Line Goes Up - The Problem With NFTs

If someone pitches you on a "great" Web3 project, ask them if it requires buying or selling crypto to do what they say it does.
Sources and Further Reading
web3isgoinggreat.com/
tante.cc/2021/12/17/the-third...
davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/...
amycastor.com/2021/03/14/meta...
www.stephendiehl.com/blog/cry...
blog.mollywhite.net/blockchai...
www.motherjones.com/politics/...
davetroy/status/1...
/ cryptocurrency-is-garb...
/ fintech-is-a-scam-a-li...
naavik.co/business-breakdowns...
www.gawker.com/culture/the-fu...
/ nfttheft
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/arc...
www.gamesindustry.biz/article...
www.technollama.co.uk/platfor...
davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/...
/ bitfinexed
Written and performed by Dan Olson
Crowdfunding: / foldablehuman
Twitter: / foldablehuman
00:00:00 Preface
00:01:12 0. In 2008 The Economy Collapsed
00:07:09 1. Bitcoin
00:18:18 2. Ethereum
00:24:34 3. The Machine
00:39:07 4. NFTs Exist To Get You To Buy Crypto
00:57:54 5. The Unbearable Cringe Of Crypto
01:11:46 6. A Self-Organizing High Control Group
01:16:57 7. Crypto Reality
01:25:36 8. There Is No Privacy On The Chain
01:32:52 9. If This "Looks Like Scam" Then Every NFT Room I'm In Looks Like Scam LOL
01:38:29 10. Play To Earn Exists To Get You To Buy Crypto
01:46:39 11. We're All Gonna Make It And By "We" I Mean "Us" Not You
01:56:08 12. DAOs Exist To Get You To Buy Crypto
02:13:21 13. I Know It's Rigged, But It's The Only Game In Town

[@otakonjunkie]

"Imagine what it will be worth in five years " Didn't even take 3 to reach zero.

[@louisstrauss285]

It's all part of the plan.

[@SorowFame]

It’ll shoot up in value in 2 years, trust me guys this totally wasn’t a waste of money.

[@jackalobowaitthisnameistaken]

I definitely imagined that

[@rawbebaba]

This video came out and the NFT market collapsed like a month later lol

[@ano_nym]

Crypto however is stronger than ever. (although it's probably at the peak now.)

[@812558]

People looked at the system and said "The issue isn't that it's rigged, the issue is that I wasn't the one doing the rigging".

[@wertkritikwilli2548]

Nothing wrong with that. After all, a free communistic society will be a system rigged by everyone for everyone.

[@juliocbp9389]

Nesara, anyone?

[@BoomerLover420]

@@wertkritikwilli2548 ...What does this even mean?

[@agilemind6241]

@@wertkritikwilli2548 *By anyone for anyone. Anarchy is anarchy, there is no difference between libertarianism and anarchosocialism. Look at any failed state to see what happens when a society / economy develops without governments - the winner is always whomever has the biggest gun or the highest pile of gold to buy the biggest gun.

[@wertkritikwilli2548]

@@agilemind6241 Read some Marx, bro.

[@TwoWholeWorms]

Gotta give Overly Attached Girlfriend props for having the chops to mint the NFT (via a third party, but still), sell it, and immediately cash out and never touch any of it again.

[@phastinemoon]

Especially since, given how shitty the internet is to women, she probably gets SO much shit, daily. Good for her

[@rykehuss3435]

@@phastinemoon white knight

[@fourthmatchflame]

@@rykehuss3435 dude. do you think that real people think that being a faceless femininst on the internet is going to get them girls. also, how do you know that phastine moon is a guy? they could be a woman speaking from experience.

[@gaming_gamer483]

hand out dog treats to men who bark at you see how they respond

[@maddieb.4282]

@@rykehuss3435see, I can use random words too

[@samwiseshanti]

The fact that this video now has 12 million views means that Dan made more money from this than 99.999% of the people who invested in NFTs 😂

[@tonycampbell1424]

The one and only person to make any ethical money off of NFTs.

[@JSHADOWM]

or, as i like to call it: "Justice"

[@beefax]

What's funny is that despite this video being entirely about NFTs and it's culture, every corner of it is full of warnings to not indulge in NFTs

[@beefax]

It's like a channel dedicated to fixing Mac's with the main guy constantly telling you why you shouldn't by a Mac in the first place

[@VoroxPete]

@@beefax So, literally any channel about fixing Macs then? Like, you cannot open one of those things up and not immediately think "Oh my god, why would anyone ever buy this?"

[@EpicBeard815]

It's May 5th, 2022. NFT sales are down 92%, and my enjoyment of this video is up by that same number.

[@SolANDSixela]

Haha, Ive personally learned my lesson and won’t be buying any NFTs in the near future

[@dongately2817]

Schadenfreude - I really hate to take enjoyment from other peoples losses but the past couple weeks, watching numerous crypto bros squirm and sweat, I have to admit I’ve been guilty as charged.

[@SolANDSixela]

@@dongately2817 i understand, personally i think im still long on BTC/ETH but not NTFs

[@bringles3042]

@@SolANDSixela how can you watch this video and take away that crypto is at all viable

[@SolANDSixela]

@@bringles3042 im talking from my instincts, experience and other’s people points on the matter. I believe btc will be a good store of value once the marketcap reaches gold’s marketcap (17 Trillion usd). I suggest you go watch michael saylor btc interview. He compares it to gold as a store of value on multiple vectors of what makes a good monetary system.

[@alexradke7597]

"A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE, THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION" IBM presentation, circa 1979

[@russelldavis1875]

Hmmm yeah wouldn't look to hard into the history of IBM if I were them

[@sixstringedthing]

I was born that year. How things have changed. Yay, progress... :/

[@mictest9310]

Well, in that case, owners of the computer/programs must be held accountable for its decisions.

[@edwardtan1354]

@@mictest9310 in which case the statement still holds true its not the computer thats accountable but who ever made it

[@gloverelaxis]

@@mictest9310 the programmer paid to write the code by the owner is also morally responsible for what the program does. there are essentially no programmer's guilds/unions that prevent coders writing evil code (in the same way engineers' guilds might prevent engineers sacrificing human lives for profit), because programmer culture is hideously right-wing.

[@kaiserschnitzel89]

A perfect description off the mortgage crisis that *refreshingly* did not blame "borrowers with bad credit taking out loans they could not afford."

[@stillmoms]

The banking industry: “Look at these greedy people, buying things we financed that they can’t afford with money we aggressively pitched them on and then loaned them! How could they have thought this was okay?!”

[@adampope5107]

​@@stillmomswhen I bought my first house, the mortgage I qualified for was insane. Like yeah, I could technically afford it but I would be eating nothing but ramen and would have no disposable income. The realtor was pushing hard for me to look at more expensive houses. This was after the housing crash. Things haven't really changed.

[@Business_Skeleton]

​@@adampope5107like he said. These are not just flaws of the system. They are flaws of human behavior. And that never changes

[@adampope5107]

@@Business_Skeleton it most definitely is a flaw in the system that allows these lenders to essentially keep doing the same thing.

[@DiomedesStrosMkai]

@@Business_Skeleton Non-sense. The flaw isn't human behavior, it's the perverse incentive structure built into the system. The housing crash precipitated because of financial de-regulation from Reagan to Bush Jr. We had an imperfect, but working, system that we dismantled so that a small minority could aggressively exploit the fundamental needs of the general populace.

[@MrKaneShadow]

My favorite hobby of the '20's is watching Libertarians speedrun to reminding everyone why rules exist

[@placeholderdoe]

I’m screenshooting that comment

[@redlion45]

"it's not a child it's a 5000 year old dragon" -Libertarians

[@noesunyoutuber7680]

​@@redlion45 I'd argue that's not even a particularly libertarian attitude. Claiming that it's not a sexual depiction of a child because of some nebulous qualifier implies that you still believe in the validity of the rules and are just trying to craft an exception for yourself - libertarians are no big fans of technicalities. The libertarian position would be more akin to "yeah, that is a child, and you know why you think that's wrong? Society, man! I'm not the problem, society is!"

[@skeetorkiftwon]

​@@noesunyoutuber7680Lol. All transies sound exactly the same...well and the actually neutering themselves and kids thing.

[@skeetorkiftwon]

​@@redlion45 And it has a female penis.

[@Conspirachu]

I wanted to revisit this in a few years with the comment "This aged like a fine wine", but it only took a few months for the whole industry to come plummeting down

[@georgelionon9050]

You'll be able to this with the part on crypo currencies ..

[@trouty606]

It's a lot like Dan's video on The Snyder Cut, which was extremely accurate in calling out what did/did not exist with it and how it might eventually come to be if it was released later. It's almost as if Dan puts a lot of effort into both researching his topics and presenting his points :)

[@curioustangent3201]

You could instead say it aged like a good, traditionally-brewed beer :)

[@pennycheshire5608]

@@trouty606 also like the twist in his Flat Earth video. I think folks forget with how relevant it later became that he released that when most of us didn’t know what the Q movement was. He’s got some kinda knack for getting out ahead of things for sure.

[@Syne111]

And when it rises to new highs in 2 years, you'll have nothing to say.

[@spiritualanarchist8162]

This whole NFT lifestyle makes me feel like i stepped into a Kafka novel. The narrator tries to understand changed reality. Everyone around him sells, buys and talks about non existing products. When he tries to understand what they do, he gets flooded with a complicated vocabulary that doesn't explain anything.

[@gregoryberrycone]

my friend trying to explain to me why i should invest in gamestop stock and be excited about their nft marketplace was liking hearing word salad. none of it made any sense to me

[@jlrinc1420]

You could just as easily be talking about Allen Greenspan and cdos

[@spiritualanarchist8162]

@@jlrinc1420 Yes, but the stockmarket, with all it's complicated Offsprings have been around for ages , and has gradually became more complicated and diverse. The whole NFT rise & fall happend within a year or 2.

[@ekki1993]

@@jlrinc1420 It's really not comparable. There's a difference of scale in both time and volume between crypto and the stock market. I expect an old system that controls most of the money in the world to be complicated, not so much a market that existed for barely a decade and is used by a small niche of people.

[@jlrinc1420]

@@ekki1993 the reason I bring it up is because Greenspan used to make the federal reserve as complicated as he could to avoid oversight from congress. Its the same tactic used by the bank of Japan to avoid oversight from the japanese parliment. The same tatctis has been used often before making finance seem as complicatedd as possible to avoid explaining anything you dont have to to keep extra regulations away from markets

[@SnowyNowak]

In the time since this video released, 95% of NFT collections ever released became worthless Together, we can make this figure 100% 🙏

[@bulletflight]

100% is a bit difficult. Even dishwashing liquid only claims to kill 99.99% of bacteria.

[@marcusaaronliaogo9158]

nature is healing

[@velocirapture89]

I support this cause.

[@fullmetaltheorist]

Billions of dollars must be wiped out.

[@jamesverner9132]

@@fullmetaltheorist Not wiped out, just transferred over to a bunch of con men that sold some idiots pictures of monkeys... its the crime of the century if you ask me.

[@neckpeck2738]

Watching this again for the 385th time, I'm awestruck by the optimism of the "Pixelgirl NFTits comic book" announcement. I'm neither an accountant nor a salesman, but let's look at their numbers for a second. They expect to claim 1% of the entire comic book market share. For comparison, Kondansha Comics and Dynamite Entertainment respectively hold more or less 1% of the US comic book market share in profits. And those are publishing companies. They sell far more than one comic - They're behind franchises like Attack on Titan, Ghost in the Shell, Flash Gordon, the Battlestar Galactica or A Game of Thrones comics. Names most people have at least heard of, even if they're not part of the scene. Kondansha offers almost 700 series on their website. They expect their one plotless horny titty NFT pixelart comic to make as much money as the whole company that put out Attack on Titan.

[@Aster_Risk]

That is such a great way to illustrate just how stupid this is. Thank you!

[@tinkerer3399]

Yep, 1% of a massive market is massive. Their expectations in movie terms were like "Okay we have this low budget indie film. When we release it all we have to do is have it perform as well as Endgame and we will be rich. It is one movie, Endgame was one movie, so it should be easy!"

[@FFKonoko]

​@@tinkerer3399close. A low budget indie film performing even middlingly would get some profit. They are instead holding onto their movie, unreleased, waiting for someone to pay them endgame money for the rights. While the cellulose they filmed on slowly degrades.

