The funniest thing about NFTs is all the real companies that fell for that shit

funny thing about the bourgeoisie. All through the 1800s most bourgeois economists were convinced that labor is the source of value in commodities. After all, that is what Adam Smith and David Ricardo thought. Then Marx comes along and takes that fact to its logical conclusion (while adding nuance that it was labor power and not labor, but I digress): Proletarian revolution and the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the abolition of wage labor and the capitalist mode of production. The construction of socialism. So from that point onwards Capitalists began increasingly inventing and embracing subjective (i.e. useless, non-materialist, non-predictive) theories of value, in order to distance "mainstream" economics from Marxist conclusions. This, coupled with the creation of fictitious capital, leads to them huffing their own farts more often than not, especially during recurring economic crises. Hence, nonsense like NFTs.
- oh TIL, guess I should have read A Hacker Manifesto. https://metacpc.org/en/mckenzie-wark/ post-marxist tech thought
  dunno if there's anyone calling themselves a vectoralist though

- i just wish that new technology that came out was cool and good and made our lives better. When I was a kid all the phones went from landlines with boingy cords to wireless! The internet went from annoying dial-up noises that turned off the phone to so fast you could watch a movie faster than you could download a song just 5 years prior. Cars started coming with the unlocking button fob! THE BUTTON YOU PRESS TO UNLOCK YOUR CAR! it was so cool! Now all the technology sucks man. When's the last time some little cool gizmo came out that made our lives better?
  
  recuperation turns radical new things into status quo super-glue as fast as possible

it was a money laundering scheme, just a techbro "innovation" that perfectly copied the role the fine art market plays in haute bourgeois society

No need to use the past tense here. I have a friend who is still slinging NFTs. I haven’t talked with him in years but I stalk him every now and then to check in on him. He invested in bitcoin early on and then dumped it before the pandemic. If he’d held on to it (and then dumped it at just the right time), he’d be a billionaire now. So I think he’s reluctant to let go of NFTs. His big break is just around the corner. And he’s also a millionaire and his parents are hedge fund managers so he wins either way, at least until the revolution comes.

Everything is like this.
Sucking up, lying, putting on a show, and being merciless is the biggest part of how anyone attains a managerial position.
It's not a bug, it's a feature.

This is one of those moments where you realize these companies aren't jumping on these trends things for us, but they're doing it to placate an investor class that doesn't know any better and wants them to be into the new, hot thing among these twitter brained friends.
- yeah I think the execs in these companies saw that people in their rich social circles were messing around with crypto and thought that meant everyone else is doing it and it's the next big thing, for an industry that markets itself as innovative there's a lot of herd mentality in tech

Square Enix selling the rights to Deus Ex and Tomb Raider so they could leverage more capital for crypto investment will never not be funny to me.
- I know we haven't seen anything material manifest yet but: stupid as crypto and NFTs are I maintain this is probably the best thing that could have happened snice Square Enix was probably just gonna sit on the IP and produce shitty mobile titles or something for the next decade anyway. Now....we might actually got something worth checking out.
  
  There's been murmurs of a new Deus Ex title "very very early" in development. Here's hoping something happens and there aren't any dogshit one-time-use microtransactions this time around.

This happens all the time among the MBA crowd. They are afraid of not doing something they think everyone else is doing, even if they don't understand it. The head of my group at work has been talking about AI for months while all of the use cases for it have basically nothing to do with our work outside of writing emails. He did this before with crypto and we have a whole product offering that is useless now because the whole rypto market sublimated overnight.

the funniest thing about nft's is the one nft guy i convinced ghosts are real because of the metaverse
people who buy into nfts will believe literally anything
- TELL US MORE
  
  that's basically the story we were talking about ghosts and eventually he decided because "everything you can conceive of is real" ghosts are real in the metaverse. I then attempted to explain to him what reality is

Really puts into question the capitalist myth of the genius entrepreneur and the idea that these corporate types are rich because they are smart or deserving in some way.
More than that, it calls into question the very concept of economic rationality - that the market behaves rationally based on the rational business decisions of rational actors acting in their own rational self interests.

Did any real company lose money on it? It was free income for the IP holders.
- I feel like square has to lose money on it, they're still dumping money into nft games and haven't released anything yet while it's shown to be wildly unpopular among what has released.
  
