You're right! His NFT is undervalued because the irony of it was not properly priced in. I'm gonna place a bet, and capitalize on this market inefficiency!
but it’s already meaningless... the only thing an NFT is, is a JSON token that points at the article, like
{
...other metadata
“author”: “Scott Alexander”,
“title”: “Meditations on Moloch”
“link”: website link,
}
maybe the full text of the article too idk, but it is fundamentally meaningless what they bought, it’s a pointer
Yeah it is all useless shit, if you want to support somebody, just give them money, no need to burn energy first. That somebody being so much into 'give what you can' and EA supports this shit is just bad.
I’ll repeat my take on what the ever loving fuck nonsense NFTs
are
First, I cannot work out on a conceptual level what the fuck an NFT
is supposed to be. I get that on a practical level it’s supposed to be a
financial instrument that lets you buy and sell intellectual property,
but with added blockchain (for some fucking reason). And I get that it’s
in vogue for the same reasons as any blockchain nonsense - the details
of that vogue are for another comment.
Second, it’s literally as far as I can tell conceptually
hard to distinguish from the tranches of mortgage backed securities
which ultimately led to the GFC in 2007. The innovation of tranches and
the innovation of blockchain were both essentially supposed to secure
bad debt with good, and in the same way NFTs seem to rely on garbage
like Ethereum to back a handful of winners with a broad base of people
that never make it. As with the GFC, the unsustainably of this economic
model should be obvious to anybody who hasn’t had a very significant
lobotomy - possibly in early childhood.
Third, the central conceptual argument for blockchain technology is
that it secures financial agreements against centralisation by powerful
interests. As we have seen, the opposite is true, but that isn’t so
important here. What’s important is that because blockchain
technology just on a conceptual level implies that people can game the
system - so long at least as it essentially translates into fiat
currency and commodities trading anyway - trying to swerve it onto
copyright just compounds the existing problems with copyright. To wit,
the conceptualising of copyright as ownership falls afoul of the fact
that within the system promulgated by the likes of Ethereum central
players can game the market when they’re not doing well. Which is quite
often.
Fourth, the ideology of blockchain stuff relies on a weird kind of
economic ontology. People who get really into blockchain technology will
tell you at length that it provides a fundamental basis for finance,
under and above otherwise free-floating markets and so on. This is
obviously bullshit.
Fifth, I am so fucking tired, work out the rest for yourself.
Its not even that; you aren’t buying the copyright or anything like that, and the image is not even stored on the blockchain (it is too low throughout for that). Any association to a meme picture or whatever is purely bs; it is like buying a difficult to forge paper that says it is mona lisa the painting, in not so fine print saying that it has nothing to do with ownership of the painting, or anything else.
As a rule of thumb an “ownership” of an “nft of something” has absolutely nothing to do with any form of ownership or possession of said something.
Combined with some boring image server that can get you from an nft to an associated image file.
Basically real dumb shit.
That’s dumb, nobody would accept a receipt for the Mona Lisa without being able to take delivery of the painting.
I can’t believe I have to explain this, but people want *the actual fucking painting*, not a receipt saying that you own it. The ability to take possession of a thing to enjoy or generate revenues from is the entire point.
The whole point is, there is no legitimacy to NFTs. The Mona Lisa will still be around, the associated NFT will be long forgotten or lost in the sea of other NFTs of the same.
Even with a living artist who dabbles in anti environmentalist art, the NFT which is not connected either to copyright or ownership or a physical artifact is a wholly separate "work of art" from the work it refers to; as if Piero Manzoni both painted a picture and made a can of his shit named not "artist's shit" but "shit taken upon painting [whatever picture it was]". (Note that, of course, in an extreme edge case, the can of shit may end up much more valuable than some boring painting it's associated with)
1\. Right now, my best guess is that NFTs are supposed to be ownership without state backing. It's *just* a thing that says you "own" something, without the usual police or front door to keep people out. They only work if everyone keeps the collective fiction alive, like how a bunch of people believe that the Dutch colonists somehow started owning the island of Manhattan. Of course they're blockchain beanie babies right now, and probably will be forever unless they develop any use outside showing off a shiny new social contract.