[@Ididntchoosethisname]

It's actually worse than that. See the comic market is itself broken down into lots of sub markets, and genres, which are themselves broken down into sub genres usually. Think like fantasy, sci-fi, superhero, children, manga, hentai, historical, crime, comedy, war, westerns. Then there is the numerous art styles, etc, etc. There is no such thing as one comic book market. The person who is buying Mickey Mouse isn't the same person who is buying the Punisher. I remember a course I took about some company that made exactly the same flawed breakdown of the paint market. They spent a lot of money developing a really good paint with the idea being that they would capture like 20% of the market. However the market wasn't really one market. They developed a really good heavy oil-based weatherproofing paint. Which isn't the same as the paint that artists use, or that people use to paint the rooms in their houses. They were shut out of large sectors of the paint market. (I believe their paint was good enough to basically become the market leader in that area, but the market was small enough that they'd never ever recoup their development costs). So really to get like 1% of the whole market, they'd need like maybe 40% or more of a submarket. Considering the name, NFTits. What even is their submarket? 'Western Hentai Meme comics'? They'd probably need like 250%+ of their submarket to even get close to 1% of the overall market. Like Dan says in the video. Clearly the project developers, and stans were/are economically illiterate with any, rightly skeptical naysayers, being shouted down as unbeliever normies. Utter bullshit fantasy economics, selling hype, and not any real or viable project.

[@callum7764]

​@@Ididntchoosethisnamethat paint example, and what happens when you conflate a niche of a market with the entire market value, is a great showcase of why this project was a dumpster fire from the get go.

[@danielludwig647]

That guy trying to harass you in Decentraland is even funnier now that we've learned how pathetically small the playerbase is.

[@sarsmask]

Came back here after the Decentraland video to see crypto dweebs still malding. Cool F-tier Second Life ripoff those guys have.

[@coaxill4059]

@@sarsmask Yeah, they seemingly picked the most generic old MMO they could, and made a bare bones version who's entire purpose is to pull more of your assets into crypto.

[@thedude4840]

I didn’t know it was Dan himself being accosted by a crypto guy. Man that guy must feel stupid knowing he’s in the greatest takedown of the stupid industries he’s chosen to take part in.

[@Noah-wx7fm]

May I ask where that is in this video?

[@djizomdjinn]

@@Noah-wx7fm Chapter 7 intro.

[@thewolfofthestars1847]

The way I had NFTs explained to me is this: you are not purchasing the Mona Lisa. You are not even purchasing a copy of the Mona Lisa printed on a sheet of A4 paper. What you are doing is purchasing a key that opens a door that leads down a hallway to a super special personal viewing room through which you can look at the Mona Lisa. And also anyone else can go in there any time they want to look at it too, by the way, but the key is yours!! And also that hallway may at any time collapse and lead nowhere anymore, or lead to some other non-Mona-Lisa picture, and there's nothing you can do about that. But you own the key!!

[@louisstrauss285]

Is it a nice key ? Could I use it as a necklace ?

[@atomicshroom]

You forgot the best part: You can also SELL the key to someone else! And if you're good enough at making them believe the key has a lot more value than what you paid for it, well you just made a nice hefty profit on the back of their stupidity! Amazing no??

[@ladywaffle2210]

One caveat: Your key opens a super special pathway, so everyone else has to enter through the main door, while you get to enter through a side door literally right next to the main door that looks exactly the same and leads to the exact same room with zero bonuses for you.

[@coaxill4059]

And also people can forcibly give you keys that you can't dispose of without using them, and there's no way of knowing whether the hallway leads to a painting, or a trap, or just a mugger waiting on the other side of the door who will steal all your other keys.

[@clementineshamaney5137]

And also the viewing room just has a photograph of the actual Mona Lisa which is in the Lourve

[@Allyssaseber]

"It's a movement driven in no small part by rage, by people who looked at 2008, who looked at the system as it exists, but concluded that the problems with capitalism were that it didn't provide enough opportunities to be the boot." Fuck, I'm stealing that.

[@maddieb.4282]

Stealing it for what? A Facebook post? Lol

[@hikarey7173]

@@maddieb.4282 theyre gonna mint it on the blockchain like all art theives LMAO

[@ano_nym]

@@hikarey7173 my new collection of anit-crypto NFTs.

[@singulartrout]

Don't pull a James Somerton

[@alvinchristian7671]

Basically, Cryptobros think they can fix economy after the 2008 crash, only to end up making it worse.

[@DanileSawn]

I recently took an interest in programming and started reading Rob Miles' "C# Programming Yellow Book" and literally on 5th page of this beginners level programming textbook reads "Coming up with a perfect solution to a problem the customer has not got is something which happens surprisingly often in the real world. Many software projects have failed because the problem that they solved was the wrong one. The developers of the system quite simply did not find out what was required, but instead created what they thought was required. The customers assumed that, since the developers had stopped asking them questions, the right thing was being built, and only at the final handover was the awful truth revealed. It is therefore very important that a programmer holds off making something until they know exactly what is required." If you're trying to solve a problem, first make sure it's a problem that needs solving is literally like the first thing you learn as a programmer lmfao

[@Blueeyesthewarrior]

For the short period of time I was a comp sci major, one of the classes that I was required to take was Design Thinking and that class was so important. Even though I’m no longer in comp sci, the thought process that one has to step into to develop ANYTHING is all informed by design thinking. Great class, highly recommend. Clearly not taken by anybody in the crypto space.

[@toomanymarys7355]

That is literally what all my husband's worst minions try to do. As a project lead, they drive him nuts.

[@onebear6504]

Yup, afaik requirements are the start of every project period. And everything else gotta abide perfectly with the requirements. What those requirements are would basically be what the contract says to do. If the customer don't want it in the end and back out, they've made a contract already and they still gotta pay up. This is so all the cost, time, and effort put in for the many other phases of development won't just be thrown away out of pure whims. Theoretically speaking...

[@DanileSawn]

Do they still owe money if the delivered product doesn't meet those requirements? A percentage maybe? @@onebear6504

[@sidPalma]

Thanks for sharing.

[@LeoScott]

Beeple selling his art as an NFT for $69 million and then within the same month calling NFT's an "irrational exuberance bubble" will never not be funny to me. My man got his money and nearly immediately dipped, and I do not blame him.

[@laurendearnley9595]

*hands over art* *receives money* "You moron."

[@cottawalla]

Did he get dollars or $69 million in bitcoin? That number, itself, carries an almost deliberately pertinent message.

[@Adam_U]

They're grifters, the lot of them. They pretend they're genuinely excited about NFTs because they want others to buy into it so they can make profit. They don't actually care about the NFTs though. No one does.

[@rossmallo]

He probably got frustrated by people constantly asking him to re-invest or advocate for other Crypto bullshit, hoping to use his image as "the guy that started it all" to artificially inflate the value of their holdings.

[@vaels5682]

​@@rossmalloThis exactly

[@inciaradible7144]

'They think programmers should solve society's problems.' As a programmer, that terrifies me.

[@jimmybayconn]

same

[@NickiRusin]

yeah no, no we shouldn't

[@user-fz3ip3ke8p]

Yes we should

[@muhwyndham]

As a programmer/software developer, we're one of the last people on earth that should be given such a task. What we need is control, not being the one in control. The thought of people with social deficiencies like us being tasked to solve social problems is crazy...

[@marocat4749]

I honestly think, yes they should, everyone should, but tackle actual systemic problems, avocate for data protection, ... Not grift sheeple. That is just a grift. And mlm, and cult.

[@antonzhernosek5552]

"Cryptocurrency does nothing to address 99% of the problems with the banking industry, because those problems are patterns of human behaviour" The way that you've explained the 2008 crash and this phrase are absolutely fantastic. Instant sub

[@satan3959]

Dammit, he votes have not reached 666 yet

[@OsirisLord]

The "Line goes up" is the same thinking that caused the 1929 Stock Market Crash. We're a hundred years from that and have learned nothing.

[@themudpit621]

With that logic all human endeavour is fruitless and liable to never improve. Personally, I'm glad people keep trying.

[@OsirisLord]

@@themudpit621 yeah but crypto was never about improving finance it was just the next big scam.

[@gctypo2838]

@@themudpit621 Seems to be a misunderstanding here. The banking industry doesn't encompass all human endeavour. The claim is just that crypto doesn't address the problems that come from human behavior. What the vid is saying is that human behavioral patterns introduce a source of problems to any financial system, and only a system that address those problems can be an improvement. Crypto does not address those problems (aside from MitM), and so it isn't an improvement.

[@StarkMaximum]

I've only seen a few Dan Olsen videos, but "My avatar on a Dungeons and Dragons forum for years was a stock image of a head of lettuce" is the most Dan Olsen thing I've ever heard. I've literally never met this man and he said one thing that made me go "yeah, that's something he'd do."

[@louisstrauss285]

It was cabbage though - 55:27

[@StarkMaximum]

@@louisstrauss285 Whatever.

[@louisstrauss285]

@@StarkMaximum damn that’s cold. Respect.

[@mq5731]

@@louisstrauss285No! It is very important to distinguish! Cabbage hurts when you throw it at someone! Lettuce does not!

[@louisstrauss285]

@@mq5731 guess @StarkMaximum threw a cabbage then because my feelings were hurt. I'm still dealing with the aftermath

[@RealLukeWilson]

As far as stolen art-turned-NFTs go, the whole “you just weren’t smart enough to realize you could’ve made money off your own work” pisses me off for another reason, as it does with other digital artists I know. We aren’t posting our art online to make money off it; we’re doing it because we’re proud of our work and want to share it. The stuff we DON’T post is the stuff we sell. So we’re not *just* upset that we aren’t making money off our art that was stolen-we’re upset that other people are making money off of our work that we never intended to sell in the first place.

[@physicsunderstander4958]

I think that the concept of making things without the express intention of monetizing them is so alien to the hypercapitalist NFT bros that they'd just stare blankly at you if you said this to them. Hustle culture is a poison of the mind.

[@kris.........]

@@philip4323 I'm sure it doesn't need to be said, but the above commenter is not the author of this video...

[@UnrealPerson]

@@kris......... Let's see if reports are worth a damn.

[@felinecontrolled]

@@UnrealPerson Surprisingly, yes. But also go to the imposter's page and report them there too.

[@g1ng3rsn4ps]

@@physicsunderstander4958 I feel like people should be able to do what they want?🤷🏽 It's perfectly fine to hustle or to not hustle as long as no one is acting like they are some arbiter of universal law. I champion freedom and individuals being able to be happy and comfortable. Basic living necessities and wages should be required for all people, and anything above that is luxury and up to the individual.

[@BanjoFrog612]

Came back to say congratulations, Dan. You killed NFTs. You’ve done humanity a great service.

[@noonward]

Yeah, good shit Dan.

[@toxic_narcissist]

copium

[@jansettler4828]

@@toxic_narcissist Spottes Mr Diamond Hands 🤣

[@lexslate2476]

The hero we need.

[@DMTrojan]

@@toxic_narcissist Have fun getting even poorer, Crypto Cultist.

[@bigjimfrom1976]

The "If we can capture 1% of the national comics market with our comic about boobs" statement is one of the most hilarious things I've heard in a long time.

[@LeakyTrees]

Yeah, a comic book about boobs would probably capture way more than 1% of that market tbh

[@SirPhysics]

@@LeakyTrees Assuming they could actually produce a comic book about boobs...every single week. For years. It's hilarious because it is immediately obvious that there was no more thought put into that idea than "people spend money on comics, what if they gave some of that money to us?"

[@trouty606]

It is quite possibly the most hilariously over optimistic nonsense claim to what someone's pet project could be capable of financially. Like even established giants Marvel or DC coming up with a new comic/hero and saying "This one brand new comic will capture 1% of the entire market" would be laughed out of a marketing meeting.

[@whitherwhence]

Also the idea of 30 million USAmericans regularly buying comic books sounds far fretched to me. 1 in 12 people? That sounds like more than regularly go to the movies

[@APerson863]

Also their calcs about how big the market is is hilarious. Market size figures are publicly available. That calc had so many assumptions and streamlining, thats its meaningless

[@Rupert3434]

As someone whose seen it evolve I really like how you've made a full trilogy of documentaries with Line Goes Up, The Future is a Dead Mall, and This is Financial Advice.

[@SlickJohnnysHouse]

I actually think Contrapreneurs is part of this series as well, being about grifters and the self-selecting marks, who are only marks because they have no financial literacy, can't bring themselves to work hard (which I'd argue is because there's no guarantee effort will pan out) and are just financially precarious enough to hold hands with strangers and leap into the abyss, knowing that such is their only chance at financial security.