  Feel like game stop using their meme stock money to build out an nft marketplace should have bit them way harder in the ass by now too.
- But Elon, shouldn't you be hoppping on this train now with~~ Twitter~~ X?

It's funny "ha-ha" but also funny "damn this sucks dude".
Square Enix, Nickelodeon, Coke, KFC, and more fell for this shit while regular people were laughing about how obvious a con it was.
That's one of the big things I think the NFT craze highlighted. When the suits at MEGACORPS saw a potential way to make money off intellectual property they jumped at it. IP law is really bad, and IP financialization is even worse. They thought they saw a whole new way to create new sort of "premium" product and they all went feral like they were consumed Spirit of Greed from Weird West. They really believe they could make a gazillion dollar from nothing, they either truly thought that or convinced themselves that they did.
Really puts into question the capitalist myth of the genius entrepreneur and the idea that these corporate types are rich because they are smart or deserving in some way.
Big time! It also really highlighted how everyone is despite to get out of the capitalist trap. I really felt kinda bad for regular people who got duped into NFTs and crypto as a whole. I'm not trying to say they are dumb people or have no agency, just saying lots of regular people lost their hard earned cash cause they bet on NFTs and crypto being "the future". Lots of regular people lost cash on the Robinhoods, the Coinbases, and the crypto dotcoms of the world. All of the "smart" "business people" were telling you NFTs and crypto was the future. Just yet another vampire scheme to siphon the lifeforce from working people =,

SBF convinced venture capitalists at sequoia to invest in FTX while playing WoW.
- :theory-gary: it was League of Legends
  
  and he wasn't even winning at the game

Some are stupid enough to drink the coolaid but most actually realise that its stupid but want to cash out on the other stupids then duck out. But the thing is they also have to tell everyone else that its actually really cool and good to get that stupid in to buy the thing.
Square is the funniest example of drinking the coolaid though. I wonder what they're even going to do now.

Also the Metaverse nonsense.

How many of these companies were actually buying NFTs? I thought they were all minting and selling them.

there's degrees to "falling for that shit" though. the cost of minting an NFT is literally negligible for the coca cola company, and the upside is enormous if it becomes an irrational market like bitcoin was. otoh, making a game centered around NFTs is sad as fuck, those people got screwed hard.
also, this is just my perception, but it could've been the other way around even. bitcoin became an irrational market because there was some purity to its conception: it was merely an unfeasible currency theory put into action, so libertarians could masturbate over it. as lousy as the theoretical pinnings of bitcoin are, there were no companies getting in on the action from the getgo. it wasn't meant to be a casino, it just devolved into one. companies getting day one onto the NFT train just made it way more obvious that it was meant to extract profit from compulsive gamblers, and the unsightliness accelerated their demise. it was just too on the nose for most people.

The real kicker is that there are plenty of good theoretical applications for blockchain technology and all we get are shitty investment commodities and grifts
The technology never gets employed to a productive end because the entrepreneurs are in charge of deploying it
- there are plenty of good theoretical applications for blockchain technology
  This is not true. Distributed ledgers allow for consensus without trust. That is it. Every other application of them is just a slower database. So pretty much all they are good for is digital money, but digital money with a hard throughput limit and no backing from any government. The rush to use them for anything and everything violates the most basic principles of good computer engineering, and there's a very good reason no one has created anything worthwhile with them besides money that can be used for crime.
  
  I🖤crime. The Revolution will be funded by and implemented by criminals.
  
  git is a blockchain without a consensus model. Once you remove the artificial scarcity component of blockchains the are extremely useful.
  
  Distributed ledgers allow for consensus without trust. That is it.
  That's like saying asymmetric cryptography only allows for trust irrespective of medium. We still deployed it everywhere because it turns out that's useful in countless ways. Blockchains are also not necessarily public, and generally most of the shit they get from leftists has more to do with stupid wasteful consensus mechanisms than anything to do with the principle of a fancy networked Merkle tree itself.
  In the end it's just another mathematical guarantee and we can do better than "concept is related to bad people and is therefore bad"
  edit : Also worth noting that PKI was a huge gold rush when it started and still to this day lots of companies make utter bank on the sole basis that their certificate chains are trusted by default in your browser
  
