[ManishR]

> The people at the end of the line who are flipping NFTs do not fundamentally care about distributed trust models or payment mechanics, but they care about where the money is. So the money draws people into OpenSea, they improve the experience by building a platform that iterates on the underlying web3 protocols in web2 space, they eventually offer the ability to “mint” NFTs through OpenSea itself instead of through your own smart contract, and eventually this all opens the door for Coinbase to offer access to the validated NFT market with their own platform via your debit card.

This raises an interesting question - can a new technology ride the hype-train sufficiently long enough to become mainstream and benefit from network effects and ecosystem dynamics kicking in, even if in its best case scenario - it's only a replacement of status quo and not necessarily an improvement? Historically, any widely adopted technological innovation has had the burden to offer and prove incremental value to society to justify paying the transition costs. But here, the incremental value is being pitched as literal "money" to be made by getting in early - which can be hard to resist for your average joe - notwithstanding their passion or stance on the underlying technology. Believe this will be an interesting race condition between dying out of the hype on one side, and technology reaching critical mass to be self sustaining on the other side. In either case however, don't see anything fundamentally changing or improving for society, except perhaps some new players displacing (or getting bought out by) old ones.

[atweiden]

> This raises an interesting question - can a new technology ride the hype-train sufficiently long enough to become mainstream and benefit from network effects and ecosystem dynamics kicking in, even if in its best case scenario - it's only a replacement of status quo and not necessarily an improvement? Historically, any widely adopted technological innovation has had the burden to offer and prove incremental value to society to justify paying the transition costs. But here, the incremental value is being pitched as literal "money" to be made by getting in early - which can be hard to resist for your average joe - notwithstanding their passion or stance on the underlying technology.

If the product is self-enrichment, not technology, then when the “technology customer” — who has, invariably, invested money — starts losing money during a bear market, the vendor has a de facto failed core product on their hands in addition to a ruinous reputation from their prior unscrupulous peddling of a technological dud.

[jwblackwell]

There's a huge amount happening in the crypto space beyond NFTs.

The article focuses on that area, which is fine, as they were the flavour of 2021, but it's worth keeping in mind that very few techies in the space saw the NFT hype train coming, Vitalik included: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/147740467160615321... so it's probably to be expected that a lot of the hacky, centralized fixes pointed out relate to NFTs.

[astrange]

> This raises an interesting question - can a new technology ride the hype-train sufficiently long enough to become mainstream and benefit from network effects and ecosystem dynamics kicking in, even if in its best case scenario - it's only a replacement of status quo and not necessarily an improvement?

That's more or less how Uber works. They just ignored taxi medallion laws, and only ended up winning because everyone decided to abandon them.