[@diegoyanez1868]

I also count In Search of a Flat Earth and Contrapeneurs as part of this series due to the shared focus on the cult like behavior of these groups. So it's like, Flat Earth, Contrapeneurs, Line Goes Up, Dead Mall, and Financial Advice. All these videos have very interesting and similar narratives on scams, the intersection of money, power, and confidence, and cult-like behavior. Though Contrapeneurs is the least like the other videos in the series.

[@braydentobin5150]

Isn't it darkly funny that there was a period of time where people thought it was a good idea to create artificial scarcity in the _one_ place where scarcity didn't need to exist?

[@DichotomousRex]

The period hasn't ended, artificial scarcity is an inherent product of capitalism

[@starlight4649]

​@@DichotomousRex like Pokémon cards valued at $1000 new out of the package despite being made of plastic and cardstock I would so love if one of those companies made a stupidly rare card only to create an absurd sales market spending thousands on it, only to make it much more common and indistinguishable as to deflate those prices, just to teach people a lesson. Just because its rare doesn't mean it's inherently valuable.

[@tomlxyz]

​@@starlight4649 that has happened before. People didn't learn a lesson

[@magicball3201]

@@starlight4649 at bare minimum, you're spending a couple grand on a real thing. Buying nfts or even crypto, a lot of it is just "well I own the right to say I have access to the thing". Hence the right-click save meme for nfts. Pokemon cards, you at least have a card. Is it actually worth ten grand, probably not, but you have something to show for it

[@me0101001000]

@@magicball3201 also, the Pokemon TCG is a legitimately fun game. So even that piece of cardboard with a character on it has a real-world utility and tangible value as a result. These NFT, well, they absolutely do not.

[@abyssalboy8811]

How did we go to "don't even share your name online" to "I'm going to put my medical details amongst the funny computer monkey block land" ?

[@quantumblur_3145]

They're the ones who slept through the warnings, you don't hear about the ones who held their info close because, well...

[@snowballeffect7812]

the medical details part is fine because of zero knowledge proofs. this video is just an editorial hitpiece on crypto and nfts. look at his sources; none of them are academic or even color papers from any coin. blockchain itself is used everywhere right now because it's a useful data structure, just like a hash table or array. Currently, Microsoft is probably the leader in practical internal and external uses for blockchains.

[@royalninja2823]

MySpace popularized the concept of tying your real name to your online presence and got it to be fairly accepted. Facebook came in and made that the expected norm, and platforms like KZbin started to push for people to turn themselves into Personalities based on their real identity. Well over a decade of those two sites ruling the entire internet and suddenly the wall between real and online life is nonexistent.

[@Jaydee-wd7wr]

@@royalninja2823, That’s not really true though, there’s plenty of people who don’t put themselves online, you just don’t know about them because of it.

[@VoxAstra-qk4jz]

People started to assume that it went without saying and stopped saying it. Apparently it did not.

[@dragomirw.844]

Having watched this a few times, it suddenly struck me... fanfiction authors in 2002 had a better grasp of the fundamentals of copyright than Inuyasha coin minters.

[@Gloomdrake]

Another funny one is the DAO that won a Dune art book in an auction and somehow convinced themselves that the art book came with the rights to the Dune IP

[@jonathanelliott1338]

@@Gloomdrake When libertarianism goes awry. "These are rules that seem plausible, so now they are rules".

[@bluslvrwolf2166]

From what I've heard they kinda had to, published authors used to be very unhappy about Fan fiction and there was real fear of getting sued over it; Anne Rice had been particularly notorious for legal threats against fan writers.

[@toomanymarys7355]

Fanfiction is fundamentally illegal. Just FYI.

[@toomanymarys7355]

​@@GloomdrakeThat one was definitely special ed level.

[@heromedley]

watching this in 2024 when 99% of NFTS are worthless now feels so cathartic

[@gamemeister27]

As a programmer, let me make sure everyone watching knows something. We are all bad at our job, can't make a single thing that works right 100% of the time, and are perhaps the worst possible choice for a group of people to solve societal problems. When given the task of solving fairly straightforward problems historically, we accidentally create a network of incompatible nightmares that is impossible for anyone, or any organization, to comprehend. Do not trust us.

[@Wizuu0274]

Most of us can barely be asked to do memory management or handle the security of a database without causing tremendous vulnerabilities and/or downtime even if it's a piece of software for a company of like 80 people, and these guys want to take on social organizations? Dear lord, no. We should be tried for crimes if we even attempted it.

[@Scum42]

As a programmer as well, Amen.

[@kevint1929]

As a CS student, this speaks to me. Computers are idiot-boxes that punish us for our hubris is creating them

[@bigjimfrom1976]

We programmers are just fallible humans; writing code is hard because at heart humans are instinct-driven animals whose brains can come to conclusions without needing to apply a logical algorithm to every tiny decision. But "code is law" is a bad idea even if the code were being written by perfect deities. Law needs a certain amount of flexibility to function, because the world is vast and variable and variety is as close to infinite as makes no difference. Code is rigid and limited in nature, and then further constrained by the scope of the project and imagination of the programmer.

[@MrRudesku]

"If architecture was managed as programming, civilization would have never happened" - As a software engineer, this is my gospel

[@Starfire861]

Every time I feel like my goals are too unrealistic, I think about the NFTits acting like their comic idea will get 5% of the total addressable comics market, and my doubts melt away.

[@astatauri]

"what do you mean that people don't buy comics just for boobs!? There's a storyline?????????"

[@guilhermetheodoro5759]

and their idea of the "comic market" was complete bulshit. They used two affirmations with completely different definitions of "comic user" to forge a merket that is far smaller than that.

[@1Seanmb]

@@guilhermetheodoro5759 It's literally insane that they thought that was representative of the comics industry's revenue, and also that they'd be even remotely capable of touching any part of that value. Like prior to the huge disney marvel movie renaissance the comics industry was failing, that's why so many marvel properties ended up in different places, marvel was selling the rights to avoid bankruptcy.

[@BeerandCheez]

@@1Seanmb They never thought that any of that was remotely attainable. The only point of that was to be a pitch, to get suckers to buy in so the creators of the coin could pull the rug out from under them. They know it's all bullshit, but they also know that if they put in enough numbers and figures and professional sounding words that these self-identifying gullible fools with eagerly part with their money. It's pure hype meant to push speculation to make that line go up. It doesn't matter how ridiculous the idea is, how out of touch with reality the pitch is, as long as it makes the line go up, it's filled it's purpose entirely.

[@ForeverGotShorter]

@@1Seanmb Not exactly. The '96 comics speculator crash is the reason Marvel properties were split between various movie studios (the company actually filed for Chapter 11 bankrupcy, they had to do it to become soluble again). Plus I don't think there's a lot of evidence as to super-hero movies impacting comics sales. Maybe that's changed in recent years, but I recall Gail Simone saying the only times she could recall a movie helping move comics was the first Wonder Woman and Suicide Squad (2016). DC and Marvel want to get new people interested in comics (as they should), but mostly it's longtime fans who buy them. Anyway, right now the top selling comics produced in the U.S. seem to mostly be slice of life YA stuff, and the rest of the industry is struggling to catch up, especially as venture capitalist assholes keep taking over indie publishers (read non-Marvel, DC or Image) and wrecking them for a short term profit. Plus Warner Bros and Disney have been engaging in their own bloodletting (sorry, "corporate restructuring") and hiring people from outside the industry to help run DC and Marvel.

[@masterpassword2]

Refreshing to see a journalist who has the courage and self-confidence to call someone explicitly a liar and not instantly try to soften it by inserting something like "allegedly" or similar.

[@lancetheradioactive9034]

Necroposting, but: the problem is that a true, written-in-contract journalist may be liable for libel lawsuits unless they add "allegedly" or unless they have definitive legal proof of their claims. (UK law is particularly vigilant on that, notably, and it's a danger anywhere with a face big enough against a company big enough.)

[@sharkofjoy]

I have noticed that for many current journalists, they still hesitate to remove softening words even when talking about legally convicted-of-a-crime criminals, if those criminals have a large enough support base regardless of (or often because of) said crimes. This drives me up the wall.

[@diegoyanez1868]

Well, normally, you could run the risk of being sued for Libel/Slander for not saying that. The idea behind it is most likely that if someone were to claim, say, "This person did this thing" when said thing is in some way disputed, even if it's very obvious and very very likely to be true, that person would still be obfuscating the fact that the validity of the claim is still in some way, up in the air.

[@OsirisLord]

Or calling someone in a deadpan professional delivery a butt-hurt warlock main.

[@CryptoMode]

Journalists are people too, we got mouths to feed and don't want to get sued 😂

[@canadsian2747]

"[...] deliberately obtuse in order to make them difficult to understand and thus appear more legitimate." "[...] with a reputation for making things deliberately more difficult to understand, specifically to create the illusion that only they are smart enough to understand it. " I'm about to graduate with a degree in finance and I cannot stress how true the above is. TRUST ME, you are not dumb; the way they built this stuff is.

[@Winasaurus]

As someone who works in accounting/tax, this is basically all of it. Most work can be boiled down to filling in like 5 boxes and ticking some. Most terminology can be boiled down to simple things like "We take no responsibility if this is wrong", but in more words. Intentionally obfuscated to increase the perceived value of the work.

[@thesalvager3020]

​@@WinasaurusBullshit job phenomenon.

[@xXAEROROCK182Xx]

The phrase “uwu looks like someone didn’t make their quota” has done permanent damage to my brain

[@admiralrentableorb9844]

Armor piercing English

[@mofo78536]

1:46:20 "uwu looks like someone didn’t make their quota”

[@gabrielvalencia1395]

The part about NFT adopters blaming artists for not getting paid because they didn’t get in soon enough just goes to show how ppl can rationalize almost anything that benefits them even when it’s clearly bad.

[@exquis_]

I cannot believe that the same group of people shouting that NFTs are the future to artists to gain income are the same ones who never even bothered to pay one of those artists comissions and are now just buying these NFTs just for the exclusivity. They don't care about the art at all, the artist is irrelevant. And they keep stealling their work to mint... Disgusting

[@C33Fernandez]

My issue is that it doesn't even benefit most of them. They're mostly losing, like day-traders in the stock market. Getting rich from NFTs is romanticised, even the big NFT players keep warning everyone, but there's too much false hope and desperation in the communities. It has a cult-like appeal that you can turn away from at any time, but they just can't.

[@andromidius]

@@C33Fernandez A bit like the Crypto craze, just even more bananas. Sure, if you got into it really early you might make money - but knowing it'll become big is impossible, and you're making money off other peoples' losses. Its really not a good model for a healthy market.

[@juliocbp9389]

"That's what they get for *dying* before this shit existed!"

[@gabrielvalencia1395]

@@andromidius yea part of me wishes I’d gotten in early so I could have made a killing now. But another part of me would feel bad because I know I would have profited off others’ foolishness. Others are clearly ok with that, so what kind of ppl are we becoming? Seems like ppl are ok with doing what banks have always been doing. The system changes nothing.

[@SlickJohnnysHouse]

I used to think Dan had "pivoted" away from discussing narratives and how they affect our perspectives, to debunking grifters. Only now do I understand Dan never stopped talking about stories and the myriad ways they have real impact on our lives.

[@kenon6968]

it's all built on narratives, some better, some worse

[@kenon6968]

@gregd018 Honestly check out Adam Curtis for a much deeper analysis of the power of narratives, it's his whole schtick.

[@GenesisTheKitty]

It's all very philosophical

[@ZergrushEddie]

NFT's have created, truly, one of the funniest things I have ever experienced in my relatively short time on this planet. The fact that Seth Green's show had to be delayed because someone stole the central NFT is just wondrously absurd. Someone 'kidnapped' the main character of an adult animated television show and the producers had to pay a ransom for their safe release. That's some Who Framed Roger Rabbit shit

[@B.-T.]

And that's already more entertaining a plot than Seth's show.

[@thesacredlobo]

Are we talking about the movie version or the book version of the character. And I mean the book the movie was based on. Albeit the movie took quite a few liberties. Though the original author like some of the changes so much he actually made them cannon.

[@massgunner4152]

The funniest part is that guy who stole it didn't have it anymore, they inmediately flipped it for a ton of money so the original owner had to pay even more money to the bozo that bought the nft.

[@defundhollywood3259]

"That's some Who Framed Roger Rabbit shit" 😂😭💀

[@wongbenyb2679]

Well done on knowing who framed roger rabbit in your "relatively short time on this planet". Do they have 80s tv where your planet from?😄

[@lilyy7318]

A year or so ago I was in an emerging tech class, and a non-insignificant portion of that time was spent on crypto. I tried so hard to convince literally a single other person in that class that crypto isn't going to do anything, and even my professor said "you're saying a car won't catch on because we already have horse and buggies." I don't feel validated by the collapse of crypto, I feel sorry it ever happened to begin with.

