[meowface]

It's odd to me that people focus so much on Ethereum NFTs' environmental impact. It's certainly not good, but it's currently nowhere close to Bitcoin's consumption, and within 1 - 3 years will likely be reduced to the cost of running something like the Tor network: https://ethereum.org/static/6b5219d652112f88202e9768e27f5db1.... (Especially since there's no specific marginal energy cost to minting or trading an NFT, so it can't be compared to something like choosing whether or not to drive a combustion engine car.)

To me the massive concern is all the financial fuckery. Anyone trying to shoehorn tokens (fungible, non-fungible, or semi-fungible) into something is almost always the reddest of flags.

For one, the proposed "token-gating" makes no sense. What's to prevent someone from buying one token and then sharing the private key with a million people? You can try to create a sophisticated token-sharing detection system with invasive fingerprinting and tracking and proxy/VPN detection and such, but it's endless whack-a-mole and it's barely feasible for the world's top companies, on top of being the antithesis of what cryptocurrency people stand for. This is why consensus algorithms like proof of work exist in the first place: you can never ensure one identifier (a private key, an IP, whatever) = one person. They have to sacrifice something fungible and scarce.

And "Your super-fans can collect NFTs of your published content." Just... what? Why? This strikes me as ridiculous and, frankly, cringe-inducing. It makes the whole thing feel gross.

[Ensorceled]

> It's odd to me that people focus so much on Ethereum NFTs' environmental impact. It's certainly not good, but it's currently nowhere close to Bitcoin's consumption ...

In a conversation about NFTs why is it odd to focus on NFT's environmental impact? Most people who hate NFTs also hate bitcoin, I assume they also hate racism, child labour, and COVID. Do you also find it odd that people don't mention their feelings about those issues when talking about NFTs?

[DonHopkins]

I totally agree with meowface that bigger problem with people shilling Bitcoin and ICOs and NFTs and other shams is that they're obviously snake oil salesmen pushing get-rich-quick pyramid schemes.

But when trying to deprogram cryptocurrency cult members, it's easier to focus of the more tangible irrefutable problems like the environmental and heath impacts, and ask them to justify why they don't give a shit about the environment and the health problems of burning coal.

Because simply explaining to them that they've been duped by scammers is a lot harder sell -- they've bought into the cult and are shilling it themselves, so they don't want to admit it.

The same way it's harder convince a Trump supporter that he's a con-man, and easier to get them to admit that they don't think injecting bleach and inserting an ultraviolet flashlight up their rectum is a good way of curing Covid-19.

If course there will always be a round of them parroting stock excuses like "Some day <insert name of scam here> will be environmentally friendly!!!" or "Only 79% of the energy is produced by burning coal!!!" or "Wasting as much non-renewable energy as possible will hasten the adoption of renewable power!!!" or "Proof of Stake!!!".

But those are all bullshit excuses that are easier to shoot down than convincing somebody they're not a member of a cult and they're not going to get rich quick if only they shill the cult's products a little harder.

(Because they're circular arguments, analogous to Trump's ongoing excuse that he was going to publish his wonderful health care plan any day now -- you just wait, and "Proof of Stake" is just Oligarchy on Steroids that certainly isn't going to help any starving artists, and any useful financial services end up being as centralized as Visa and PayPal anyway, but much less trustworthy and run by incompetent unregulated criminal scammers just like MtGox, with exactly the same exit strategy as Confido if they're not shut down by the Feds first).

https://www.mtgox.com/

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/21/confido-ico-exit-scam-founde...

[Ensorceled]

> I totally agree with meowface that bigger problem with people shilling Bitcoin and ICOs and NFTs and other shams is that they're obviously snake oil salesmen pushing get-rich-quick pyramid schemes.

Oh, yeah, they are definitely a ponzi scheme, MLM or, at best, Beanie Babies. At some point this will all come crashing down, either by regulation or lack of new patsies.

It's like the dotcom boom all over again; where co-workers, friends and family are all buying these crazy stocks at insane valuations.

I was just curious why the meowface was focusing on the "whataboutism" of Bitcoin vs. ETH.

[DonHopkins]

I was (first and primarily) focusing on the environmental impact for the reasons I explained above, but then (secondly) asking the NFT shills to explain exactly how NFTs solved any problems that couldn't be much more efficiently and less destructively solved, because I know they can't and won't answer. Their silence on the matter speaks volumes about their lack of integrity and competence.

Some people simply don't have working bullshit detectors, and those are the ones who need to be influenced emotionally instead of logically, because that's how they were influenced by scammers in the first place, and no amount of logic will change their minds.

When I wrote that, I hadn't even seen the ridiculously cringy part about "Your super-fans can collect NFTs of your published content" and the link to https://papyrusnft.io/ yet, but all I can say is "just wow".

You've REALLY got to be gullible to fall for that kind of unmitigated bullshit, but unfortunately a whole lot of people are. I mean, the background color and stock artwork and ad copy on papyrusnft.io is just mind-bogglingly tacky and ridiculous, but maybe it serves the same function as the frequent and obvious mis-spellings in Nigerian Prince scam emails.

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-nigerian-scam-emails-are...

[meowface]

Sorry, maybe I worded my comment poorly. I'm not trying to say "why are you talking about Ethereum and not Bitcoin instead?", or something like that.

Here, it's a tiny bit like trying to link NFTs to racism because there's a certain subset of cryptocurrency enthusiasts who are Nazis. (And some do say this.) Not the best analogy, I know, but in this case Ethereum is commonly thought of as environmentally unfriendly basically due to guilt by association with Bitcoin.

Ethereum does have an excessive environmental impact, because proof of work is fundamentally environmentally unfriendly. But the point is it isn't a very big impact right now and probably won't ever be an impact because before it can reach that point there'll probably be a shift to an algorithm that reduces the energy cost to that of any other ordinary software. And even if it did pose such an impact right now, NFTs pose no direct marginal energy cost (though they do so indirectly by encouraging more use of the network, which raises the incentive to mine).

In my opinion, there are so many other good arguments against (most/nearly all) NFTs that when you pull this one out, it instantly causes the opposition to flag you as someone not worth listening to. Especially when it's couched in dramatic language, like that NFTs are "burning so much coal, causing cancer, and destroying the environment", as the previous commenter wrote.

[hiptobecubic]

"It's bad but it's fine because I'm sure that everyone will do something about it before it becomes a problem," isn't very satisfying.