3 & 4 - Blockchain is the ugly ancap cousin of torrenting, which is a bunch of computers coordinating to do something cool. Right now I think blockchain tech is getting so much VC money because of basically [this](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/sep/24/disruption-big-tech-buzzword-silicon-valley-power). DeFi sure as hell won't democratize finance with $60 pool entry fees, but it will let a new set of people bypass existing regulation and become obscenely rich\*. And it'll make a new set of wealthy fintech people - I'm sure many of the folks running arbitration bots and flash loan attacks are not working for Goldman. Most of defi seems to be
- actual, literal Ponzi scams promising >6% interest per day (basis cash clones, unaudited rug-pullers, etc.)
- bribes: our tokenomics promise the price will moon in a week and we'll give more coins to HODLers, so people who buy our useless coin now will be greatly rewarded
- rent-seeking: holders of this token will siphon off 1% of each transaction, forever
- bypass regulation: various financial instruments that track the price of stock or futures, but there's no KYC, no IRS reports, etc.
\* the model: make a cryptocurrency, reserve 5% of the coins for yourself, bootstrap a community using it, you are now sitting on many millions of dollars. In 2017 you could skip this with an ICO
Thanks for the finance 101 lesson lol but I have a graduate degree specialising in philosophy of economics
I’m only taking the piss a bit there, I know what you’re getting at, and some of the details you bring up are interesting
Absolutely not to worry. To be honest at this level of abstraction it’s hard to parse whether somebody (me) is trying to summarise as briefly as possible their own background knowledge, or whether somebody is repeating canards they’d read on a blog somewhere. I didn’t have the time or space to go into great detail and show my work.
I don't know what NFTs are either - functionally they seem to be a bridge between crypto weirdness and art market weirdness - but I have just discovered that [the Wikipedia article on NFTs was created three years ago by someone called "Molochmeditates"](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Non-fungible_token&oldid=839347699).
I've mostly avoided coming across anything that has to do with NFTs, but [this nice article](https://everestpipkin.medium.com/but-the-environmental-issues-with-cryptoart-1128ef72e6a3) was making rounds a little while back, and while it's ostensibly about some specific issues, it assumes you know basically nothing and half of it is going over wtf a cryptocurrency or cryptoart even is.
They speculate that the main appeal of NFTs is as a pandemic quarantine substitute for people who'd otherwise wave stacks of money around in art shows on paintings that end up stored in warehouses as "investments". Ultimately NFTs are just dumb as hell and "it's a hobby for rich people looking for fancy new ways to burn money" is probably going to be the most "sensible" explanation you'll ever find.
What is an NFT? Usually something like this
{
...other metadata
“author”: “Scott Alexander”,
“title”: “Meditations on Moloch”
“link”: website link,
}
it points at something, that’s it. A mass hallucination of value
> Second, it’s literally as far as I can tell conceptually hard to distinguish from the tranches of mortgage backed securities which ultimately led to the GFC in 2007.
At least we have some set of tools and conceptual frameworks for thinking about the assets involved there. I'm probably not as down on crypto in general as you are, which isn't to say I'm not down on it, but on some level it may be too generous to compare it to traditional securities. Like, a token of ethereum costs around $1700 right now. A reasonable question to ask, as you might with stocks, would be is that undervalued or overvalued? As far as I can tell the answer is who the hell knows. There aren't clear sets of fundamentals that correlate with value like you see with traditional securities, in fact they just really aren't all that comparable at all IMO. They don't represent ownership in a company, or have associated revenues, profits, balance sheets, etc. I know those are all imperfect and poorly understood things in their own right but at least they're something. Here it seems to me like the only thing you can confidently conclude is that the price is $1700 because a lot of people are trying to buy it. So they think it will be worth more than that in the future obviously, but I don't know why. I'm speculating wildly now but it might be more useful to compare these things to financial instruments from the 1920's and see what comes from that.
