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vaporwave literally sucked ass anyways
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don’t u dare say that about vaporwave
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honestly i kinda like light? it helps me wake up
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when was the last time chloe updated it
December?
November?
trash theme
BEST theme
they better
i didn’t slave away making FIFTY DAMN JOYCATS for nothing
yes you did
#beingbackvaporwave
#beingvaporwave
hey now
my efforts have already been slightly rewarded
I hope you people with NFTs realize that not only will you get a place on the holy blockchain but you will also be harassed by me
for free!
if you want death threats at a rate of greater than 1 every 12 hours please subscribe to my patreon
I literally fully believed all of this until the fucking nfts
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i believed all of it until i saw checked how much 0.05 ETH is worth
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I don’t really mind NFTs as NFTs.
Like… if you buy an image for yourself, you get the image.
People pay artists to make iamges, you can just as well pay the pc for it.
That is, they are really overpriced for images :^)
short version: an nft is basically a piece of paper that says you own something based on absolutely zero authority, that basically can only function as an access pass, but also every time you make one an absurd amount of power is burned causing tremendous levels of environemntal damage, which exponentially increases the more NFTs are made
long version:
Summary
Okay, okay, so I guess I’m going to have to explain what a blockchain is, and why the emissions thing is not something that can be easily fixed via improved technology, since people who buy into crypto don’t seem to understand how fundamental it is to the whole affair. A blockchain is basically a ledger of transactions- every single computer running the blockchain has the exact same series of transasctions, keeping track of… generic stuff! This usually takes the form of either cryptocurrency, such as bitcoin or ether, which is essentially a deliberately scarce ““currency””, or an NFT (non-fungible token) that is a small programme usually pointing to some image or other, although there is no inherrent requirement for it.
The problem is that since there is no central ledger (it’s a decentralised system), there has to be some way of ensuring that there is a single, agreed upon authoritative copy- most popular blockchains use a sytem called Proof of Work to ensure this. Basically, in order to verify that a transaction is that, each part of the blocikchain is encrypted based on the data contained in the earlier points of the chain, and all “mining” cryptocurrency is is solving a cryptographic mathematical problem of exponentially increasing complexity using gigantic industrial-scale rigs that consume huge amounts of power. Because the network of miner and validation nodes all do intense amounts of work to review and sign off on every transaction, this makes the system intensely secure.
I’m not going to be totally unfair to cryptocurrency, which NFTs are sort of intrinsically linked to- there are several things it excels at:
- This system means that it is almost completely impossible to modify data once it is placed onto the chain- because changing something earlier in the chain would modify all future data in the chain, you can only add new things to the chain, making man-in-the-middle attacks functionally impossible without huge amounts of effort that would categorically not be worth it.
- There is no central authority- the system is instead governed by those with the computational power to succesfully run validator and mining nodes, which theoretically anybody could do with enough money.
- NFTs as a system do technically create digital scarcity- criticisms of the idea of NFTs are often drowned out by lazy criticism of a kind of low-effort scam that has swarmed most crypto markets, namely selling horrifically ugly computer-generated art for exorbitant fees with a promise of future returns, and the ability to use one as your pfp, something you could literally just do anyway because you only own a url to the image, not the actual image itself, because there’s no cryptographical relationship between the images and the data in the blockchain, only between the url and the blockchain, meaning that if you took over the server the url links to you can easily change what everyone’s NFTs point to. However, that is not fundamental to the idea, and other ways of using it exist, and I’m not going to pretend that it doesn’t create some level of digital ownership.
Now that we have fully established that I am being as fair as possible, I am going to thoroughly deconstruct this entire concept and explain why I think these are a fundamentally flawed idea.
Because of the escalating power requirements inherrent to blockchains, the actual code that comprises an NFT has a whole bunch of incentives to be as minimal as possible- most blockchains have transaction fees of whatever currency is endemic to the chain- Ethereum has Gas Fees, which are a payment of ETH that scales in proportion to how much data people are currently trying to put onto the chain as the next transaction, so to decrease the cost you are incentivised to make your NFT contain as little data as possible (this is why so many of them are effectively just URLs- that’s a relatively small amount of data and thus relatively easy to produce).
In addition, the fact that it’s nigh-impossible to modify data while it’s on the blockchain, while undoubtedly an advantage, also makes the systems nearly impossible to bugfix- the only thing you can do is, essentially, rename the old programme so that any other programme looking for it doesn’t find it any more, mint a new selection of NFTs with the same name as the old containing the bugfix, and send those to the wallets of everyone who had the old NFTs, paying transaction fees for every single step of this process. Because of this, you have a financial incentive to put as little on-chain as possible, which functionally limits NFTs to only realistically being used as access passes, which they are in this case.
Essentially, using a crypto wallet manager, you can prove to any website that you are the validated owner of a certain NFT, meaning that if you sign into your crypto wallet you can sign into almost anything else, as websites can interface with a crypto wallet and see you have certain things, and trigger functions based on those things. As a consequence, you can theoretically transfer game items, grant access to management systems, et cetera, based on the NFTs. However, because by design a crypto wallet has to deal with public (albeit anonymous) information for the system to work, two huge problems arise.