  Even this is overselling blockchains, to be honest. There are a variety of far cheaper ways to do distributed trustless consensus, for example CRDTs. You can even run a CRDT-based ledger if you're willing for people to have negative balance. The only thing a blockchain adds is an incredibly expensive clock mechanism to slow the transactions down enough that they can prevent double-spend and enforce positive balances.
- Man what the fuck am I doing on hexbear. Even the most inconsequential disagreements turn into this sort of bullshit, without fail
- name a single application of "blockchain technology" that cannot be done the same or better by other tech

It's not that they didn't know.... It's well...
There was a time when Russia had an Occultic Research Department, and America got one. Did anyone actually believe in Magick? Did anyone wanna take the chance to be the guy who laughed at magick only to see America brought to its knees by something "Close enough" to psychic spies? Well that situation, no matter how unlikely would be worth a demotion.
Eventually it became a contest to see which nation could get the other to overspend their budgets on healing crystals.
Allegedly the CIA got some real psychic shit involved with project Star Gate, but.... ehh.... can anyone other than the CIA get magick to work? No, so....
My point is, it's not that they thought NFTs were this goldmine. They were worried about being left outside the gate if the hype paid off.
Ya gotta remember, these people do not know market trends, they do not know computers. They know "My great grandkid talks about this Video Game thing, maybe we should do a Nintendo? get Atari on the phone!"

I'm sure more of those companies were aware that it's a shitty idea than you're giving credit for. That doesn't matter though, what matters is whether they can convince other people to pay for it before everyone else figures that out. Most marketing is about getting people to buy shit that they wouldn't buy otherwise, this is no different.
- Yea especially with KFC listed as an example.
  They've literally done stupid wasteful shit for decades to get free publicity. To the point they called a chicken sandwich with chicken for bread a double down and started advertising literal slop buckets.
  Anything other than maintaining a decent quality menu.

They saw what happened to cryptocurrency and they were not willing to pass on the next new thing called "crypto" using a similar technology. With bitcoin producing results many tens of thousands of percent in increased value it was something they were all willing to commit to.
Had cryptocurrency not happened the NFT concept simply wouldn't have drawn the interest it did.
- Anyone who wants to make their money back, I can sell you some cryptonight. It's based on DLT and lets you exclusively own some night time. If my sources are right, it's about to take off big. Especially if you're in the northern hemisphere—if you buy now, you can sell it to Australians straight after for more than you paid because their nights are getting shorter while yours are getting longer. You don't want to miss out, do you?
- Oh I'm not. I'm just saying that they wouldn't be popular at all without the fomo that bitcoin has created. Truly just a 10k investment in bitcoin, which would be peanuts to some of these millionaires, would have resulted in billions in return. They know that and do feel like they missed out so their reaction to nfts is specifically tied too bitcoin's success (in increasing in value) itself.

I sometimes think that FOMO in the tech world is a real fear that keeps these tech execs up at night. Even if it was obvious dumb bullshit I think a lot of these guys have seen so many tech empires rise and fall so rapidly to the point they're barely even remembered and I think there's a fear that they could be the next short sighted dummy who writes off the new technology as a fad and completely misses out on the next game changer.

They saw the opportunity to make a quick buck and went for it.

Laugh all you like, but there's money to be made and they won't stop until you pay for memes.
- yeah but I'm never going to pay for memes
  
  We will seize the memes of production!

What's just as funny as that they're now falling for the AI scam
- They do love their short-term wins that bite them in the ass long-term.

Would anyone care to explain the difference between NFTs and crypto? Or more specifically, why crypto still has some following since both are the same grift.
- If you wanna get precise, NFTs are crypto that you can't use to buy anything. Of course, in real life you can hardly use crypto to buy anything either, so it's all just variations on the tulip bulb.
- An NFT is a receipt in crypto. Instead of an entry to the block chain that says -1 coin for you +1 for me, you have an entry that says someone paid for 'https://hexbear.net/PPB'. And its all text, just the URL. If the URL becomes invalid
- To put it simply, NFTs are crypto that hav a URL to some other thing attached to them.
  As soon as the site that hosts bored ape images goes down, the ape people will have a bunch of 404 errors that cost them tens of thousands of dollars.
- an nft is someone using crypto to write on a ledger that you own a link to something like an image. basically if you paid me $10 to write down on a piece of paper that you owned the mona lisa that would be an analogue nft. It's non fungible because if I wrote down that you owned the mona lisa and also that you owned a portrait of the artist as a young man each note would refer to you owning the specific painting
  cryptocurrency is the answer to the question what if you wanted to buy gold but were also an idiot