“Doing this only excuses the messaging that we have been seeing everywhere we look … that crypto is an ‘investment’, or the future of money, or the democratized version of finance that will finally give the average person a fair shake.”
“Doing this only excuses the messaging that we have been seeing everywhere we look … that crypto is an ‘investment’, or the future of money, or the democratized version of finance that will finally give the average person a fair shake.”
“The less optimistic possibility is that financial engineering is all crypto can do. It may make money transfers more efficient, maybe it makes collecting royalties quicker and more transparent…. Those are all great, valid use cases. But they are narrow in scope: they were already financial transactions.”
“When you think about it, OpenSea would actually be much ‘better’ in the immediate sense if all the web3 parts were gone. … However, if they had built a platform to buy and sell images that wasn’t nominally based on crypto … I don’t think it would have taken off because this is a gold rush.”
“Tether’s Chinese investments and crypto-backed loans are potentially significant. … [I]f those loans fail, even a small percentage of them, one Tether would become worth less than $1. Any investors holding Tethers would then have an incentive to redeem them; if others did it first, the money could dry up. The bank run would be on.”
“I’m not sure this networked and weaponized absurdity is the product of ‘vengeful nihilism’ because I’m not sure the message is that ‘lol nothing matters.’ To me, the message is similar to that of any protest: We matter. And you’re going to listen to us.”
Bonus quote: “What you are looking at is an NFT from the popular artist Beeple of a well-endowed Musk walking a version of the Doge meme (a Shiba Inu). It is selling for a very specific six-figure sum that is a combination of the numbers 69 (hehe sex!) and 420 (blaze it!).”
“On this half-empty passenger ship with its swirling ’80s carpets right out of The Shining, there is very little sober talk of blockchain’s obstacles or limitations. … Instead, the core and only existential question is which of the various coins and ICOs (initial coin offerings) will make you the richest the fastest before dawn.”
Bonus quote: “John McAfee has never been convicted of rape and murder, but — crucially — not in the same way that you or I have never been convicted of rape or murder.”