- Any token that can be used to grant access can also be used to revoke it. Let’s say that, I, hypothetically, ran a website that used a wallet to grant access, but I hated this website with a burning passion, so as well as looking for my NFTs to see if I’ll allow you to log on, I also looked for Joycat NFTs, and if I find one in your wallet I can revoke access, or, if, hypothetically, I was a bank, I could look for any token that indicates digital membership of a union, or look through the blockchain for any donations to any political organisations made via crypto, and use that to influence your credit score. Obviously, this can be solved by simply using a different wallet for each website, but at that point we’re back to simply signing into every website., and all benefits from the system have been revoked.
- Because if a token is being used as an access pass, the functions associated with that token aren’t on-chain and are thus controlled by a central authority- whoever controls what the access pass means. This is why NFTs are fundamentally meaningless- in order to put what they actually do on-chain you escalate the transaction fees and power consumption to an absurd degree, so they’re only actually useful for interfacing with off-chain activities, at which point we’re back to a central authority deciding what your access means. If MU made a deal with us, and the joycat NFTs granted a special usertitle on MU, the moment MU had reason to dislike us, that title could be revoked- the joycat is guarenteed by the chain, true, but what the Joycat means is not.
This is why NFts and cryptocurrency in general have become mere empty speculative instruments- while they can very tenuously be used for actually useful purposes, they in fact acheive things which we were all doing already at greater cost, meaning that the only thing they’re actually good at is handling financial speculation. This is when I bring up that while the escalating power requirements can actually be solved b\y an alternative system called Proof of Stake, .where rather than the verification being done by huge cryptographical problems, instead it is done by simply… well, paying! You stake something in order to verify it, thereby proving you are trustworthy given you have meaningful financial stakes in the veracity of the information.
However, this does not fix the fact that this still costs more than what we’re doing nowadays in order to do exactly the same things, and excarcerbates the problem that this system favours the already-rich using it as a means of financial gain.The market is fundamentally a scam because of this factor- the only way to make money off of cryptocurrency and NFTs is for somebody else to lose, because the price of a cryptocurrency goes up the more people have bought into it, and thus cashing out can only be realistically done by converting others, giving those involved in crypto a financial incentive to evangelise it- regardless of if you consider it a pyramid scheme or a ponzi scheme, what it is is a bigger-fool scam.
Regarding using cryptocurrency as a normal currency, there is firstly the fact that most chains have glacial transaction times, and more worryingly, the value of the markets is so volatile that by the time you’ve paid for something what you paid for it may be significantly more or less in value, but that can theoretically be fixed. What cannot be fixed is that all cryptodcurrencies, by their very nature, have a deflationary economy- the value of a single bitcoin, or ether, or whatever cryptocoin you’re trading, trends upwards at all times. Deflationary economies are good for those with large investments, but absolutely disastrous if the money is supposed to be used to buy things, such as food, transportation, etc., or in other words, what humans need to live. If we switched to using crypto as our actual currency in the future, we’d be in a near-permanent state of hyperdeflation followed by hyperdeflation, something with disastrous consequences, and until that level of integration comes cryptocurrency is by necessity a financial investment, which is an issue precisely because it relies on an infinite stream of bigger fools to be a good financial investment.
Finally, the myth of decentralisation is just that- a myth. There is one way that information on the blockchain can be edited- a rollback, but what this causes is a fork- two chains that start with the same series of transactions but at one point diverge, which are both equally cryptographically correct solutions as far as the computers are concerned. Because everything on a blockchain has to be financialised for the system to function, people on one fork have a financial incentive for their version of the chain to be the authoritative version- you can see this by the fact that Ethereum Classic, a version of Ethereum in which a ginormous scam was not rolled back, is still around, and not merely nonexistent, becasue people who made transactions or bought in after that scam have an incentive to keep it around. If cryptocurrency expanded to cover the entire internet, as in the “”“web 3.0"”" future, a single fork could make your joycats invalid, because a joycat from Memechain Classic, which you might have, might not be accepted anywhere, whereas joycats from the modern Memechain are now used everywhere.
In short, while the system does have advantages, its’ very structure is so rigid and financialised that it has necessarily created a market that only really functions for the purposes of fraud, and while the environmental damage can be mitigated, what cannot be mitigated is that the systems are not fit for purpose- NFTs are meaningless despite theoretically being meaningful simply because the technology that we would need to make them feasible does not and likely will never exist. Most NFTs are not what they do, they are simply access passes to what they do, and all this gigantic system of decentralisation has created is a new centralised system, where the data is decentralised but all power is still concentrated in the hands of the wealthy elite who decide what the blockchain means.
For more information, do some fucking research, I only wrote this gigantic rant for a joke, if you’re into cryptocurrency you have a financial incentive to discredit me anyway so it’s not like I’m going to convince you or anything. But please, for the love of all the gods, do NOT buy NFTs or crypto, you will absolutely regret it.
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excuse you
they’re beautiful don’t you think
by the way i didn’t even mention that although the system is completely resistant to man-in-the-middle attacks that doesn’t really stop you from putting bad data onto the chain in the first place- the programme within an NFT absolutely can be malware
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Basicly trade into NFTs only if you want to trade into demand/supply price speculation.
But even then it’s best idea for NFT ceators to just release more and more NFTs so they make money for selling them, which makes it harder to earn money from it.
As well as all the economic, ecologic etc. issues it has.
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