same people attack anything and everything to do with crypto as if it's the single worse thing?  And how they treat anyone that doesn't enthusiastically agree?  You're accusing me of being a secret crypto bro trying to confuse and trick people into accepting crypto because you think I posted a little bit too aggressively towards people literally claiming crypto is pure evil?

Sure, okay, you're clearly looking at this from a neutral frame.


This Effin’ GM said:


> I addressed you being critical, your version of critical mostly being it’s just inconvenient as it stands right now. You even quoted me addressing what I think about your critiques.



That was _one _of my complaints.  _One_.  I mean, really.  The last one from that quote you mention, and one I included because it was personal and not general.  The first being volatility.  The second being it's stupidly growing energy cost.  The third being that it's a market rife with opportunities to be scammed.  Then the fourth was that I don't even need it.

Do better, please.  At least stop accusing me of being aggressive while at the same time you're leveling absolutely baseless accusations of being a liar and a sneak.


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## ReshiIRE (Feb 15, 2022)

I don't think there's really neutrality on an obvious scam and something that is being used for all sorts of fraud and as a way to exploit people.

The video posted in this first reply is just a conversation ender, it is _that_ comprehensive.

The whole 'technology' and 'innovation' is just shite, and as a programmer I'm sick of it continuing this long, and want these damn financial games to end before things really go to shite.

It has no place in the games industry (both physical and virtual), and the faster we can mmove on the better.


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## This Effin’ GM (Feb 15, 2022)

Ovinomancer said:


> Dude.  Have you seen the way those same people attack anything and everything to do with crypto as if it's the single worse thing?  And how they treat anyone that doesn't enthusiastically agree?  You're accusing me of being a secret crypto bro trying to confuse and trick people into accepting crypto because you think I posted a little bit too aggressively towards people literally claiming crypto is pure evil?
> 
> Sure, okay, you're clearly looking at this from a neutral frame.
> 
> ...



I’ve been waiting for someone to tell me to “do better” my whole life, thank you for your insights I think I can finally grow as a person.

speaking of growth 


Ovinomancer said:


> I've said it a bunch of times.  It's ridiculously volatile, and will remain so, because it's not tied to any economic base like traditional currencies.  The mining costs, both in opportunity and in energy costs, are outlandish and growing.  They're poorly understood by many which opens the door to easier malicious activity regarding them (as shown by the fact that the two largest categories of criminal use of cryptocurrencies are stealing them and fraud).  Engaging in that market requires me to extract money from the perfectly fine-for-my-needs dollar market, which is a barrier to entry.



It’s volatility, costs, poorly understanding populace, and barrier to entry can all be arguments of current state convenience.  

But sure. One.


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## Gradine (Feb 15, 2022)

BrokenTwin said:


> @Gradine I agree with your larger point that money is made up, I just strongly disagreed with your opinion that gold is a useless metal.



Yeah, the utilitarianism of gold, especially in modern technology, was never really the point, but I still probably should've known better than to spout off the mouth.


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## This Effin’ GM (Feb 15, 2022)

ReshiIRE said:


> I don't think there's really neutrality on an obvious scam and something that is being used for all sorts of fraud and as a way to exploit people.
> 
> The video posted in this first reply is just a conversation ender, it is _that_ comprehensive.
> 
> ...



What kills me is the talk of adding medical records and other deeply personal information to the blockchain.

Deregulation of maintaining my personal information? No no no, regulate who has access to that. Absolutely regulate that and stop trying to make currency and games be the gateway to this path.


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## Ovinomancer (Feb 16, 2022)

This Effin’ GM said:


> I’ve been waiting for someone to tell me to “do better” my whole life, thank you for your insights I think I can finally grow as a person.
> 
> speaking of growth
> 
> ...



This seems like you're highly motivated to cast me as a bad actor and are searching for any excuse to do so.  Which is weird, because that requires you to assume that the reasons I gave are all just based on my personal convenience.

Highly volatile markets are dangerous to investors and prone to collapse, thereby destroying wealth invested into them.  Engaging in crypto is pretty much like gambling, with all the downsides.

The costs of crypto are felt by everyone.  The mining operations alone harm communities well outside of crypto and who have nothing to do with crypto.  The fact that these cost can only ever go up is a serious concern, and that's outside of anything to do with currency or currency markets.  It's an attack on infrastructure, if not one that was intended to be so.  Intentions matter little here.

Poorly understanding consumers goes to exacerbate 1 and 2, but also mean that the entire edifice is ripe for malicious actors.  I'm not ever going to encourage fraud, but systems built in ways to be hard to understand only ever enhance the opportunities for fraud.  Fraud is bad.  I'm actually savvy enough to understand this, and it's one of the main reasons I avoid cryptocurrencies and especially NFTs.

I mean, seriously, do better.  This is you intentionally maligning me based on nothing other than the fact that I pointed out some bad arguments against cryptocurrencies.  You might note that I haven't been defending NFTs, because I actually think those are really bad things, even if I disagree with some of the outlandish claims against them.  They're bad enough without having to make stuff up.  And this has been my point:  cryptocurrencies and especially NFTs are already bad enough that you don't have to make things up to make them look bad or show they're actively harmful.  Stick to good arguments that don't rely on making things up and you'll be more successful at getting people to understand what you want to put out.


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## Ovinomancer (Feb 16, 2022)

This Effin’ GM said:


> What kills me is the talk of adding medical records and other deeply personal information to the blockchain.
> 
> Deregulation of maintaining my personal information? No no no, regulate who has access to that. Absolutely regulate that and stop trying to make currency and games be the gateway to this path.



Yes, this has always been an incredibly stupid thing to propose.


