The Rundown for January 20, 2022
Been a minute but might as well just get back to it. I’ll start the year by ragging on crypto:
Pretty good takedown of the Web3 fraud:
So why this hype? Because the cryptocurrency space, at heart, is simply a giant ponzi scheme where the only way early participants make money is if there are further suckers entering the space. The only "utility" for a cryptocurrency (outside criminal transactions and financial frauds) is what someone else will pay for it and anything to pretend a possible real-word utility exists to help find new suckers.
This leads me to an post that nicely sums up the creep factor that I get when reading or interacting with cryptobros:
They promised us Bond villains with lasers and unhackable data centers in atmosphere-evacuated vaults in international waters. What they gave us was the banality of day-traders, armchair finance-bros with laser-eye avatars, who are unable to give up on the grift because the grift requires that they must always find the greater fool.
Of course it’s all fun and games until everything collapses and gives birth to fascism.
And for all the hype, most implementations don’t even deliver on the original promises of decentralization and immutability.
Platonic Solid Snake (Twitter thread) - or what the hell it is you’re actually getting when you buy an NFT.