Jim Sterling summed it up pretty well: You know those programs where you can buy a square foot of land in Scotland so you can call yourself a "Lord," or where you can pay to name a star after yourself? It's like if that also jacked up GPU prices and destroyed the environment.
> I get that on a practical level it’s supposed to be a financial instrument that lets you buy and sell intellectual property, but with added blockchain (for some fucking reason).
It's just extending the enforcement mechanisms of cryptos to deeds. The consensus process exists to say "okay, coin #X belongs to Y" and block invalid transactions like someone else spending your crypto, coin duplication, spending invalid amounts etc. Instead of "#X" referring to the coin, it holds eg the name of a thing. If anyone tries to sell something with the same name, the transaction will not go through.
There are obvious weaknesses to that. For physical assets obviously it's worth jack shit without actual legal enforcement. Zero protection against stolen goods of any kind, since you can sell stuff using things other than ethereum. It just prevents someone from selling the same "thing" twice on the same blockchain.
Even then, it's pretty shit at that too. The first I heard of it, it was used to sell avatars that were like 64x64 pixels. That's fine; you could scan the blockchain for anything that is close to how your avatar looks. For anything more complex like drawn art, music, video, or text, you can't directly compare them. You can tell if they are *exactly* the same, but someone could change a few pixels on a painting or reword a sentence and suddenly you need to be running machine vision[1] on every thing ever sold to tell if they genuinely are different, and that will always be trivially hackable.
> Second, it’s literally as far as I can tell conceptually hard to distinguish from the tranches of mortgage backed securities which ultimately led to the GFC in 2007.
ehh- NFTs aren't really any more significant than people buying teslas with bitcoin. The value of ETH has gone up due to publicity, but not by a huge amount. Hasn't hugely changed the usage or investment. The people investing in NFTs are either insane or have so much ETH that they earn more value from the publicity driving up prices, or they just don't care about spending.
But yeah, shitloads of money is being spent on utterly worthless bytes. Three months from now those "assets" will be unsellable.
> Third, the central conceptual argument for blockchain technology is that it secures financial agreements against centralisation by powerful interests.
Just to reiterate what I've been vague about: everyone is talking about it in terms of copyright and intellectual property, but IMO that's dumb and solely for the hype value. It's much more sensible to think of it as just adding ownership/deeds/titles to currency. If someone tries to sell you a fake property deed, you can see that the address is owned already.
Obviously we already have public records etc. and even if we didn't it's almost totally unenforceable. Real world it's probably useless outside like... integrating with an MMORPG. It does make abstract sense once you place the blockers to keep you from ever thinking about how you'd verify an asset, though.
[1]: technical accuracy: you'd need context aware hash algorithms for every type of data. eg you have a program that takes in a picture and outputs a near-unique number. It should also do the same for any picture that *looks* the same according to human perception, so you can ensure that the same picture is not sold. Thats hugely complex and obviously easy to trick, even by just brute-forcing, since the algorithm will need to be open and shared so people can verify the number derived from the asset.
I feel like we’re speaking different languages here. You’re diving into certain specifics of implementation whereas I’m talking about the economic implications of the system. My argument as stated above zooms out to an analogy with how the system is going to function even if successful.
I think mostly what I was trying to say is that the liability of everything in NFTs pales in comparison to crypto as a whole and always will. If the value of crypto was being disguised by the value of real assets, people would need to be spending more on those assets than they hold in the crypto they're using to buy NFTs.
I got into specifics about NFTs because I basically see them as even more bullshit than crypto. There are no truly valuable things owned by NFT. If that's the case then there's no significant change. The world is still massively overinvested in cryptocurrency, but NFTs don't really make it any worse.
