The unrelenting tidal bore of relentless cryptobullshit

I’m cautious of being sure of something. Going beyond the point of doubt is akin to fanaticism: but, time and again, the digital era has shown us things are always nuanced.

I became convinced that Web3, particularly crypto, was completely and sensationally bad. In its contemporary form, could find not one single merit. So I put some pocket-money down and had a close look, to see if it does indeed behave like a credible market. It does not.

The trouble is that you can’t guarantee stability against an unstable backing; nothing will protect you against the whole market going down. Every algorithmic stablecoin thus far has failed to maintain its peg. Algorithmic stablecoins work until they don’t.

Stablecoins are a modern form of the wildcat banks of the 1800s, which issued dubious paper dollars backed with questionable reserves. These led to the National Currency Act of 1863, establishing the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and taking away the power of commercial banks to issue paper notes. At the very least, stablecoins need to be as regulated as banks are. But all of cryptocurrency is a less robust version of existing systems and has any advantage only as long as it gets away without being properly regulated.
— David Gerard, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/05/12/cryptocurrency-crash-2008-financial-crisis/

It’s fragile and massively complicated: a whole bunch of loosely defined, flimsy, inefficient, vulnerable, independently-controlled components that are all the weaker for having become interdependent.

The entire crypto space has been a Jenga stack of interconnected time bombs for months now, getting ever more interdependent as the companies find new ways to prop each other up.

Which company blew out first was more a question of minor detail than the fact that a blow-out was obviously going to happen. The other blocks in the Jenga stack will have a hard time not following suit.
— @ahcastor, https://amycastor.com/2022/06/14/the-latecomers-guide-to-crypto-crashing-a-quick-map-of-where-we-are-and-whats-ahead/

All this stuff has a seemingly-noble idology, but those who subscribe to those ideas know full-well that they can be used for personal gain at wider and greater harm. It’s kept complex for a reason: to be exploitative. The less people understand it, the more likely they are to be taken in, and taken for ride.

You should not invest in Bitcoin.

The reason why is that it’s not an investment; just as gold, tulip bulbs, Beanie Babies, and rare baseball cards are also not investments.

These are all things that people have bought in the past, driving them to absurd prices, not because they did anything useful or produced money or had social value, but solely because people thought they could sell them on to someone else for more money in the future.

When you make this kind of purchase – which you should never do – you are speculating. This is not a useful activity. You’re playing a psychological, win-lose battle against other humans with money as the sole objective. Even if you win money through dumb luck, you have lost time and energy, which means you have lost.
— @guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/15/should-i-invest-bitcoin-dont-mr-money-moustache

Things with no real value are touted as assets. They are not. These tokens are simply a means for charging people for something that ought not to have a purchase price, since they are worthless. Just as Facebook et al. commercialised human interaction, web3 synically commercialises hope.

It’s common for NFTs and governance tokens to double as speculative assets that can be bought and sold across crypto or NFT exchanges. But it’s questionable whether they have any fundamental value. Many gaming tokens are at best volatile and at worst worthless.

Yet proponents of crypto gaming try to sell it as the future…
— The Conversation, https://thenextweb.com/news/crypto-gaming-promise-riches-reality-different

And then there’s the true cost. Signals of wealth are, almost universally, made of carbon. Crypto is no different.

One of the great Bitcoin unknowns has long been the amounts being produced, or “mined,” in what’s believed to be the top locale for mining the signature cryptocurrency: China’s remote Xinjiang region… The blackout halted no less than one-third of all of Bitcoin’s global computing power.
— https://fortune.com/2021/04/20/bitcoin-mining-coal-china-environment-pollution/

It’s not just the electricity: the sheer consumption that crypto requires is staggering. It’s significally less sustainable, not to mention less valuable, than the least sustainable wealth-indicators that already existed.

Bitcoin mining requires very specific hardware… around 10,000 tons of metal is extracted and transformed each year only for the bitcoin mining industry…
— https://scribe.rip/crypto-lucid/gold-is-now-a-green-bitcoin-d12c439cca0f

The vast majority of those involved are inadequately protected. The ideological decentralisation of ‘control’ merely makes it near-impossible for everyone to benefit from the long-standing systems designed to protect their interests.

US copyright law explicitly states that transfers of copyrights and transfers of copies are legally different…
— Hailey Lennon, https://www.forbes.com/sites/haileylennon/2022/07/05/a-landmark-nft-lawsuit-seeks-to-determine-how-creators-owners-and-investors-can-protect-their-intellectual-property-and-monetize-assets-moving-forward/

The technologies are often touted as revolutionary. They are not.

The Ethereum virtual machine has the equivalent computational power of an Atari 2600… This is regression, not progress.
— Stephen Diehl, https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/web3-bullshit.html

Where we’ve got to is layer upon layer of flawed idology, fanatical greed and shonky technology. It is one of the truly great embarrassments of our times.

Bitcoiners believe the ETH community is the ‘woke’ alternative…
— https://scribe.rip/web3-0-must-be-destroyed-57803329ee47

Ironically, web3 is in part a product of the status quo the fanatics claim to be disrupting. If everyone considered it socialising in a more natural, equal way, it would have been summarily dismissed.

…the present interest in this field is because of a dumb speculative bubble…
— Alex Hern, https://alexhern.substack.com/p/the-nft-letter

It’s an appauling mess. The ideology of freedom being used to make people less free. Far from bypassing the olygopoly of Big Tech, web3 is the antithesis of freedom brought about by pure, exploitative greed.

In cryptocurrency markets, every coinholder has a financial incentive to be their own marketer…
— https://yesterweb.org/no-to-web3/

As Aimee Mann might have put it, it’s not going to stop, til’ we wise up.