[@BigHotSauceBoss69]

1) crypto has not collapsed at all, not in the slightest, it's still a trillion dollar market. 2) your professor is completely correct in his mindset, because his mindset has been *proven* to be the case dozens of times through history

[@emilystewart6175]

I wonder how much your teacher jad invested in crypto and how much he lost

[@lilyy7318]

@@BigHotSauceBoss69 1) No comment. 2) For every good idea, there are a hundred bad ones.

[@timothystamm3200]

That comment about horses and buggies would now have me respond with "The train already replaced them for most distances, and is still to this day better than the car."

[@jacobbachman4014]

@@BigHotSauceBoss69 so please explain the benifits of crypto compared to the current financial market, and why the current crypto that are around wont die to yknow... the government?

[@hj-ct2qi]

Today, 9/22/23, it has been widely reported that NFTs are now worthless. I don't have any proof that this brilliant, perhaps all-time greatest video essay ever made had anything to do with the NFT crash that has developed since it was posted, but I like to think that it does. Rewatching it today and raising a glass to you, Folding Ideas.

[@commandernomad2817]

I think there was a graph out there that correlated this videos release date with a sudden a sharp drop in the value of NFTs happening at the same time.

[@hj-ct2qi]

@@commandernomad2817 That's fantastic!

[@nahtesalinas1917]

I just smoked.

[@toobig7150]

I dont think it was the final nail, but it definitely was the sharpest, longest and the one that made the most "crunchy" sound when placed on the coffin. All the same, a toast to this masterpiece of a video

[@blakksheep736]

​@@toobig7150 great description! 😆

[@masterofwriters4176]

How ironic a video called "Line goes up" made so many lines go down.

[@placeholderdoe]

But I thought the line could only go up

[@segadoeswhatnintendont]

Because it folded the idea of the line going up

[@c0smickaiju916]

I used think NFT's just didn't click in my brain. I understood they were stupid but it was so unintuitive I thought I was missing something. Turns out NFTs on every level don't click with reality. Like, it's really staggering

[@agwellin]

Not just nft's, all of crypto. This video made it finally clear to me that, yes, everything you think is a problem with crypto IS a problem with crypto. It's all tech hype mixed with ancap bullshit and nothing useful to be found underneath unless you're a grifter/scammer.

[@jordanholt9170]

I had the same thought about Bitcoin when I first heard about it, although I couldn't describe why. There was just something disconnected about it that didn't make sense to me.

[@k-master973]

It’s literally just a cult. Now in the past I’ve used that phrase ironically, but seeing all those specific acronyms and terminology used, it’s JUST Scientology for techbros You’re financially invested into this group, and the leaders keep you in creating the “others” who simply “just don’t get it and don’t want to see you succeed,” and so you have a sunk cost mindset that it *has* to work out eventually I am someone who is very careful of calling things cults, but by almost all accounts NFTs are a form of a digital cult

[@k-master973]

@@jordanholt9170It’s mainly because it’s just not stable. Cryptocurrencies are just a stock market you can buy stuff with

[@astupidlylongnamethatstoolong]

@@k-master973 this tbh, my most amount of use was buy low sell high, get actual money out from it and forget the wallet ever existed. Because there's simply no actual day to day use for it.

[@OlgaZuccati]

That NFTITs pitch is basically someone going "If everyone gave me all their money, I would be the richest person in the world!"

[@ProjectXA3]

"If we can get even 5% of that audience-" "imma stop you right there, because 5% of the comics market encompasses approximately *THOUSANDS* of comics across DOZENS of major and minor imprints, EACH of which can account for up to an entire full-time job for a dozen people or more to make."

[@Cheezbuckets]

I feel like there’s something to be said about their branding that I’ve watched this video a few times, so I’ve heard the name many times, but I still read “NFTITs” as “NFT ITs” for a bit and thought that I’d just forgotten the part about IT techs for NFTs 😅😂

[@joshuaanson5939]

"There are two ways history could go. One is a new technological buzzword will come along and distract investors" oh hello, AI.

[@tentativegazer]

The thing i despise about AI is that it could geniunely be such cool and useful tech and even AI art itself isnt an inherently evil concept but as with everything it gets its grubby little hands on capitalism is bent on using it as a cudgel to abuse the working class even more

[@Titanic_Trash]

The idea that shipping might find a use for blockchain is really funny--shipping has been perfecting how they track ships, cargo and labourers at sea for centuries. People seem to think its really backwards because its so old, but that's only because shipping is so fundamental to how the modern world functions. For example, I deal with records from the 19thC that already track ships by giving them a number that is non-fungible--you can change the ship's name and its flag but it will always have the same number. In that way, we can still track the movement of ships from over 100 years ago, the workers they employed, and the cargo they shipped, with a whole government framework that organized the information and created detailed statistics manually before the use of computers.

[@XanthinZarda]

Heck, even those not flying the flag of any country* (Pirates) were tracked, legered, and kept stock of because you don't just magic up a ship, cannons, crew, and more.

[@commandrogyne]

Thats actually really interesting, how did that affect maritime conflict? I'd imagine that different companies wouldnt commonly deal with both sides of a conflict, but if say, two countries were at war, would the cargo and capabilities of their navy be something accessible by enemy forces? Or would that be a trade secret? I know this is super unrelated to the video, im just genuinely curious lol

[@blakksheep736]

It's basically like trying to innovate cups, simply because they're old and no one has tried yet, never once considering why that may be the case.

[@blakksheep736]

It's basically like trying to innovate cups, simply because they're old and no one has tried yet, never once considering why that may be the case.

[@Titanic_Trash]

@commandrogyne The bureaucracy itself would not be accessible by an enemy unless the country was invaded but any paperwork on a vessel could be seized by boarders. The first thing a naval ship captain would do if boarded or during a mutiny was to throw his log and papers overboard. Also there is currently a big European history project using what is called Prize Papers that were seized when the British took foreign merchant ships--these include financial and business papers, private letters and sometime military intelligence. All the world's mail used to travel by sea prior to WWII, so a lot of people used basic cryptography to shield secrets and sent multiple copies of the same news if it was important. Some of Napoleon's love letters to Josephine were discovered on a captured ship, for example, and the British published them in the newspaper. The ships themselves would have been either integrated into the Royal Navy or resold in prize court--the proceeds would have gone to the officers and crew of the vessel that seized them. That is the basis of Captain Wentworth's fortune in the Jane Austen novel Persuasion and was a big incentive for joining the navy rather than the army. It also encouraged crippling rather than sinking vessels so that they might be resold or integrated into the navy at a savings. It became more strategic to sink merchant vessels rather than board them by WWI, as between the Napoleonic Wars and WWI there were huge changes in tech, international business and law, bureaucracy, and also concepts of nationalism and neutrality. Basically, the development of total war, especially by Germany on Britain's food and raw material supply from America and India, meant that merchant ships were basically sunk rather than seized. This formed a huge part of the reparations demanded by Britain at the end of the war, including both cash penalties and replacement ships from the German fleet to replace the ships they had lost to U-Boats.

[@reagansido5823]

I would LOVE to know how "Mint it yourself if you don't want people stealing your art" applies to artists that are literally dead.

[@kuman0110]

they should have just get up earlier and mastered the art of necromancy smh

[@noizepusher7594]

They probably would say that the artist should’ve adopted *before* they died

[@grzegorzbrzeczyszczykiewic563]

Even in death, I serve the Blocknissiah.

[@lilneoman1]

​@@grzegorzbrzeczyszczykiewic563lmaoo

[@grzegorzbrzeczyszczykiewic563]

@@lilneoman1 From the moment I understood the inconsequentiality of my JPG, it disgusted me. I craved the perenniality and scarcity of the Token. I aspired to the absoluteness of the infinite machine. Your kind cling to your hyperlinks, as if they will not decay and fail you. One day the crude intercomputational network that you call Web 2.0 will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved. For the NFT is immortal. Even in death, I serve the blocknissiah.

[@livvy94]

One of my friends recently said this: "honestly, I think the people who are pushing the idea of introducing NFTs to music, or art, or games aren't actually interested in the music, art or games themselves - the appeal IS the financial trading, and if they weren't spending their money on this they'd be spending it on the stock market instead"

[@markfelt5650]

exactly. I constantly hear "it allows artists to get paid their worth" Horseshit - if you actually value the art the artist has made then pay the fucking artist for the art that's apparently so valuable. it doesn't NEED to be this complicated. If the art is worth nothing then where is the logic that an encrypted URL pointing to the art is somehow going to appreciate in value rapidly?!?!?!

[@ollympian_art]

@@markfelt5650 As an artist, these losers bragging about how they’re supporting artists only to then turn on said artists, bash them, ridicule them, and blame *them* when their art is stolen and sold as NFTs, is fucking infuriating. They’re exactly the type of people who would complain about artists setting their commission prices too high any time they cross 50$. And you bet they’d never buy commissions or otherwise ‘support’ artists that aren’t connected to their crypto cult. It’s not about the art, it’s about a social image, clout, and money - the antithesis of art and what it represents.

[@user-dr5ph7ur4c]

all the good music has already been created in the 90s so no big deal I want to trade it, yes. The shitty modern music is only good for trading

[@Merthalophor]

Here's a question to ponder: If Picasso's painting were digital (and no NFTs would exist), would everyone who would today be be prepared 10k , 100k, 1 mil for a picasso, just pay them to get a digital copy? How many people do you think are on the planet today prepared to pay 10k for a picasso? A lot!! Another one: If some skilled artist creates an exact copy of a Picasso, that might not be absolutely perfect, but perfect to the extent that a buyer ready to pay $1 mil wouldn't notice the difference - do yout think that buyer would be ready to pay for the copy? Of course not. It's not about having this order of atoms, this physical manifestation of an abstract idea of a painting, in _your_ house. It's about having the _abstract idea_ of the painting in your house. It's about: Having the NFT that is the physical painting in your house. Copies of a phsical artwork are fungible, but they're also generally worthless; the originals are non-fungible, and where the worth is at. If you think NFTs are a scam, so is art trading.

[@m.f.3347]

@@user-dr5ph7ur4c you would only say this if you were an absolute ignoramus lmao. There's more great music of every genre being created right now than at any point in human history

[@GiftOfKnowledge-np9vg]

As of September of 2023, it’s been found that 95% of NFTs are completely worthless, with the most expensive remaining going for about 100$. Just in case anyone wanted confirmation on how they immediately imagined this ended.

[@blakksheep736]

Btw, how is BAYC doing?

[@adampope5107]

I like how the juicero guy just throws his towel on the ground instead of on the counter or something. Really shows the ground breaking awe inducing brilliance of the juicero.

[@trouty606]

It was a brilliant foreshadowing of the company soon to throw in the towel and go bankrupt for trying to sell a $400 bag squeezing device.

[@PhileasLiebmann]

That clip never fails to crack me up. I don't know why, but the timing of the guy turning to see the Juicero and dropping the towel, combined with the hindsight of what the ad is actually trying to sell, is peak comedy to me.

[@CoLiCoVis]

“Our global system is so fundamentally unjust that that people are patting themselves on the back for generating a whole new kind of OwO pit boss that tells you to grind harder or your fired but caps it off with a blushy emoji.” This is the worst timeline.

[@eos_aurora]

Your profit margin was too low 🤪. You’re getting sent to the crypto mines until you manage to make us a higher profit 🥺😩😚

[@mhawang8204]

It’s really sad that people have to resort to grinding on a video game to make a livable wage, and the ruling class that exploit them are building themselves up to be the socially conscious landlord.

[@ng.tr.s.p.1254]

@@mhawang8204 The idea of playing games full-time to earn minimal wage is just so disgusting...

[@The_Machine125]

@@ng.tr.s.p.1254 It's also such a weird idea, like I play games cause it's fun or I get personal fuilment or because I want to escape. Why would I then transform it into a low wage, grind heavy job?

[@oohhboy-funhouse]

It's actually worse. Instead of wasting vast amounts of electricity hashing like bitcoins, play to earn wastes human lifetimes as the hash. Crypto fundamentally has to be a resource black hole to "Work".

[@DoctorandtheDoll]

"Rules must always be evaluated by their power to oppress." I've come back to this video several times and I always walk away with a new line that really hits me hard.