> My argument as stated above zooms out to an analogy with how the system is going to function even if successful.
I don't think it *can* be successful without having literally replaced cash with crypto- if there's *any* kind of alternative market that doesn't also verify ownership of NFTs, there's zero value to it.
That said I kind of like the idea of crypto, even if I hate the implementations. I'm fascinated by the idea of a dollar being underpinned by some actual idea of supply/demand chains, like a giant distributed Project Cybersyn, even if the reality would be utterly dystopian zero-privacy computerized hell.
The problem I have is that even just on a philosophical level I don’t really believe in the importance of = let’s be pretentious and call it The Fundamental - as a particularly important feature of knowledge or if you like information, which is ultimately what currency is at least supposed to be, i.e. an efficient means of communication via the medium of transactions.
Crypto falls at the first hurdle here, because it is extraordinarily inefficient at doing the job of currency. Furthermore, the blockchain system makes more or less any crypto object less a form of money than a form of commodity. The crypto object on the blockchain is just a clever form of the same ideas that motivate double-entry bookkeeping: keeping a secure track of what and where the crypto object is, and hence its value.
Probably the biggest issue with crypto in general on this front is the ideologically motivated blindness to those facts. Enthusiasts have a certain sort of skin in the game whereby the blockchain in and of itself can replace or improve record-keeping to the point of grounding financial transactions in a Cartesian way which history shows is neither particularly important in any real world nor a particularly effective way of conceptualising money: it is signally relevant that bitcoin gets taken up disproportionately as a philosophy by goldbuggers who think that a gold standard is necessary for a stable economy.
So when it comes to NFTs what we have is less an interesting idea than a shibboleth: if you’re into the idea of grounding everything moneywise into a particular conceptual framework (which on its face doesn’t actually make much sense to even a well-informed outsider) you’re going to be into it, but less for practical than for misguided philosophical reasons. There isn’t any real sense in which crypto solutions circumvent the ordinary supply/demand analysis of economic behaviour, so we’re left with the sociological question of why it is certain people get into it. And the answer to that question is always “because it makes them money”.
That's fair; in the absolute best case crypto takes the work done by a single authority to test if transactions are valid and makes millions of people do those tests so that they can vote on whether to allow it. In the real world there are absolutely atrocious flaws in scaling (like proof of work) that make that work trillions of times more wasteful.
There are nice aspects to separating the actual handling of transactions from from more generally directing money (investing etc). It's pretty easy to write a smart contract that will act like a hedge fund and accept money from average people with a little saved up. It's very hard to start a fund to do something similar. If I want to buy stocks I have to get my bank to do it for me instead of joining some kind of crypto pool. Even if none of that has anything to do with crypto itself, breaking free of the institutional ossification without taking on the risk of literally giving your money to some dude is nice.
> There isn’t any real sense in which crypto solutions circumvent the ordinary supply/demand analysis of economic behaviour, so we’re left with the sociological question of why it is certain people get into it. And the answer to that question is always “because it makes them money”.
1. I think the existence of a complete trusted public ledger vs. a trusted private ledger is not nothing. Again having every single purchase I've ever made be public is horrifying and terrible, but being able to infer *exactly* how much the price of food (and the wages of everyone involved in that supply chain) changed when the new family moved to town is very interesting. You could do the same thing if you had access to the private ledger(s), but even putting trust aside the only other way you could do that is if a single entity kept track of everything.
2. Smart contracts are very cool but hard to imagine without a crypto-like system. If you've got banks in charge of allowing smart contracts, they're not really going to exist. It cuts out a *ton* of middlemen. If you work at a cooperative, you don't need a monthly paycheck- you can effectively spend directly from a shared account, share your liquidity and risk with your coworkers, pool things like insurance deductables. You don't need escrow because you can just pull your money back with the contract. You don't need to worry about someone's check bouncing when you deposit it, because the transaction itself tells you if someone else has a claim on that money.
