I must quote The Deeper Connect Nano is like the VPN of the future, without the monthly fee - #8 by jaf again: “they’re a bunch of blockchain solves everything wankers. Don’t touch this thing”.
The idea of NFTs reminds me of Joseph Weizenbaum’s observations how people around him got so enthralled by computers they constantly tended to confound the virtual with the real, Eliza with a psychiatrist.
I think there is definitely a value to digital ‘assets’ but OTOH our digital life is a house of cards.
The blockchain and proof-of-work is also primitive in the sense that essentially what you do is ascribing value to amount of energy wasted. You could as well heat a warehouse with a bunch of resistive space heaters, hand the proof-of-purchase for the electricity to a clearing house, and allow them to trade that piece of paper in a stock market of sorts.
You could have used the same amount of energy to make people’s lives better (like heating homeless shelters or run a production line for stuff) but you chose to vent all of that into our already heating atmosphere.
As a reward people admire you for being so avant-guarde, so digital, so clever, and you may get rich. We moan at the sight of environmental destruction that our species’ insatiable appetite for mineral resources inflicts on the planet but you managed to cut out the middle man, all the dirty physical production stuff. Blockchain is the most efficient polluter on Earth. Not unlike a heat pump, it generates wealth on one end for a very few, at the expense of exhausting heat and CO2 on the other, for everyone to suffer from, socializing the incidentals. Well played, very clever.