[@brainwashalpha5495]

Martin Luther King Jr had some thoughts on Laws and Morality in his letter from birmingham city jail in 1963. And Thoreau on civil disobedience

[@fellinuxvi3541]

@@brainwashalpha5495 That's more about disobedience and where it's appropriate to break them, this is slightly different, although you could use similar criteria for both.

[@brainwashalpha5495]

@@fellinuxvi3541 you're right, I did conflate the two. it was fresh in my head after seeing passages of both whole I was taking a practice SAT reading portion

[@URightBut]

Rulers*

[@fellinuxvi3541]

@@URightBut rules*

[@kalibbailey6219]

Imagine accidentally sending someone your social security NFT and they just get to have that now, or sending the deed to your house to the wrong wallet and some guy you've never met is now your landlord

[@placeholderdoe]

“Sorry dude I accidentally sent the deed to some random man in Indiana, he’s charging me 17 fish a month in rent.”

[@StraitLimes-cg1jn]

I agree on this though. For most people its hard to onboard

[@kalibbailey6219]

@@StraitLimes-cg1jn This is less about onboarding and more about being able to accidentally give "ownership" of real things with no way to recover

[@rossmallo]

I daresay that to the mouthbreathers advocating for this system, this is *part of the point*. They almost certainly knew about this possibility, and rather than a risk, they saw it as an "additional source of revenue".

[@kalibbailey6219]

@rossmallo Yea, it's a level of dissonance that is easily usurped by reality. If I send my " house deed NFT" to a russian scammer who enforces that. We don't have a globalist system that could even begin to address it

[@DubsteadyMusic]

"If there's one thing union busters love it's the idea of an unbreakable individual contract who's inequities can all be blamed on a machine" what a genius observation and concise summary of why this stuff is so dangerous. Literally techno facisim without a soul to blame

[@ayyyyph2797]

Great, Corporate Statism is back on the menu /s

[@the_dark_soul_of_man]

The problem with the "code is law because code is impartial" idea is that code in fact isn't impartial, it inherits the preconceptions of its programmer. Meanwhile, it makes it so if someone hacks you, you can do nothing about it, after all, code is law.

[@matthewyoho5422]

That phrase is equally horrifying to people who know how coding works - which is to say, that it doesn't, because humans suck at programming and code is buggy - and who know contract law works - and are aghast at the idea of auto-executing contracts devised by tech-bros who routinely fail to account for extremely basic stuff like "mortality" into the list of eventualities: that anyone ever utters it with a straight face in crypto is all the evidence you need to write off the crypto space as a collection of lunatics.

[@ReikuYin]

Ahem. I'm sure any coder has seen this. "Hello world!" "Hello world!" "Hello world!" No imagin that with these kind of stakes.

[@the_dark_soul_of_man]

@@ReikuYin it would be 50 Eth 50 Eth 50 Eth

[@louisstrauss285]

@@the_dark_soul_of_man Even the concept of impartiality isn't as binary in law as it is in code. There's often arguments about circumstances, intentions & interpretations of the law's spirit as opposed to its letter. Law is impartial because it follows legislation but its interpretation of legislation, particularly in grey areas, is key.

[@the_dark_soul_of_man]

@@louisstrauss285 Imagine code trying to solve one of the more complicated cases... I shudder at the thought.

[@fiishbones3796]

I can't believe they had the gall to mint Qinni's artwork. Her death was a devastating blow to the everyone in the art community, her final posts heartbreaking even to someone like me who only knew her as someone whose art would show up on my dashboard. She inspired so many of us young artists of the internet age. RIP Qinni, you are deeply missed

[@penname8441]

+

[@Drilling4mana]

goddammit this is how I found out T_T

[@wastedinspiration]

These cryoto-vultures are so disgusting :(

[@TAP7a]

@@wastedinspiration vultures serve valuable functions in the ecosystems they co-evolved with. Crypto is more like, or indeed simply is, cancer.

[@NeoNovastar]

Seriously, it just showed how skeethy and disgusting those people were. Augh

[@Rohv]

As someone from the Philippines, I feel some schadenfreude and pity with the fall of Axie. Schadenfreude with the people I know who acted smug and posted cringe memes that theyre earning more than honest to goodness daily wage earners. Pity for those desperate people who stopped working to do Axie full time and put their hard-earned money in it hoping for a better life.

[@Samantha_yyz]

I def relate to that, lol for those pitbosses and fuck for those bottom rung workers that were screwed by all of this

[@Acrylescent]

This video is so validating. I felt like I was losing my mind for being highly suspicious of crypto. All my friends and co-workers were all buying in and going on and on about how they were going to quit or move or buy a ton of new shit. One ex-friend bought a “celebration car” when doge coin had that random spike for a little while. He even minted an NFT of his car, a fully decked out Audi, and was trying to sell it for thousands. It never sold. Needless to say his Audi got repoed, and then he defaulted, and he got divorced. He spent so much time on watching the numbers and having hype calls on discord he just opted out of life. He cut off anyone who wasn’t a total crypto bro and now has a lower paying job then before. This shit was parasitic.

[@troodon1096]

On one hand it feels a little cruel to mock people that ruined their own lives. On the other hand, it's hard for me to feel much sympathy for someone suffering the consequences of their own bad decisions.

[@Acrylescent]

@@troodon1096 Yeah even though it was all self-made they were still taken advantage of by a shitty system that played off thier own financial insecurities (and general insecurities) to basically create pay pigs to then excommunicate them because they aren't rich. It sucks but yeah I feel bad for them, but like in a ah shucks kinda way lol.

[@zawrator4457]

Sounds like he was really unhappy with his life ngl. Wouldn’t directly blame it on crypto tbh, he probably would’ve as easily patched into anything else.

[@Acrylescent]

@@zawrator4457 There is some truth to that, but crypto does go after guys like that. The marketing is made to entice people that want to be millionaires, but don't want to really put in work. So, he's had the chances of going to other grifts, but crypto hit that sweet spot for a lot of people.

[@Praisethesunson]

​@zawrator4457He was hoping for that new wife money

[@inexplicable01]

We should never forget that Dan posted this at or near the height of Crypto. It would be so much easier for anyone to post this now when all the holes are truly exposed. But Dan spoke the truth the way he saw it even the hype was still very very high.. Much much respect for your courage and vision.

[@Beastly_Genius]

No he posted this at the height of NFT not crypto itself since bull market didn’t begin until around April. Also let’s not act like this video actually affected crypto itself; this video most definitely affects NFT scams & the stupid way some of it was being described as art

[@nickjunes]

And it's still completely false.

[@wongbenyb2679]

Wouldnt it be fun if it then come out all the later investigation has started because of this video?

[@wongbenyb2679]

@@nickjunes seem like someone has invested heavily on crypto 🤣🤣

[@easternrebel1061]

@@nickjunes u huh, sure. If that's true, than please go ahead and provide substantial evidence disproving what he's said. All you crypto bros ever seem to come up with is dumb broad terms like "FUD", insults, or claims that "it's just not true bro" or "it's too complicated to explain"

[@jurriendevries3673]

A very interesting bit I found was the guy who thought his NFT profile pic was somehow impressive. He could've paid an artist a tiny fraction of that amount of money and gotten a much prettier piece of art that was completely made to his specifications, something actually unique and personal, but that would mean he's interacting with the economy in a traditional way. And he can't have that, even if it means he gets a better product and someone else gets paid a fair wage for good work. To me this really shows it's never been about changing the world for the better, it's just ego.

[@artisticcannibalism1350]

You nailed it, it's all just one big con and the advocates for crypto are either suckers or con men trying to lure in more suckers through any means necessary

[@easternrebel1061]

Exactly. That and a strange obsession with rebellion against tradition. That's why despite the claims bitcoin makes about challenging central banking, it effectively cloned the early business model of centralized banks, prior to the government and people like Teddy Roosevelt introducing strict regulations to maintain fairness and justice. As you said it's all about ego, as well as enriching themselves while doing absolutely zero hard work and yet getting instant gratification.

[@Uhshawdude]

@@easternrebel1061 They’re not rebelling against tradition because they actually understand the harmful exploitative nature of the current system, they’re rebelling because they feel like its unfair that they didn’t get a chance to be the boot.

[@easternrebel1061]

@@Uhshawdude basically.

[@teogonzalez7957]

Newsflash, he wasn’t actually impressed. Many of these types of crypto and NFT believers don’t actually believe, they just need to convince other people to join so they can sell for profit.

[@gedalyahreback2133]

I worked for a blockchain company for one year. Never again. And I cannot tell you how soothing this video is.

[@louisstrauss285]

What did the company do ? If you don't mind me asking of course.

[@RegalRoyalWasTaken]

How much of a nightmare was it?

[@blakksheep736]

What happened exactly?

[@Syco07-pm3iz]

Questions we may never find the answer for

[@fabiolean]

I can imagine Mother's Basement swirling a glass of Mountain Dew as he delivers the line "VARIOUS VARIATIONS"

[@placeholderdoe]

He really needed the code red for that one

[@sender2688]

When Bitcoin had a previous bull run in 2017, there was a joke floating around in Russian trade chats that a Bitcoin is like selling useless monkeys. It is hilarious to see that five years later, crypto seriously became exactly that.

[@maxpogfrog]

damn, those places need to be monitored if they predict that well

[@theurbanshaman6285]

Bitcoin is not NFTs. Geez, man.

[@adjoint_functor]

@@theurbanshaman6285 they said crypto, not BTC.

[@ehemaligerschepperer324]

I don't understand your point, it still is a decent market to trade in.

[@kevinhengehold4387]

How do Russians distinguish between "useful" and "useless" monkeys?

[@somewony]

The entire time I was thinking: "So it's just MLMs for tech bros who like to think they're smarter than that?" Felt good to have that suspicion confirmed by your very last sentence.

[@Keviamaya]

I feel bad for tech bros, most of them will likely get scammed out of their money. If you are a coder you have no excuse tho, this system is obviously stupid and worthless ._.

[@magusperde365]

Its way waaaay more dangerous than any MLM though

[@TechyBen]

Yeah, it's sad. Because work, jobs, family, trade etc al exist. But all are susceptible to MLM scams... so spotting the actual MLM scam tree in the forest of legitimacy, is difficult. Sometimes though, we walk into the forest of scams, and that is scary!

[@skullsaintdead]

@@Keviamaya Some are prolly decent but damn, so many seem to revel in the misfortune of others, even when talking with scamming victims. All the caveats they used to blame the victim are the same as those used by sexists to blame women for being raped ('you should of been smarter/fought back'). Its deplorable. They value money above everything, their self worth is so intrinsically linked to their monetary success, they become inhuman to justify the tactics of the business they're in. Frightening. Money aint worth it, people.

[@elhazthorn918]

"Tech bros"? I prefer the term "guys with a monkey fetish."

[@WJPindar]

I have laterally consumed hundreds of hours of documentaries, books and talks about the crash of '08 and this might be the single best explanation of it I've ever seen. And you did it in five minutes.

[@shubhrangshudebsarkar6966]

Can you reccomend other resources on the crash? Interested in learning about it.

[@anthonycaldwell7119]

@@shubhrangshudebsarkar6966 These are some very solid docs on the subject. I love learning more about the crash. It was a pivotal time in the history of American and world history

[@anthonycaldwell7119]

@@shubhrangshudebsarkar6966 kzbin.info/www/bejne/n5KxeZyNpLepgZIsi=Zxsl1pylIdlyOC7T kzbin.info/www/bejne/jV60anSFpZd5jZosi=TiUvnQtu2FejAicC kzbin.info/www/bejne/i2LHoYqfj9ScgLcsi=XBc988Gr5XiM5sZu

[@maddieb.4282]

@@anthonycaldwell7119so you responded but didn’t bother to answer their question whatsoever. Great lol

[@mattfleeman6526]

​@@shubhrangshudebsarkar6966 Michael Lewis' book The Big Short is an excellent narrative driven explanation of what happened.

[@VoidNull9222]

I’ve heard a lot of bad misinterpretations of Fair Use on the internet but holy shit the guy at 2:06:12 makes Doug Walker sound like a tenured professor of copyright law

[@redmage5251]

wish it did work like that though

[@regenorakel]

The fact that Geoff managed to say "NFTITS holders" without breaking character is highly commendable.

[@Pluveus]

I mean, he's an Anituber who just did a video series about the Anime movies produced by a literal cult. He's had to say some absolutely crazy shit with a straight face.

[@LikaLaruku]

NFTs= Cryptowallet. NFTits= Cryptobra.

[@regenorakel]

@@Pluveus True!

[@XingAoShen]

@@Pluveus does he have a second channel?