3. This applies less on a personal level, but I suspect theres a lot of potential in encoding supply/demand with smart contracts. You can formulate asking prices in contracts based on the prices you pay, your current liquidity, your future plans etc. Your mortgage refinance can be built into the contract ahead of time, if finances are favorable. If you earn on commission or you have customers, and your customers suddenly lose a bunch of money, you can invest/liquidate automatically. In the grand scheme of things its just peanuts, but IMO many of these things *should* be automatic; there are obviously correct actions that are often time-sensitive, but in practice everyone ends up paying late fees or overdrafts etc. because they just forget. Most of the time, for most people, I think they'd be happier if a computer just handled paying their rent *before* they had to think about whether or not they can afford a new laptop.
4. Financial friction is pretty undeniable, and crypto does help with that even if it isn't decentralized/democratized. Smart contracts that guarantee exchange rates so you can buy directly from people in another country are basically just Venmo... but things like ACH suck ass, and things like Venmo exist only because banks suck so much. The fed is understandably very interested in the idea of augmenting the reserve with direct-to-consumer access. The only thing slower than crypto is ACH... I pretty much need a marque of writ to transfer money directly from my bank to a friend and it takes at least a day. The banks trust a federal authority, but a distributed system would *really* have to suck to be worse than the ACH. Not that I expect that would make it any easier to send money, but it would probably get a bit faster.
As to (1) I think this is very region-specific. I live in London, unfortunately, and the other day on a walk with my friend we managed to work out that she’d been the accidental origin of suspicious charges to my account. I’d leant her my card briefly for online purchases and - because it ends in a similar number to her own - she’d accidentally charged me for Google Play purchases. The upshot to this is that I wasn’t being fraudulently charged by somebody who’d cloned my card, which *is* a common thing elsewhere. Crypto is particularly popular as a solution to fraud in places where fraud is common: in the UK debit card fraud is a lot less common than it was 20 years ago because banks know on what side their bread is buttered and have done a lot of work to manage the fraud problem with the growth of online.
There are similar features for (2), worrying about escrow just isn’t a big deal for some people. Getting screwed by Wells Fargo just isn’t a feature of banking everywhere. It’s important to remember that the two countries where crypto has been most successful - as far as I understand - which are China and the US are countries where traditional banking is riddled with fraud and particularly shitty behaviour on the part of bankers, endorsed by scumbag politicians etc.
I think (3) is just wrong. Smart contracts don’t do the things you say they do, unless perhaps in some ideal set of circumstances which doesn’t exist. Smart contracts in practice just reinforce the exact problems you identify here in a new set of clothes.
As for (4) the problem of regionalist comes up again: I have no love lost for banking in Europe but we simply don’t have the same issues due to a different style of regulation. This is an indicator that crypto isn’t the only game in town to solve the problem, and pushes me to suggest that the cons outweigh the pros when it comes to generalising crypto as the solution.
none of those four actually work in practice, and we're enough years into people trying and failing that they don't work as hypotheticals either.
crypto claims to do all of these things and fails super-hard at them, over and over and over.
it is important to stress: the claims that crypto does any of this, or can do any of this, are absolutely completely fraudulent bullshit.
the goal is to sell you magic beans for actual money.
number go up.
More general response, me on NFTs:
* [NFTs are for crypto bros to scam small artists](https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/03/11/nfts-crypto-grifters-try-to-scam-artists-again/)
* [NFTs are something high art might be able to use for money laundering, now that the money laundering cops are looking a bit closely](https://archive.is/7F0Ge)
* [Dr. Chuck Tingle has correctly ascertained that NFTs are devilman nonsense](https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/03/21/chuck-tingle-not-pounded-by-my-book-pounded-in-the-butt-by-my-non-fungible-tingler-that-is-literally-this-nft-because-of-the-current-catastrophic-environmental-and-ethical-impact/)
Now that I’ve posted it here I’ll stop kicking the can in SSC.