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## Ovinomancer (Feb 16, 2022)

ReshiIRE said:


> I don't think there's really neutrality on an obvious scam and something that is being used for all sorts of fraud and as a way to exploit people.
> 
> The video posted in this first reply is just a conversation ender, it is _that_ comprehensive.
> 
> ...



Cryptocurrencies aren't a scam (jury out on NFTs, I'm leaning in that direction, though).  They weren't built as a scam, intended as a scam, and don't really operate as a scam.  They do operate as gambling, though.  Gambling isn't a scam, but it does prey on the undereducated and structurally favor deep pockets and awareness of how the game works and taking advantage of fish.


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## This Effin’ GM (Feb 16, 2022)

Ovinomancer said:


> This seems like you're highly motivated to cast me as a bad actor and are searching for any excuse to do so.  Which is weird, because that requires you to assume that the reasons I gave are all just based on my personal convenience.
> 
> Highly volatile markets are dangerous to investors and prone to collapse, thereby destroying wealth invested into them.  Engaging in crypto is pretty much like gambling, with all the downsides.
> 
> ...



I never complained about you pointing out bad arguments.

I did specifically highlight your aggression and how you chose to address people you disagree with, Mainly a pattern of degrading comments.

I think I’m successful enough! I feel literally zero compulsion to get you to agree with me or to enable your understanding. Not my goal, not my job.

now, getting people to see the aggressive language and tone you take? That’s my goal. And I think I’m doing just fine at that. But I guess I can “do better”.


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## Ovinomancer (Feb 16, 2022)

This Effin’ GM said:


> I never complained about you pointing out bad arguments.



You did.  You accused me of being a secret cryptobro putting out weak complaints but planning instead to convince people to buy crypto.


This Effin’ GM said:


> I did specifically highlight your aggression and how you chose to address people you disagree with, Mainly a pattern of degrading comments.



You had exactly one potentially valid point, there.  Where I said something was embarrassingly incorrect.  It was.  It was trivial to find out the correct answer -- a simple google on the term showed it.  

The rest was you mapping incorrect assumptions onto what I said.  The name of the dictionary was Oxford's Learner.  That wasn't a value judgement, it was what the dictionary was named.  I don't even have an opinion on if it's a good dictionary, but at worst it's an okay dictionary (most are).  This was entirely you.  And there is a very important difference between anonymous and pseudonymous.  We see it here -- both of use are posting pseudonymously under an assumed screenname.  You know you're continuing a conversation with me because my posts are tagged with my pseudonym -- it's a continuity.  If we were posting anonymously, there would be no markers at all to identify a post or who made it -- people couldn't tell if your posts were mine or mine yours from looking at them (savvy people may find patterns, but that's a different level).  The claim that it was aggressive to point out this critical difference, one that makes a big difference to the point being made, is just weird.


This Effin’ GM said:


> I think I’m successful enough! I feel literally zero compulsion to get you to agree with me or to enable your understanding. Not my goal, not my job.



I feel the same way, only I don't hold the opinion that you're some bad actor lying everywhere just because you've posted some things I disagree with.  I don't need to make things up about others to explain why they might disagree with me.  


This Effin’ GM said:


> now, getting people to see the aggressive language and tone you take? That’s my goal. And I think I’m doing just fine at that. But I guess I can “do better”.



Right, the tone policing.  I mean did you jump in to tone police @Abstruse, who was hyper aggressive?  Or others that have been aggressive toward people not jumping on the anti-crypto bandwagon without any qualms?  Nope.  Just me.  Odd how that works out, isn't it?  If you disagree, you're disagreeable.  If you agree, you're agreeable.  Actual behavior be damned.


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## This Effin’ GM (Feb 16, 2022)

Ovinomancer said:


> You did.  You accused me of being a secret cryptobro putting out weak complaints but planning instead to convince people to buy crypto.
> 
> You had exactly one potentially valid point, there.  Where I said something was embarrassingly incorrect.  It was.  It was trivial to find out the correct answer -- a simple google on the term showed it.
> 
> ...



Odd how that works? Naw super easy to explain. Abtruse is already gone, left a while ago after getting in some moderation trouble. Read through the whole thing, taking particular care to see who was overly aggressive in their responses which there were many, both sides in fact! And most people who were being aggressive stopped posting a while ago. But one remained, going as far as to insult moderators.

yeah your whole anonymity vs pseudomity reeks of a pedantic deflection missing the original point of the use of anonymous. It’s not a critical difference, it’s just a use that irritates you. Your obsession with the specific definition and application of these words is super weird considering your absolute refusal to refer to crypto as anything but a currency, but alright.

And so we are clear, cause I guess I do care if you understand despite my previous assertion, I didn’t accuse you of being a crypto bro as much as I rationalized your behavior as that of someone who either at best a bad faith actor, is obviously pedantic, and at worst secretly a cryptobro trying to pretend not to be while still showing the similar behaviors. Then I expressed that rationalization.

I’m not making those beliefs up. I believe them. They are real beliefs!

They may be incorrect beliefs though, sure. And 100% my opinion, not objective fact. You might just be rude and not have the wherewithal to see that. I’m not omniscient, that’s for sure.

edit: mistook abstruse for someone else. Naw abstruse was super helpful. Based on what I saw, their aggression was a response to willful and repeated twisting of words and misrepresentations of fact.

edit: it’s super telling that out of all the people you want to discuss being aggressive you chose abstruse and not the person who actually got a warning point for over aggressive behaviors. Sounds like you just wanted to dunk on abstruse, going as far as to try to draw them in with a tag.


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## Umbran (Feb 16, 2022)

This thread has now become about Ovinomancer.

Enough of that.  Thread closed.


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