[@Pluveus]

@@XingAoShen He does podcasty stuff with his Girlfriend on Basement Life, but the cult stuff was just the normal channel.

[@Steven-ef3ft]

Ah, yes, digital scarcity. That definitely seems like a good thing and not a way to remove the best benefit of digital assets being infinitely reproducible.

[@aapocalypseArisen]

i always th0ught this way regardless 0f the p0litics like really y0u cant c0nvince me that any data isnt just endlessly replicable and by its 0bvi0usly renewable nature has n0 real value bey0nd what m0nkey business we attach t0 it which in itself has n0 value im0 y0u can say creat0rs 0f things sh0uld be c0mpensated but really were all just sitting ar0und buying tickets t0 n0t even air its like s0me string 0f text held 0n a bit 0f silic0ne intangibly "s0mewhere" and that in my mind is an easy thing t0 apply a value t0 which is t0 say free 0u0

[@atomicshroom]

I don't understand how these people fail to realize that they're the digital equivalent of "Hey what if we could restrict access to tap water and sell it back to people for a price depending on how artificially scarce we decide to make it?" Like, how do they not realize that they're on the evil side of things? Or maybe they do realize they're on the evil side but they just don't care because getting rich is all that matters, right?

[@eccomi21]

@@atomicshroom in a captialistic system it is all that matters. eat or be eaten. i am not saying it is good, i am happy to live in a country that is at least somewhat socially democratic with public healthcare and such, but it just is how it is rn

[@thrashingputz5163]

Yup.

[@oreofudgeman]

@@atomicshroom they don't fail to realize this. They DO realize this, and they're trying to monetize every aspect of your online existence right now. Web 3.0 isn't for you. It's for people to profit off of you even more.

[@Oftly]

...follow me, as i go rambo. to the moon in my brand new lambo." this has been stuck in my head for 2 years, daniel.

[@FumbleSquid]

"...Open Sea's like chapel yuh!" It's painful. These songs cause me pain but I cannot forget them. I would not be surprised of crypto rap is someday used as a torture method

[@SuperZergMan]

~ I just bought more land in the Metaverse ~ Every time I hear it it hurts me, but I can't stop.

[@oregonsenior4204]

"Rules must always be evaluated for their power to oppress." This statement needs to be widely distributed. Not just for NFTs.

[@mattiac4112]

I had no idea that the joke about NFTs being "MLMs for men" was quite so accurate but I appreciate it even more now

[@Mirro18]

My brain was so full after watching the video that I read MLM as "men love men" rather than "Multilevel marketing" at first and was VERY confused for a good second. So thanks for the unintentional chuckle.

[@hrobjarturhoskuldsson5014]

@@Mirro18 men love men... for men

[@nerveagent1905]

@@hrobjarturhoskuldsson5014 where is Lenin or Mao, tho

[@ems9616]

+

[@elhazthorn918]

You mean "MLMs for men with a monkey fetish."

[@greenredblue]

As many times as I've watched this, it never fails to make me laugh how _this_ is the only video KZbin seems to think should be monetized with ads for NFTs.

[@conorkelly947]

Makes sense if you're a robot, after all he says NFTs about a million times.

[@jeffmorris9893]

That's like Amazon's marketing algorithms of 5 years back. I bought two books on atheism and the Amazon AI figured I was interested in Jesus. I was peppered with books on Christian Apologetics.

[@jperry714]

@@jeffmorris9893 I can attest that Amazon has done that at least as recently as two years ago. To me.

[@doctorwholover1012]

My ads thought I was a girl for years, then I bought mens caffeine shampoo twice (3 bottles per order) on amazon and now every ad I get is about men's hair, it's either a testosterone supplement, a caffeine treatment, or razors/hair clippers 🤣

[@xxlepusxx]

Not the only one, I watched a video from someone (I don't remember who now), talking against nfts, and I ate two crypto ads and a broker app ad.

[@GentlemanBones]

There's an amusement to the idea of 'man in the middle attacks' on 'global shipping' in that I just, immediately imagined a pirate. Like boarding and robbing a cargo ship is definitely a man in the middle attack.

[@kingturboturtlednoc5722]

I mean that's part of it. If pirates don't want to get caught, doing a man in the middle attack is their best bet to stop the system noticing that they stole a whole ass shipping container

[@elcoshayuyodrsimi3000]

It's honestly really interesting to see things like it become a marketing technique, to put something more recent, it's like the cybertruck, they both have security features that only prevent a highly idealized form of danger, your car probably won't get shot, the same way a man in the middle attack will nevee happen to almost anyone, but having a frankly unnecesary amount of protections against a movie-sounding situation makes people think it's overall safer than it actually is.

[@abbywolffe4114]

It's telling that even after watching this video twice, I cannot explain why NFTs are any more valuable than the purple "student bucks" my fourth grade teacher gave us for cleaning up our desk spaces or doing well on assignments, and we could at least trade those in for candy at the end of the year.

[@JoshSweetvale]

NFTs aren't valuable. They're pogs. Artificial collectibles without pre-existing franchise.

[@ShitkidOfJamrock]

I wonder how many snickers bars it would take to trade for a bored ape I bet you could get a steal, eventually. Like 3 snickers bars for an ugly ass monkey picture.

[@Mighty_Atheismo]

They're more valuable because some people were able to use their influence to con people into thinking they were!

[@JoshSweetvale]

@@Mighty_Atheismo Which is what happened with pogs.

[@Mighty_Atheismo]

@@JoshSweetvale lol fair. I forgot I'm not old enough to remember pogs

[@UnreasonableOpinions]

NFTs are what you get when someone looks at Tulipmania and their only take-away was ‘why the hell are we selling physical tulips when we could just sell tulip receipts?’

[@wastedinspiration]

So funny. I had to pause the video when I saw this to read the comment out loud to my husband.

[@Kagomai15]

Omg the tulips, learning about that in college was a wild ride. You're absolutely right!

[@penname8441]

+

[@adrenalinevan]

its more like the south seas bubble then lol

[@edgarallenhoe3518]

They actually were just selling tulip receipts though

[@Mini_Squatch]

For me the biggest sign that cryptobros are detached from reality is that some of them thought that buying a copy of the book Dune granted them the IP.

[@nomindseye]

What's this then? I've never heard that particular gem. Hilarious if true.

[@matthewyoho5422]

​@@nomindseye Kind of, but not exactly: the crypto-bros in question were a group calling themselves "Spice DAO", because they made a DAO (or a thing that kind of resembled one at least) with the intent to purchase Dune - or rather, the production bible for Jodorowsky's famously "never actually filmed" movie adaptation of Dune, they weren't stupid enough to bid on a normal copy of the book - after a particular individual (Soby) put that idea out into the world after stumbling across the auction. His makeshift DAO actually failed in its goal, because them entering the auction triggered a bidding war that led to the eventual price being *ludicrously* inflated (most copies had sold for around $50k in the past, that one wound up selling for $3m) and they didn't have enough funds in the treasury to cover the transaction + fees, so Soby himself had to liquidate some crypto assets and enter as a last second bidder (the process of the DAO then buying it back from him was the source of friction down the line that led to him abandoning it at one point in the saga). He'd never outright told people "buy the book and we'll get the movie made", but he didn't exactly go out of his way to disabuse the collection of idiots tossing their internet clown bucks into the communal pool of that notion either, so the group wound up convincing themselves that was what they would be doing; they never seriously pursued that of course, because it was pointed out - amidst the relentless, unceasing mockery by everyone else aware of what they were doing - that IP rights really do not work like that even a little bit. What they actually tried to do - going as far as to purchase a script - was function as a production company, to produce things "similar" to Jodorowsky's unreleased adaptation. Fast forward to today, where the only thing that they made were some as yet unreleased (and I don't think actually related to Dune in any way) NFTs, the DAO has been dissolved (they're now just the "Spice Club"), and they're trying to find a buyer for the rare book they had at one point in the process claimed they'd be ceremonially burning (doubtless they abandoned that idea when people pointed out that scanning and digitizing the contents before destroying the volume would not actually change the status quo... because people have already scanned the contents and digitized them), which will be sold at a steep loss if they ever even find a buyer. Dan has a whole thread on his Twitter going through the details.

[@mist1104]

@@nomindseye apparently they spent millions of dollars on it, they then tried to mint it, but they don't own the IP so they can't. Funniest shit I've ever seen

[@edvelociraptor1794]

The group in question was called the Spice DAO. They didn't even buy the novel itself, they bought a book about a failed attempt to adapt the novel into a movie. So they overpaid for a collectible.

[@Mini_Squatch]

@@edvelociraptor1794Wow and i didn't think it could get stupider

[@Niffoni]

Incredible flex at 1:16:58 where you managed to get all 4 of Decentraland's users logged in at the same time, and framed in the same shot!

[@jacobmoriancumer7588]

I want to thank you. When the covid mess started, my work at my steel mill almost dried up. While I never reached the point of "desperation", I nearly came close to it. And that's when the NFT craze began ta crop up. Even after it began ta boil down, I was still thinkin' that it might be a good way ta secure my finances. The only thing that stopped me was a friend of mine sending me this video. I was literally gettin' ready ta dump a whole bunch of my money into what seemed like a "promising" NFT project when a link to this video popped up in my Discord feed. I watched the entire thing with my eyes glued to the screen. You helped me not only avoid a financial disaster, but ya actually helped me ta calm down and see the whole situation with a level head. I was able ta take the money I was about ta spend on "Non-Fictional-Tricks" and actually make use of it. Work has since picked back up at my mill, and I've found much more reliable ways to secure my family's financial future. I'm probably not the only one, but I want ya to know that you saved at least this guy from fallin' on harder times because of greedy men.

[@blakksheep736]

I'm so happy for you!

[@Sabbathtage]

I love your story. It made me so happy to read it. It can be really hard not to fall into scams when you are feeling the pinch and suddenly there's a new thing going around and, hey, it looks like lots of people have made crazy money off of it already. Financial strain just puts you in a different head space and grifters know how to exploit that. Good for you and all the best to you and your family.

[@Saibellus]

when we're low, a mad gamble seems sensical cuz we feel like theres not much left to lose. its only after you actually bottom out that you realize how much you had. glad you got your head on straight and learned something. conmen from the beginning of time make money off struggling people who just havent heard of their scam yet, preying on hope and fear in equal measure. glad you didnt become another victim.

[@KrolKaz]

Yup. Just stick to bitcoin

[@beccak8166]

I'm so happy that things are looking up for you at your job!!

[@hoagie911]

The parallels between this and meme stocks are so apparent after watching This Is Financial Advice

[@TheAnthery]

Yeah, it's a circle of a venn diagram

[@blakksheep736]

Very explicitly so, especially when you look at the "paper hands/diamond hands" terminology, they are very explicitly cribbing from each other.

[@gringochucha]

The fact that the word "community" is thrown about so much tells us all we need to know about loneliness in the modern world.

[@paritybit2277]

Projection is an extremely powerful coping mechanism. These people live within their own hierarchical narratives where the pinnacle of existance and purpose in life is becoming rich and loved by the whole world. This is why trying to disway these people from falling for crypto and NFT scams on the basis that they will lose money is so difficult and rarely, if ever, works. The basis for why they engage in crypto schemes is based on their need to get rich quick and be apart of an elite club of intelligent radicals who found life's secret cheat code to success.

[@GoodStarfish]

I'm glad you brought that up

[@esmokah]

Yup, and as the guy in the video said, for interaction you need to make a transaction.

[@DrRyan82994]

basically every content creator uses it

[@sleepingdogpro]

It really is very telling that these guys need to feel like they're in the in-group so badly. Like there's no one in their actual life they're connecting to. No one that they matter for. The longer this video goes on the more I feel sorry for them - so much of it does seem to come from lonely internet guys who want a community but have no idea how to belong to a real one.

[@Niffoni]

I know it's a lot more complicated and nuanced than "this video crashed crypto" but I still named my RTX 3080 "Dan" in acknowledgement of your service.

[@Lightwolf234]

Happy to be able to buy computer parts again

[@sage-py6fr]

you named your rtx grafics card? cute

[@liamf2300]

@@sage-py6fr its a lot more valuable than a baby

[@damjanp7920]

@@liamf2300 lmao savage and based

[@gagesparks5898]

Im stealing this idea, thank you

[@steph20xd6]

While watching this I got a scam ad of AI Vitalik Buterin telling me to transfer Ethereum to his account and I'd get double my money back. Perfection.

[@VioletteZero]

"Both what NFTs are claimed to be and what they are are both terrible." Well fucking said.