Meditations on Moloch was an important read for me before I’d
encountered any political theory. It’s simply amazing to me that the
same guy who wrote this long essay about how perverse incentives will
optimize out civilization (and an entire FAQ against American
libertarianism) has now decided to burn my monthly electricity usage to
auction off the essay.
Also I’m going to get a kill-a-watt, my electricity usage is way too
high now that I’m thinking about it.
e: see the post for a comment by Scott himself. Perhaps we have been
trolled by the buyer, who is wealthy enough to be an accredited
investor.
To be fair, iirc he slightly botched the idea of the poem, and made it about his personal gripe, being perverse incentives. You can project a lot of issues into Howl. (Once i heard somebody say, howl is a clear sign of an artist who has failed in life and projects than onto society, which was a take).
My biggest problem with it is that he says Moloch includes but is not limited to capitalism, and then basically all of his examples were more or less just problems that exist under capitalism, plus the tragedy of the commons, which is nonsense in and of itself.
It assumes a state of affairs that rarely exists, if it has ever existed at all: all actors act solely in their own self-interest, do not communicate or coordinate with each other, are not governed by social convention or legal framework, and, by implication, have no regard for sustainability or long-term consequences.
Moreover, there are numerous real-world counterexamples demonstrating that people and communities are perfectly capable of managing common resources sustainably for the benefit of the entire community, making the "tragedy of the commons," *at best*, a description of particular resources and communities in particular places at particular times, not a universal outcome of human development (the latter of which being how it has been characterized historically).
I think you misunderstand the tragedy of the commons, it’s just a situation in which acting against the common interest is in each person’s individual best interest. The core problem of capitalism is that it creates exactly these situations.
Yeah this is completely wrong.
The tragedy of the commons describes those states of affairs whereby people *do* act in their own self-interest, there is no such assumption the way you describe because as a concept it isn’t intended to generalise to all human interaction and indeed can be used to furnish an argument for sustainability: by ameliorating the conditions under which the tragedy of the commons exists it is at least theoretically possible to eliminate such circumstances.
The idea can be misused, and has been, to justify odious ideas like enclosures and so on, but it absolutely is not internal to the insight that there is some individualist/self-interest running all human interaction.
I'm usually happy to defer to you, Poptart, because it's clear that you're far more knowledgeable than me in most subjects we discuss here, but on this one I feel like I have to push back a bit.
[As originally conceived](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243), the tragedy of the commons was an argument in favor of Malthusian population control and a rejection of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and suggests that the idea of "the commons" itself is one we should leave behind. It absolutely was intended to generalize to all (or at least most) human interaction, because that's the extent to which it would need to apply to justify such conclusions. It has been used "to justify odious ideas" because it was itself conceived as an odious idea, not some detached, neutral observation as to how human self-interest has played out historically.
All that being said, I'm always happy to learn where I've gone wrong, so any further insight is very much appreciated.
You make a good point, which I had in mind while I was writing up the reply in the first place, but chose to discard for reasons of coherency and space.
My response is that it’s important - *especially* with 19th century science - to differentiate between the origins of an idea and its status as a concept. The origins of the idea of a tragedy of the commons, rooted in what would become early 20th century liberalism and racial science, absolutely cannot be untangled from a generalising view of human nature, this much is true. Nonetheless the idea of a “tragedy of the commons” has specific applications which are not a crock of nonsense: when your neighbour decides that you share common property and justifiably want to keep it to yourself, that’s part of the general schema we’re talking about when we use the phrase “tragedy of the commons”.
I’m trying to think of particularly good examples...
