Fair enough.
Still not keen on the entire idea of an NFT, though. I guess we'll just have to wait and see how this works out in the long term.
Also fair, assuming you're criticizing it mostly for its somewhat needless energy use. I would really like to see some sort of an improved, widely-adopted blockchain technology that uses significantly less power; I recall HKE (not exactly a reliable source, lol) tweeting something about how ethereum 2.0 operates under a "proof of stake" rather than "proof of work" model, which is supposed to use significantly less energy than the current system does.
But otherwise, I compare NFTs to something like buying vinyl, CD, DVDs, etc. -- you can get "the same thing" by burning your own copy of a CD (or simply downloading the animated NFT).
I know this probably sounds stupid, but I would really like to see a "pirate" NFT site pop up, where you can build your own NFT collection consisting of works that others "own." I like that idea, even if it is a little pointless, but I still find myself visiting
2814's NFTs (2 more
here) and watching them loop through for a bit, and I enjoy looking at the
latest drops on NiftyGateway just to see what people are up to.
All of that said -- one of the $1000 NFTs that 2814 minted last week just sold for $888, and there's a 15% seller fee, meaning that someone bought it and held it for less than a week, and then sold it for a $250 loss, while 2814 and Kidmograph made out with somewhere in the neighborhood of $1000 in profit just from those 2x transactions (there's been closer to 300 transactions total). Maybe you don't particularly like HKE, telepath, or Kidmograph, but this is obviously a viable way for artists to make money on their digital art.
I find the NFT market fascinating, but there are clearly going to be a lot of losers throughout all of this. NiftyGateway's FAQ makes it clear that you shouldn't be buying NFTs to immediately "flip" (though I can't find this page anymore, lol), but a cursory glance at any of the NFT subreddits makes it obvious that a lot of folks are just trying to get in it for the money.
I know you said you were pretty much "done" with this thread, but I've been getting a bit more into it and I've found myself enjoying it a lot more than I thought. I also collect vinyl, though, so maybe I'm just predisposed to the "Ned Flanders plastic collecting" that HKE frequently whines about in his tweets. In any case, the only big negative that I see is the power usage, but I found
this (2019) and
this (2021) article detailing the very significant decrease in energy usage once the upgrades are in place. It's an incredibly interesting solution to the problem: rather than ethereum requiring practically the entire blockchain to validate a transaction, it instead queries individuals with a significant amount of ETH staked if the transaction should be verified or not. If they "lie," the staked ETH is lost and the transaction is reversible; in return for verifying these transactions, the "staker" collects a small fee that would normally be distributed over the entire blockchain.
I do not currently have the funds to dip into ETH, but it's been on my to-do list for quite some time. I've always considered ETH to be a better investment than bitcoin, even if overall returns prove me wrong. And I'll say, I don't personally think that vaporwave requires an anti-capitalism or counter-culture slant to be "authentic vaporwave," but it's clearly a driving force in much of the community. Given that, I don't see why crypto nor NFTs wouldn't be interesting to the "vaporwave community." Perhaps it's an anti-consumerism point of view, but at the end of the day, NFTs are funding artists and crypto is an attempt to decentralize currency and wrestle away some control from big banks and the federal government; crypto certainly hasn't done a phenomenal job of accomplishing this, but I don't see how these goals fail to align with "vaporwave." Or, at the very least, I don't see how these goals can create such a negative reaction from the "vaporwave community" (though, clearly $300,000+ was recently thrown around during the Birth of a New Day NFT drop + subsequent secondary market sales).
Maybe this joke is getting old but, thanks for coming to my TED talk.