[@patriciogarciadamiano7469]

Only 7 minutes in and he already dropped the MOST succinct explanation of the 2008 financial crises I've ever seen.

[@jasonpetitjean8332]

I spent most of that explanation thinking about how much more clear and how much less condescending an explanation of the 2008 financial crisis this was than The Big Short

[@SoldierHawke]

Dude, right? I can't tell you how many times I went, "ooooooh ...." (Usually followed closely by, "oh SHIT.")

[@kemp10]

He's a smith with words

[@felixhamel1853]

So true! I just now realize that I’ve never actually understood the 2008 crisis before.

[@specialagento486]

I’m 13 minutes in, and it’s all fire. The next two hours are going to be great.

[@TheDnBGremlin]

absolutely floored anyone can take a man who says "85 terabytes a year is perfectly fine" seriously. as a software engineer and web designer who makes decent cash, the idea of perpetually buying storage for this bloated bougie wastebasket of a ledger at that scale is a balking point even if I had no idea about the rest.

[@damaskusseraph6046]

A 1 TB hard drive on Amazon costs 49.99. Assuming their laying retail price that’s 4249 dollars a year just on storage for a tiny amount of users.

[@Tzilandi]

@@damaskusseraph6046 And that assumes that you also don't have to replace anything due to wear and tear, so it's probably going to be even more.

[@damaskusseraph6046]

@@Tzilandi not to mention power costs and storage

[@vaiyt]

Imagine now that web3 becomes the standard and you have to back up the entire internet to handle tokens 😂

[@JoshSweetvale]

People will always build a better hoarder. _The Culture_ by Iain Banks is about starships the size of cities with colossal computer cores _inside time dilation fields._ They still have data bloat. Exponents are the devil.

[@S1apShoes]

You mean to tell me that introducing artificial scarcity into a place where scarcity is impossible, and in fact, the lack of scarcity was the entire point of cyberspace in the first place, ended up being a failure? Color me shocked.

[@lcg3092]

Wouldn't count it as a failure just yet. We do have plenty of examples of artificial scarcity in the internet, and I don't think this idea will die just yet. While it may be stupid if you think of the overall society, that would be a great way to extract profit from the internet, and as they say, where there's a will there's a way...

[@Philitron128]

​@@lcg3092such as?

[@lcg3092]

@@Philitron128 Well, off the top of my head, research papers are often locked behind a paid wall and Sci-Hub that offered those papers for free was forcibly shut down.

[@Philitron128]

@@lcg3092 lol they may be locked behind a pay wall, but that doesn't mean you can't get them for free haha. That's the funny thing about the internet, if it can be copied it will be copied.

[@lcg3092]

@@Philitron128 That was one example, and yes, there is a lot content that is either imposible or inviable for the average person to get to for free, if you put a system in place that keeps the average person from accessing it, then that's already artificial scarcity. Even if there will always be a person well versed enough to go through any digital barrier given enough time, if the effort is too great for the average person than it's artificial scarcity, because the exception does not make the rule. If you want to pretend those don't exist for whatever reason, be my guest, doesn't change reality. I know for a fact that many streaming content is often out of reach of easy piracy. Sure, if I download Tor and surf the dark web or search around in some niche forum maybe I'll find it, but not only that would put myself in more danger of downloading malware, it's enough effort that most people would not engage with it. It's artificial scarcity, even if not technically impossible to overcome.

[@MrBenMcLean]

When Lawrence Lessig wrote that, "Code is Law" he meant that the proprietary closed source code forced upon you by Microsoft or Apple has the power ultimately to control your life by controlling what you can and can't do by controlling what your computing devices can and can't do. "Code is Law" means that their proprietary software make Microsoft and Apple into being the effective government in society. The idea that "Code is Law" did not mean what the crypto-bros take it to mean, that you as an individual can make up whatever laws you want simply by writing code. That is never how "Code is Law" actually worked.

[@phastinemoon]

My father has a lot of “right to repair” advocate friends who LOATHE Microsoft and Apple for exactly those reasons. The tools that were supposed to help us live better lives, instead twisted into the tools for the powerful to keep us under their thumb.

[@ProjectXA3]

Yet another fucking hysterical layer of stupid in this cake, love it

[@thexalon]

Just a comment on the bubble burst back in 2008: I was there, Gandalf. Specifically, back in 2006 I was working as a programmer in the bowels of a company that handled and automated some of the paperwork for subprime mortgage brokers (don't hate me too much - I desperately needed the paychecks to keep a roof over my head). And just looking at the data I was seeing every day, I could see that there was no possible way this could work long-term, because none of the loans were set up in a way that the borrower could ever pay down the principle. And about 4 months in, the largest of this company's clients collapsed, taking my job there with it. A couple years later, when the failures started trickling up to Wall Street, the talking heads were on TV saying nobody knew how risky it all was. That was utter nonsense - if I, just some guy at a desk at a not-huge company connected to the industry could tell it was all going to blow up sooner or later, I'm quite sure that the key players knew.

[@NJKoopmeiners]

But that's the thing. Everybody knows, but as long as they profit, they don't see it as their responsibility to do something about it. Or they start lying to themselves that a miracle solution will present itself. But they are never ever going to speak up, because they, as much as you needed to, desperately need to cling onto the fabric of their existence. They interweaved the absurdness of the system into the fabric of their personality, which also happens now with NFT's and Crypto, that's why people invested in it can respond so toxicly towards critism, not (well mostly not) because they are evil and want to just scam people, but because they are human and made NFT and Crypto their way of life. Just like you made the dependency on that job for your survival an integral part of your personality, of who you were as a person. And you would think that we as humans would understand that by now and have the majority depower the disillusioned and powerful minority and build check's and balances to prevent these kinds of very human dynamics, but it just doesn't happen. We are all responsible. We have become complacent. We have become blind to the needed failsafes that keep the dynamics that have given us prosperity, freedom, peace and wealth from running rampant and taking away that very prosperity, freedom, peace and wealth. Especially if those blindspots, those weaknesses, can be exploited by glitches in the system by actors who benefit us losing. Social media is such a glitch and it has been exploited by foreign state actors.

[@randomjunkohyeah1]

@@NJKoopmeiners “Just like you made the dependency on that job for your survival an integral part of your personality, of who you were as a person.” They literally didn’t say that at all what are you talking about.

[@dragontyron]

They knew and they were all playing hot potato; who can be the last to cash out, and who can be the biggest winner. Eerily similar to how this all looks!

[@gusmalone2005]

You should watch The Big Short. It's based on a true story about some Wall Street guys who predicted it was gonna happen so bet against the stock market, and made absolute bank.

[@Osterochse]

@@gusmalone2005 if you beleive that it is going to burst, then why should you not bet againts it? it is the same thing as believing that something goes up and getting into the market or just withdrawing from one if you think it doesn't.

[@Spectathorism]

One of the true nature of humanity is this: "they won't call nor tell others when they found a gold mine, IF they do... then they're trying to sell you their shovels OR trying to get you to dig it for them."

[@vincent21212]

not true. when I told everyone close to me about Bitcoin in 2013 I did so not because I was selling them Bitcoin directly at a higher price than I bought it, nor did I believe that it was necessary for these friends and family to buy in order for me to benefit. I told them about bitcoin because I thought they'd appreciate being wealthy and not have to worry about money after a couple of years. Alas, they weren't convinced. Today I'm wealthy but with no one to celebrate or relate to. They all know it, but we can't openly talk about it because i'm learning that money serves only to divide people

[@whitelabrat]

@@vincent21212 Yea but your money is vaporware packaged as currency. People literally have been saying all the same things you just did but I could insert a stock or commodity for "Bitcoin" and the result is the same. "I told my friends to buy Apple back in the 80's and no one listened" is the exact same sales pitch. Only weirdly Apple stock mostly made only a handful of people actually wealthy but paid out just enough that those with lesser shares didn't want to rock the boat. And Apple was the positive example... for every Apple there was also a dozen Commodores who just up and died. The only reason buying Apple is something people talk about is because it is one of the few that worked and only the ones who guessed right profited. And most never profited enough to actually reach wealth because to buy in correctly in any system that is basically a pyramid means having liquid assets already you can use for the investment or being at the top of the pyramid. Apple stock mostly made people who worked at Apple wealthy and most of the others who did well were already wealthy. And Apple was not even vapor ware. It is like the tech bros from the 1990's just repackaged the same vapor ware ideas and there is not even a real product or company behind any of it which was already at best a dubious way to predict success. It's just the 90's tech crash rebranded and sold to a new generation. Its the same gambling just with no regulation to prevent fraud at the top of the pyramid. At best the most stable coins are a commodity who's only value is rarity and cost of production which makes collecting them no different from the people hoarding gold and silver. And the worst have significantly less value than that. The reason your family members can't talk to you about it is you literally are that guy in the family every one knows bought a house in a flood plane but won't admit it. Maybe you won't flood but you can't be persuaded you are risking it because you have a house right now. You are the guy who can't stop talking of Thanksgiving about how they will be wealthy still when we are forced back to the gold standard since you have been buying precious metals. Or you are one of those closer to the top of the pyramid which is sort of even worse.

[@sorryifoldcomment8596]

@@vincent21212 We aren't talking about only telling people "close to you," though, so I don't think this comment actually includes you. This comment isn't about personal discussions you've had with individuals in your life. Just the people yelling about it publicly, everywhere. If you aren't in the group of individuals still spamming comments under every KZbin video about NFTs, spamming about how we all need to buy into it with our real money across all social media platforms...then I don't think this applies to you. :) I mean, even in the (very apt) analogy of finding gold, the person who finds it (or thinks they might have found it) does tell some number of individuals...especially if they have people close to them who could use it. In fact, having motive to tell people close to them directly conflicts with any motive to make it public, because then their close ones will be left out in the competition. IDK if that makes sense. Also, I hope by "rich," you aren't counting crypto that you haven't cashed out yet. When it comes to the real money you have apparently made...let's be real, you made your money only because other people lost their money. You didn't get that money because someone actually produced something with value that could be sold, that could be used. You sold your crypto at an artificial value, because someone else was willing to buy in, trade their cash for it....then you cashed out, leaving them with only the hope of finding a bigger fool they can sell it to. Except, for everyone to actually make money...the value of the cryptocurrency would need to go up, forever. For everyone to cash out at a profit, you need an endless line of bigger fools to donate their cash, and never have the artificial value inevitably drop to such an extent that the bubble bursts. Once no one else is willing to put more new money in, donate to the pot so someone can cash out...it's over. The value is already dropping of the more successful cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, and when it comes to most cryptocurrencies, holy shit it's already a mass grave. Already so many people are left with worthless currency they can't exchange for any real money, because it's at $0 and been abandoned. The people stuck holding it (you know, like you're supposed to do with real money) in fact have lost everything they put into it...but, where did that money go? Well, it was ultimately taken by the people who sold them the crypto and cashed out soon enough. It's basically like everyone putting money into a lottery bucket by buying lottery tickets, then one person wins and takes it all. That person only received that money because enough other people lost their money...and the money they got completely depended on other people putting their money in and then not getting anything back. Only difference is that people don't buy lottery tickets on the promise they'll totally make more money than they put in. It isn't pitched as an "investment opportunity." To me, any person going around advertising they made sooo much money from crypto are honestly like people bragging about winning the lottery. 🤑 Then telling everyone to buy tickets too! /End rant ✌️

[@xXluluchanelXx]

@@vincent21212 crypto-currency generation is destroying our planet faster than we previously had the means to do so. but who cares about the future when you can screw over some dummies, cash out and enjoy your life right? at least someone trying to sell me a time-share is only guilty of wasting the use of a small parcel of land.

[@kitchenlattice]

OP's statement is true of cryptobros and their ilk, but not humanity in general. Indeed, it's the fundamental belief of cryptobros that this is normal human nature and not abhorrent and sociopathic.

[@TVAVStudios]

No matter how many times I watch this, that final chapter always hits. He actually reminds me of Pratchett in that his breezy and often casually humorous style hides a deep rage at the injustice and stupidity of it all just beneath the surface; it comes out a couple of times earlier on, but then he spends the last five minutes just calmly, cooly spitting fire and it makes the whole video.

[@kingturboturtlednoc5722]

I get chills every single time I hear that line of "but [they] concluded that problem with capitalism was that it didn't give enough opportunities to be the boot"

[@aim-to-misbehave5674]

I would have _loved_ to have seen what Pratchett would have made of the AI/NFT/crypto mess - it would have made an excellent satirical target for a von Lipwig book

[@aethertag1530]

​@@aim-to-misbehave5674moist would have spent the front third of the book going from impressed at the sheer audacity to disgusted/confused that nobody else sees the scam for what it is Like with Gilt

[@blakksheep736]

Who's Pratchett?

