An astrobiologist says NFTs do not bode well for our species’s future
nautil.us
nautil.us
I didn't think the science was settled on such things? Do I believe there is a logical argument for life out there? Definitely but how arrogant must one be to name themselves the Head Astro Biologist? And then to critique the economics of emerging markets...I guess that makes him an Astro-Biological-Economist too!!
Who knew a physics degree could take you so far!!!
This is a theme in Accelerando by Charlie Stross where mankind (mostly) gives up on exploring the stars because it can't look away from the fascinating firehose of precessing simulacra close to the sun. It also turns up in the H.P.L.D. (Highest Possible Level of Development) that turn up in the story Altruizine: A True Account of How Bonhomius the Hermetic Hermit Tried to Bring About Universal Happiness, and What Came of It from Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad.
Specifically, many of us see NFTs as a 'circle jerk' in which people 'possess' things to impress other true believers. The NFT enthusiast is not looking inwards, and not looking to the stars, but rather lives with a crowd suspended in a mirror. It's a cultural form, like the reddit meme, that is an odd hybrid of autistic and neurotypical thought that is accessible to both, has the weaknesses of both, and causes some of us to despair for the future.
(I got a physics PhD too but dropped out and, lately, I see sociology + psychology + literature to be a lot more 'real')
You take ink and you print an image on cardboard; we call these "trading cards", like Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, or baseball/basketball/sports cards.
A designer releases a limited edition of a new shoe/shirt/backpack, and people line up overnight because they want wear it, collect it, or resell it.
NFTs are digital collectible assets, that's all. They help to solve the problem of provenance as records on blockchains are immutable. But the core of their purpose is the same as any cardboard slab with ink on it; it represents some derivative product of a person, moment, or image. You don't get the rights to the athletes image, you don't get the rights to the artist's art, you don't get ownership in the person themself; you get a piece of cardboard. (Some NFTs have interesting royalty schemes, but we'll see how that plays out.)
I don't know why people try to see NFTs as some sort of phenomenon deeper than they actually are. Look around, this collecting behavior is nothing new.
Tom Wolfe, in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Painted_Word
talks about how New York Times Hilton Kramer worked to convince conservative and boring rich collectors who really rather buy Norman Rockwell paintings that it was OK to buy modern art.
NFTs are dangerous precisely because they reveal fundamental problems in human nature that have been repeated over and over again and will be later again. The NFT is shocking because it happened so fast, because the amounts of money grew so large, and it did it all without a mediating "art world."
Immediately it is financial bubble and financial bubbles are dangerous. This guy invented modern finance (government bonds)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Law_(economist)
and had his systems blow up spectacularly. When it blew up in France the king, queen and many of their hangers-on lost their heads.
What do you think of tagging old growth trees on private property with QR codes linking NTFs as a way to protect them from the logging industry yet still extract the potential value of a literal growth asset?
Sometimes the early stages of a market do not reveal it's full potential, in the 1970s and 1980s many dismissed personal computers too.
I sometimes think that people with degrees should know better than to arrogantly conflate their google searches with actual knowledge and insight and so easily dismiss emerging markets they do not understand.
I am not a huge fan of digital NFTs either but then I really don't understand why anyone would pay for imaginary items in a game regardless of it being an NFT or just some vanity item yet people do it all the time.
The exact same arguments made against digital merchandise could and should be made against the perfume and makeup industries I suppose, as it is all just fake and has no tangible value.
Sorry if my words weren't snooty enough to rise to your level, I lost my thesaurus.
Generally I am skeptical about "pay $X in cash now and we'll never cut the trees down" because the cash is real but the "not cutting down" may not be.
A typical old growth cedar in my neck of the woods currently runs on average somewhere between 5000 CAD AND 20000 CAD before milling, after going through a saw mill that number typically doubles or triples depending on the quality or grade of lumber produced.
I would imagine there would be a cost of around 2000 CAD to actually register the ownership within the current system so the amount 200 USD worth of gas to mint that to the block chain is really insignificant.
There would be several other issues such as those pesky trees that fall down and the noise they make, fires, animal squatters etc. not to mention the local governments would eventually want their grubby little hands greased in some way or another if actual commerce was being conducted using a so called crown resource (Yes in Canada the Crown gets their cut even from private land).
Still, that is but one simple idea for what is a new market being built up at this moment in time that we are all fortunate enough to be living through.
Is it any better than tulips? Maybe, maybe not but I remain open to the possibility and feel the need to speak up when the smoke blowers start pushing their opinions as fact. Especially imaginary experts on theoretical things such as Astro Biology that earn their livings corrupting young minds with propaganda under the guise of it being higher education, while at the same time having no problem silencing the voices of those who hold contrary opinions. I'm looking at you leftist liberal universities.