This emoji summarizes it perfectly: 🤢

  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago
    • NFTs are objectively a scam, and unsurprisingly, 1208 – these developers – proudly and prominently display Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belfort on their homepage.
    • They just say “open-source” without stating a license, and coming from people willing to put a pyramid scheme in their no-effort mobile game, that sends up red flags for openwashing.
    • If it is open-source, that isn’t god’s gift to mankind or anything. There are plenty of existing open-source Flappy Bird clones that mimic it – as best I can tell – one-to-one because Flappy Bird isn’t a complex game. And I’m somehow doubting a game designed to hawk shitty-ass NFTs has a lot of detail put into it either.
    • Bobby Turkalino@lemmy.yachts
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      2 months ago

      You call them scammers, then say their right to scam should be protected by licenses? I say we scam the scammers by forking it and doing whatever the fuck we want with it 🙂

      • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Whether something is open-source or not is dependent on what license if any its creator chooses to put it under. a) This comment confuses me more than anything, and b) if you want to make a better Flappy Bird game, you’ll probably have a better shot forking one of the existing clones than waiting for whatever steaming, uninspired pile of shit comes out of Belfort’s wallet.

    • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      One small but important correction. NFTs are not a scam, it’s an amazing technology that has the potential to revolutionize lots of stuff, that became popular when people used it for stupid shit.

      Saying NFT is a scam because people have used it to scam others is like saying phones are a scam because people call others over the phone to scam them.

      NFTs are essentially a decentralized token. This means that they can be used to represent anything you might want to represent with a token, e.g. ownership of a physical object such as a car or a house; ownership of a digital asset, such as a website or game; some predetermined amount of something, similar to a stock or bonds; etc. The fact that some people used it to mean ownership of random pictures and people thought buying random pictures on the internet for a ridiculous amount of money was a good idea tells you more about people than about the technology.

      • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        That’s neat. Until a representation of something on a blockchain has any legal meaning regarding authenticity, ownership, or anything else, and until the overwhelming majority usage of NFTs isn’t as a scam, NFTs remain a pathetic and comically stupid class of speculative asset constituting a pyramid scheme that also happens to destroy the environment.

        • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          The legal validity of things come from people using it and courts enforcing it, someone years ago might have said:

          That’s neat. Until a representation of something on a piece of paper has any legal meaning regarding authenticity, ownership, or anything else, and until the overwhelming majority usage of paper isn’t as a scam, paper remains a pathetic and comically stupid class of speculative asset constituting a pyramid scheme that also happens to destroy the environment.

          The thing is that even if a technology is used mostly for stupid things that tells you more about humans than about the technology itself. Or do you also think that phone calls are scams because 90% of the phone calls you receive nowadays are scams, even though the technology behind phone calls is the same used for mobile internet.

          Also the destroy the environment claim is really bogus, for starter money pollutes more than crypto when you consider all of the chain of what it takes to produce and transport money. But also for example if you live in the US your home probably pollutes more than a mining farm since they’re usually in places where electricity is extremely cheap, mostly in China near a hydroelectric power plant. But also the technology itself doesn’t need to consume that amount of energy, that’s just the current implementation, but there’s a push to move to PoS instead of PoW, which would mean that NFTs (and crypto in general) would not need farms or even a specially powerful computer.

          • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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            2 months ago

            Ok, I was in agreement with you (the concept of NFTs is great, what people do with it is dumb) until the environment part

            Crypto, even proof of stake, isn’t energy efficient and never will be, the banking sector uses more energy but it also manages quadrillion in funds and transactions, crypto’s value as a whole is orders of magnitude less than that and there’s more energy spent per transaction than in the traditional financial sector. Crypto replacing banks and cash would be an environmental disaster.

            Next, even if mining is done using green energy, it means that this energy isn’t used to reduce emissions in other, actually essential, sectors. There’s an environmental cost to green energy (what do you think was under the dam’s reservoir?) so having to produce more infrastructure just for crypto is wasteful.

            • acosmichippo@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              exactly, and also saying our houses use more energy than crypto as a justification is just relative privation. yes our houses use energy because we need to survive. that doesn’t mean we should just give a blank energy check to whatever inefficient new technology comes along.

              • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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                2 months ago

                I didn’t even get to that, house energy usage can’t be compared to crypto energy usage, they’re not used for the same thing!

            • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              There are some valid points here, and I agree that the energy could be used elsewhere and that green energy is not entirely green.

              I even agree that for most cryptocurrency as they are now the cost per transaction is higher than alternatives. However the technology for cryptocurrency, especially with PoC can be a lot more efficient in scale. To get an idea of it you can look at Visa, which processes 1700 transactions per second, BCH can do 178, so 10% of it, ETH2 is supposed to be able to process at least 20k, so 10x that amount. I imagine either of those coins pollute a comparable amount to visa when you consider everything that visa needs to operate (machines, cards, servers, etc). I feel that people don’t take these sort of stuff into consideration when they talk about the energy consumption of crypto. There is a discussion to be had here, but blankly stating that it’s an environmental disaster is fear mongering.

              • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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                2 months ago

                Visa can process a maximum of 24k TPS

                Crypto energy usage goes up the more it’s being used and the more decentralized it becomes. Centralized services like Visa can increase the network load while barely increasing the energy requirements.

                Crypto bros always forget that to replace the banking system, crypto would need to replace the infrastructure as well, but because of decentralization it would be less energy efficient for the same result.

                You can just stop, there’s no way to greenwash crypto and decentralization. The amount of transactions happening on all crypto networks at the moment could be handled by one server if it was centralized. There’s benefits to it, stop trying to sell it as being green, it’s not and never will be.

                • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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                  2 months ago

                  Crypto energy usage goes up the more it’s being used and the more decentralized it becomes.

                  That’s wrong, crypto energy consumption has to do with how hard is the PoW difficulty, it does not correlate at all with usage or centralization, it’s only related with security, i.e the more energy it consumes the more energy someone would need to use to attack the technology.

                  But the energy needed to mine 1 transaction or 1000 is the same. There are problems at scale, but power consumption is not one of them.

                  Centralized services like Visa can increase the network load while barely increasing the energy requirements.

                  Not really, they need more servers to process more transactions, but cryptocurrency can scale up much more easily because the whole infrastructure from consumer to miner is decentralized.

                  Crypto bros always forget that to replace the banking system, crypto would need to replace the infrastructure as well, but because of decentralization it would be less energy efficient for the same result.

                  That’s what most people fail to see, the infrastructure for a scale at the size of visa is already in place for crypto. So there wouldn’t be an increase in power consumption by mass adoption, only by miner adoption, and that’s a difficult thought to grasp, it’s like if everyone could borrow their computer to visa or Mastercard to process their transactions, the amount of people wanting to offer their computer to visa/master would define how much resources they use, but an increase in visa users doesn’t mean an increase in visa borrowed servers and vice-versa.

                  You can just stop, there’s no way to greenwash crypto and decentralization. The amount of transactions happening on all crypto networks at the moment could be handled by one server if it was centralized. There’s benefits to it, stop trying to sell it as being green, it’s not and never will be.

                  I’m not trying to green wash, but crypto is not the environmental disaster the person claimed, especially not when you take into consideration PoS and newer coins with different validation methods.

                  • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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                    2 months ago

                    From the get go, you’re wrong

                    https://www.coindesk.com/learn/bitcoin-mining-difficulty-everything-you-need-to-know/

                    The more people mine, the more decentralized it is, the more energy is necessary because difficulty is increased. The more transactions happen, the more blocks are required, the more energy needs to be spent to confirm all the transactions. The more it’s used, the higher the value, the more people mine.

                    There’s a limit to the number of transactions per block as well, so no, your can’t just say “1 or 1000 it’s the same”.

                    Visa is already able to handle 24000 transactions per second as is, no need for more infrastructure.

                    Crypto uses 1% of the world’s energy production for a couple trillions in assets, the financial system uses 2.5% for quadrillions in assets, multiple thousands more than crypto, no, crypto can’t scale to that without a huge environmental impact.

                    Yes you are trying to greenwash crypto, just stop.

      • binary45@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Hey, if you say NFTs aren’t a scam, then why is almost every single NFT project losing its value?

        • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          First of all losing value and being a scam are not correlated, the dollar is losing its value compared to the Euro for the past year but it’s not a scam.

          Secondly that would be an association fallacy, “X is a scam, X is an NFT, therefore all NFT are scam”.