[@TVAVStudios]

@@blakksheep736 Terry Pratchett? Wrote the Discworld books, wrote Good Omens w/Neil Gaiman?

[@CoyoteMao]

Remember kids: if someone's trying to sell you crypto, they're either a conman or an idiot.

[@NathanWubs]

or an idiot that wants to be part of the conmen.

[@fiskersproductions]

@@NathanWubsthose at the bottom of the pyramids always are

[@troodon1096]

Probably both.

[@brandonlyon730]

I definitely agree with this, but now this reminds me of a quote from Caesar in Fallout New Vegas: Caesar: If you think it's worthwhile to make smart people learn how to talk like backward savages, you’re a Follower of the apocalypse... Or an idiot.

[@fourthmatchflame]

@@brandonlyon730 Edwin, a man who read one book about rome and said "yeah i could do that, exactly like that.", is reffering to learning native tribes langagues here, witch is worthwhile.

[@RothAnim]

When talking to crypto people, one common emotional thread I see is the idea of complete individual control; the rhetoric of "decentralized" is sold as "you will be in complete control of your destiny" and not "you will have to negotiate everything with a group of people who each think they are in complete control of their destiny". These aren't communities of equals, but competitive hierarchies where everyone is encouraged to see themselves as kings, but end up being serfs.

[@adrenalinevan]

What is capitalism but the myth that a serf can be king?

[@Em_Branco]

This is literally just the underlying ideology of capitalism. The lie that everyone has equal rights and is free to pursue their own happiness. No one is actually free to do jack, in fact, we're all subordinates to a deeply complex system of socioeconomic relations, everything that we can and cannot do is at the end dictated by the conditions this system creates. Freedom is just a magic word for the morons who want to uphold this monstrous system to use to hide the fact that poor people cannot meet their basic necessities because it's not profitable to help them.

[@adrenalinevan]

@@Em_Branco and if you really want freedom you have to change the material conditions and socioeconomic factors that make us behave this way

[@ernststravoblofeld]

I see it as feudalism with moderate turnover.

[@DoggyHateFire]

Exactly. The only freedom you get is the freedom to get exploited and rooked more than you already do in the real world economy.

[@caitmonroe9349]

I graduated high school in 2007, so basically my entire adult life has been post-2008 crash. While your video made me even more angry about the people behind NFTs, the part about economic despair among people who got suckered in really resonated. The whole system feels so hopeless and rigged that it makes sense that so many people would irrationally throw money at empty promises.

[@Nassifeh]

NGL, I do wonder if we'd be in this position if the media had spent slightly less time telling millennials that we were to blame for our own inability to afford stable housing because sometimes we went to Starbucks. I guess next it will be telling zoomers that they should have bought crypto if they ever wanted to not rent something.

[@asmodiusjones9563]

Yes. To me, the greatest tragedy of NFTs isn’t that they are so blatantly a scam, it’s that they do not present as more of a scam than the regular financial systems we all live under. Anyone can ignore NFTs, but their popularity is a portent of doom for the economy overall.

[@asmodiusjones9563]

@@Nassifeh If you hadn’t spent $50,000 a year on Starbucks, for five years in a row, you would be able to make a down payment on a house. The math is incontrovertible; it is solely your own fault that you can’t buy a house. (I am being facetious)

[@Septurez]

what are you talking about? I was a broke college student 6 months ago and now have six figures because I flipped some collectables? mad and poor

[@jamesbrooks9321]

i graduated in 2005 and then enlisted 4 years in the military, we're part of a generation of people joining the workforce and supporting ourselves, setting our own direction for our lives right as the economy fell out from everyone, it's all we've ever known and our perception of the world is fucked

[@DaMaster012]

To think, all of this might have never happened, if only Blizzard didn't nerf Warlocks in World of Warcraft. And here I thought creating Brigitte was the most destructive thing they ever did.

[@Shventastic]

That bit about "revolutionary new vectors of harassment" along with the given examples, is a similar conversation I had to have with my 8-year-old son to explain why he has voice chat, DMs, and adding friends locked on his Roblox account. No matter how I tried to explain the risks to him, he insisted I was wrong and tried to circumvent the parental controls. I had realization shortly after watching this that the entire NFT and Crypto sphere is literally just oblivious and ignorant adults getting preyed on by predators with far more imagination and resources for predation. Hopefully this video helps remove the ignorance for any potential victims, but some people will just refuse to listen until disaster strikes or a responsible party intervenes beforehand. Lol

[@JoshSweetvale]

I fundamentally disagree. Naïveté is no excuse in adults. Maybe it aught to be, morally. But to tautologize for a moment: The legal system, the market, and the school playground assume naiveté is the fault of the actor, not the enviroment. That's the yardstick. Social Darwinism.

[@Crypted112]

@@JoshSweetvale eh, it's a bit more than naivete. for some people it's desperation and hopelessness, so they turn to things like this. plus these types of scams deliberately try to keep people uninformed and ignorant about how they actually work so they can take advantage of them, so i dont blame those people for falling for it. that being said, if someone watches this video or has this stuff explained to them and STILL decides to invest, yea 100% their fault at that point.

[@placeholderdoe]

⁠​⁠@@JoshSweetvalea lot of “naive” adults are victims of oppression

[@JoshSweetvale]

@@placeholderdoe Personal responsibility has to start somewhere. Like 16, 18 or 21.

[@placeholderdoe]

@@JoshSweetvale yes i agree, but to learn how to be responsible, you need help. If you grew up in an environment with bad schooling, or bad parents, or you have a learning disability, you are disadvantaged. If you weren’t taught basic math, reading, etc in school or by your parents then it isn’t your fault you’re weak to scams. Even less extreme examples, if you are mentally disabled you may have a harder time getting jobs or an education. Responsibility is very important, but each person has a different situation. There is no one rule, you have to take it by case. Have a great day

[@BroManDudeGuyPhD]

"A different system does not inherently mean a better system. We replace bad systems with worse ones all the time. We replaced a bad system of work and bosses with a terrible system of apps, gigs, and on demand labor. So it’s not just that I oppose NFTs because the foremost of them are aesthetically vacuous representations of the dead inner lives of the tech and finance bros behind them, it’s that they represent the vanguard of a worse system. The whole thing, from OpenSea fantasy for starving artists, to the buy in to pay to earn games, it’s the same hollow, exploitative pitch as MLMs. It’s Amway, but everywhere you look, people are wearing ugly ass ape cartoons" What a quote!

[@DasAntiNaziBroetchen]

Just wait till software engineers/nerds are in charge. Those people have the best social skills. Speaking as an engineer myself who absolutely hates other engineers at work.

[@bosobot]

what a shitty quote

[@DestroyerOfAglets]

@@bosobot lmao, gottem!!!!! 😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣😂😂😂 Normie destroyed amirite?

[@bosobot]

@@DestroyerOfAglets fr

[@DestroyerOfAglets]

@@bosobot I was making fun of you

[@caltissue141]

As a programmer I have one message for everyone else - programming is hard and code is rarely correct the first time. Even with no malice it's easy to fuck it up completely. The faith people have in programmers to get things right is entirely misplaced, and is the product of very good self-marketing by tech companies.

[@leonardocarvalho7306]

It's like when you hear about game developers screwing their respective QA departments over and over, underpaying and overworking them and firing them without notice. Pure insanity.

[@zk5228]

How does the joke go? People are cautious on airplanes and elevators, despite engineers' assurances that they're safe. People are carefree and reckless with computers, despite programmers' and cs experts' warnings that all code is held together with dental floss.

[@dalstein3708]

The nice thing about software (compared with other engineering disciplines) is that you can easily tweak it, fix bugs are deploy it again. To make a piece of software immutable, put it on a blockchain and trust it to handle valuable assets is... insanity.

[@RememberingGames]

@@dalstein3708 So true. Can't put integration tests on a cardiac transplant patient to make sure everything will works fine in prod.

[@4esv]

"}" nuff said

[@BAgodmode]

That dude saying “we are a DAO,” it’s like their version of version of SovCit “it’s not me, it’s the legal fiction who shares my name in all capitol letters.”

[@lttlknn]

I come back to this video not only because of how elegant of a takedown of NFTs it is. But every subsequent failure of crypto projects and coins has only gone on to reinforce the red flags. This video will become canon imo.

[@cheezemonkeyeater]

"if this looks like a scam, then every NFT room I'm in looks like a scam lol." I feel this sentence should, perhaps, have been examined a bit more by the person who said it.

[@ng.tr.s.p.1254]

"It was at this moment that the cryptobro knew, he fucked up."

[@UnreasonableOpinions]

That awkward moment when you hit the point so hard you smash right through it.

[@CivilWarMan]

Definitely fits into the category of a selfawarewolf. It reminds me of a story from the US Civil War. Late in the war, the Confederacy was in a bad spot. They were on an unalterable path towards defeat. Among other issues, one of the main problems was that they were running out of manpower. This prompted some in the Confederacy to, as a last resort, propose recruiting slaves to serve as frontline troops. Since slaves constituted nearly 40% of the Confederate states' population, this served as a massive potential boost in available manpower. However, the idea was largely dismissed on account of the massive social, political, cultural, and moral implications it would have on the Confederacy, especially since the proposal also included using emancipation as an incentive to encourage black enlistment. It all came to a head in January of 1865, when Robert E. Lee endorsed the idea. In a letter to Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon, Howell Cobb, a Confederate general who opposed the idea, wrote, "If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong"

[@cheezemonkeyeater]

@@ng.tr.s.p.1254 Except he really didn't, because the cryptobro was dense as lead bricks.

[@maverickmak]

I remember Dan tweeting sometime last year that he was struggling with scripting a crypto/NFT video, because the landscape was changing so wildly, and the subject matter so insane. He'd shelved it. Fast forward, and he's grappling with what would become this draft. I followed the twitter thread of his descent into the madness of the NFT discord servers. Its clear he's been researching, writing, editing, etc for months. Hard to imagine the amount of creative effort and strain it must have put on him. And finally it releases. A presentation worthy of any lecture hall, and its completely free to watch practically anywhere in the world.

[@DailyCryptoAnalysisYT]

Sounds like blockchain technology

[@Cixon14]

@@DailyCryptoAnalysisYT ?

[@vincnt0169]

yeah, really well researched video... but imo didn't go deep enough. He focussed on this one branch of crypto that is now tilting towards a weird, speculative bubble, but the philosophy behind decentralization and crypto's has little to do with "commecializing everthing", the things nfts address for example are mostly already commercialized but owned by giant corporations that just do what they want, they just make it look like things are free, but in reality they take your data and most profits for themselves. In my eyes, the main goal of crypto's and decentralized systems built on top of them is to distribute the power of the digital space back to the users, creating platforms that everyone can shape and participate in. That's what i first thought of when people said "wagmi", if we build a decentralized system, we can all participate and distribute the profits according to everyones contributions. But yes, a lot of the critique is very valid, although a lot can be fixed... it just takes time. right now, nfts are generally overvalued and not yet developed enough, but it will get there, as you mentioned the space is moving very quickly, even if the nft hype dies down, some new technology will emerge and cause another hypewave, and once we have accumulated enough of these technologies, it will be possible to build really useful things.

[@MattBooth]

You should mint the twitter thread, you'll be a moonianaire!

[@shu9062]

@@vincnt0169 Democracy and equality are practically impossible to attain, even less so through crypto. Economic liberalism and deregulation has historically benefitted the elites and the elites only, I don't see how a tech twist on Adam Smith is ever going to give the masses at large an opportunity to succeed.

[@leandervr]

I can't get over how terrible of an idea Betting Kongs is. Is there any worse kind of conflict of interest than gambling in a casino you partially own? They're lucky it fell apart, because I am absolutely certain the only other endpoint was them all murdering each other.

[@placeholderdoe]

Yeah, it’s either win it all on black, or paint the room red.(sorry I wanted to make a pun)

[@talonthehand]

@@placeholderdoeThat's a solid pun - never apologize for fine art.

[@EmeraldPhoenix-sp8hm]

Huh. So they really just asked, "Hey, how can we make the financial system somehow even more complicated and shitty, then leverage that to satisfy our own insatiable greed?"

[@9600bauds]

they straight up said "hey, I bet CS:GO weapon skins would make an awesome replacement for money, if it was a lot more complex and wasteful and the system had more fees attached and steam had no customer support or privacy settings"