Environmental examples come to mind: in economic anthropology the example of the Amazon jungle is often thrown around. It’s a good example. Prior to the evolution of the modern State, it has been argued, subsistence farming of the slash and burn variety was a sustainable enterprise which made use of what was understood to be common land. The tragedy of the commons in this case is where more powerful actors in the arrangement - such as government funded business - take advantage of the fact that the land isn’t enclosed as property as such. In this case, the idea can be used to criticise the power structures which permit contractors to treat people like shit because the land is considered common land, rather than property to which they may have a right.
So the central issue in my example can be re-conceptualised as less the historical origins of an argument for The Bad Shit, and more as positing a problem with the notion of property itself. A tragedy of the commons can be as much posing a question of justice and rights to use of land, at least in my example. While it is true that the “I’ve planted my flag” attitude is central to other historical examples of the tragedy of the commons, there are other things in play.
As always, I appreciate your thoughtfulness. Separating origins from applications is admittedly a weak point for me, so I’m not surprised that was our main point of disconnect. Discussing things with you is always a learning experience, so thank you.
+1 to this. The history of economics as a research science over the last two centuries has consisted largely of scholars rationalizing non-industrialized behaviors from an industrialist mindset, with a small minority of scholars [slowly and patiently undoing that work](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#Research).
Ostrom is cool because she did essentially economic anthropology *like* an anthropologist, whereas a lot of economic anthropology is doing anthropology *like an economist* - the classic academic imperialism problem (“there is only one social science, and we are it’s practitioners”)
What’s particularly interesting is how mainstream she is - Nobel Memorial Prize and all that. My supposition is along with being just very good at her job - which is never enough in economics - that she has an appeal in both the conventional and outsider camps. On the one hand she advocates a fairly radical localism which puts people-as-collective first, and on the other she flatters the biases of e.g. the neoliberal project by arguing against big government.
I recall that Stiglitz got a lot more heat after his Nobel than she did, because his ideas conflicted more the conventional views without the flattery.
> a description of particular resources and communities in particular places at particular times
yes this is in fact an accurate description, and no one has claimed otherwise - "tragedy of the commons" is only ever used with respect to specific situations
edit: the other comments didn't show on mobile but w/e i'm leaving this here
It is not a good breakdown at all, see here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/mgkspj/scott_sells_moloch_whose_love_is_endless_oil_and/gswewes/
> howl is a clear sign of an artist who has failed in life and projects than onto society, which was a take
This is arguably accurate, it’s a fairly common criticism of the beats - especially Ginsberg but also Kerouac et al. - that in their work they blamed society for every fuckup they made, which is not to say that there weren’t/aren’t structural reasons why they couldn’t get as ahead as they would like or should like, but that they were fundamentally self-interested people who had a hard time admitting that they had a certain degree of self-responsibility for putting themselves where they ended up.
I find William Burroughs refreshing in this respect, because although he was an associate of the beats, he had a brutal self-honesty about what a shitty person he was, which both Ginsberg and Kerouac and a number of others lack. Tuli Kupferberg (great man, dishonestly referenced in Howl incidentally) had the same quality. Totally aware of where and why he was at, but never as famous as certain others because he never had the talent for bullshiting about his own life like those certain others.
> has now decided to burn my monthly electricity usage to auction off the essay.
Math: [ETH is at ~1.3 million tx per day](https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_transactions_per_day) at [~3.5 GW](https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption/). There's a bunch of dumb bullshit involved with NFTs so call it 10 transactions to make+bid+buy (is it more? I have no idea). Works out to 653 kWh, ~$82 of electricity, ~310 kg of CO2 (same as burning ~35 gallons of gasoline). Here in MA the average monthly electricity use is <600 kWh.
Goddamn, that sucks.
If curious, you can check "Gas Used by Transaction" [on etherscan](https://etherscan.io/token/0xabEFBc9fD2F806065b4f3C237d4b59D9A97Bcac7?a=2143) for a more accurate number to convert to kWh. It's about 1% of the money used to buy the NFT.
This
person emailed me and offered 20 Ethereum for the NFT. This is a lot
of money for a token without a clear use case - about 5,000 at the time.
I considered my various ethical obligations, and I decided the right
thing to do was accept and donate most of it to charity. I confirmed
that they understood how little they were getting and that they were
rich enough that they wouldn’t miss the money. I offset the ecological
costs by donating about ten times the highest conceivable estimate of
what they were to carbon offsets and anti-global-warming charities
(including a direct air capture offset in case other offsets don’t
really work).
I haven’t yet decided how much I’m going to keep as compensation for
my work (learning how to make the NFT was hard for someone at my level
of tech cluelessness, and I want to incentivize myself to do hard things
to get money), but I will donate at least half to charity - probably a
charity related to nuclear disarmament, for appropriateness’ sake.
Just copy + pasting this here for people to see more easily.
Looks like a very rich fanboy had 5K to burn, and decided to do it
this way. Possibly the same person mentioned here in this
comment is the one Siskind points to above as the buyer (although if
I’m reading the NFT website correctly, this “decentralion” person has
already given the NFT to someone else).
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by blockchain, starving hysterical naked save for the masks they wore to discuss global trade
The irony of him commodifying an article on races to the bottom in a race to the bottom
So next time Scott deletes his blog because people call him a racist neoreactionairy these people will have to defend him or their investment is gone
I’ll repeat my take on what the ever loving fuck nonsense NFTs are
First, I cannot work out on a conceptual level what the fuck an NFT is supposed to be. I get that on a practical level it’s supposed to be a financial instrument that lets you buy and sell intellectual property, but with added blockchain (for some fucking reason). And I get that it’s in vogue for the same reasons as any blockchain nonsense - the details of that vogue are for another comment.
Second, it’s literally as far as I can tell conceptually hard to distinguish from the tranches of mortgage backed securities which ultimately led to the GFC in 2007. The innovation of tranches and the innovation of blockchain were both essentially supposed to secure bad debt with good, and in the same way NFTs seem to rely on garbage like Ethereum to back a handful of winners with a broad base of people that never make it. As with the GFC, the unsustainably of this economic model should be obvious to anybody who hasn’t had a very significant lobotomy - possibly in early childhood.
Third, the central conceptual argument for blockchain technology is that it secures financial agreements against centralisation by powerful interests. As we have seen, the opposite is true, but that isn’t so important here. What’s important is that because blockchain technology just on a conceptual level implies that people can game the system - so long at least as it essentially translates into fiat currency and commodities trading anyway - trying to swerve it onto copyright just compounds the existing problems with copyright. To wit, the conceptualising of copyright as ownership falls afoul of the fact that within the system promulgated by the likes of Ethereum central players can game the market when they’re not doing well. Which is quite often.
Fourth, the ideology of blockchain stuff relies on a weird kind of economic ontology. People who get really into blockchain technology will tell you at length that it provides a fundamental basis for finance, under and above otherwise free-floating markets and so on. This is obviously bullshit.
Fifth, I am so fucking tired, work out the rest for yourself.
/u/dgerard any thoughts?
Now that I’ve posted it here I’ll stop kicking the can in SSC. Meditations on Moloch was an important read for me before I’d encountered any political theory. It’s simply amazing to me that the same guy who wrote this long essay about how perverse incentives will optimize out civilization (and an entire FAQ against American libertarianism) has now decided to burn my monthly electricity usage to auction off the essay.
Also I’m going to get a kill-a-watt, my electricity usage is way too high now that I’m thinking about it.
e: see the post for a comment by Scott himself. Perhaps we have been trolled by the buyer, who is wealthy enough to be an accredited investor.
dgerard really is the basilisk and he is torturing us
Just copy + pasting this here for people to see more easily.
Looks like a very rich fanboy had 5K to burn, and decided to do it this way. Possibly the same person mentioned here in this comment is the one Siskind points to above as the buyer (although if I’m reading the NFT website correctly, this “decentralion” person has already given the NFT to someone else).