UPDATE: Someone on Reddit pointed out that I had gotten the rules to Bitcoin Numberwang wrong in this rant. That has now been corrected. I apologize for overestimating the incompetence of the Bitcoin community. (Which is not a sentence I ever expected to have cause to type, but here we are.)
Some of you who’ve been exposed to social media in the last week or so may have noticed a new trend where the usual cryptocurrency assholes are trying to recruit artists into their bullshit. And, tragically, a lot are falling for it…including some who should really know better.
Of course, if you have no idea what an NFT is, you might not understand why this is such a unique waste of everything. So let’s dive in and piece together what the fuck happening this time in the world of coinasses. (There’s a tl;dr at the end of the post, don’t worry.)
First off, let’s make sure we’re on the same page as far as terminology, because I’ve noticed a lot of cryptocurrency advocates don’t understand the first goddamn thing about the technology.
Blockchains are chunks of a really long list, in the case the ledger. In cryptocurrency, a ledger includes everything that’s been done using that specific cryptocurrency since it was first dreamed up. Because of how much space that would take up in a functional financial system, the chain gets broken into the aforementioned blocks. Each block begins with the hash of the previous block, hence the “chain”.
Or, in other words:
The thing is, given the fact that cryptocurrency is intended to be decentralized, the consensus problem has to be solved: how do you get everyone to agree on which of the new blocks is the real one? Naturally, the broader cryptocurrency community has largely settled on the most wasteful method possible: proof of work.
Let’s look at Bitcoin to see what that means. The short version is that new coins are created (“mined”) when a node manages to construct a block from unprocessed transactions using a randomly guessed number (a cryptographic nonce, essentially). If that random number, when hashed with the block, produces a number less than or equal to a given threshold, then that’s Numberwang! If the guess is wrong, then all the electricity used to generate that random number and hash the resulting block goes to waste. And that’s a lot of energy being wasted on a glorified guessing game.
This isn’t an invite to claim “but we’ll get clean energy to use it soon” or “but other stuff is even a bigger waste”, because A: no, you won’t; B: no, it isn’t; and C through Z: nobody cares, go fuck yourself.
So now that we’ve gained some basic understanding of how the Bitcoin sausage is made, the question is: what the fuck is an NFT?
Short version: what if Bitcoin but artwork.
Longer version: Non-fungible tokens are a way to prove “ownership” of a digital asset. The idea is that if you want to buy the “original” for a piece of digital art, whether because your e-penis is too small or because you actually want to support the artist, you would actually buy the NFT. Ownership of the NFT is tracked on the blockchain…you know, that word that makes normal people’s eyes glaze over?
The thing is, all you’re getting from buying an NFT is bragging rights among people who think NFTs matter, and the warm fuzzy feeling of supporting the artist. Art forgery never stopped being a thing that exists, and that was back when it took more work than just typing in “cp realart.png realfakeart.png”. Very few people are actually going to care if the digital art they’re showing off is the “original”, and speaking in my capacity as a furry I can assure you there are plenty of far less environmentally catastrofuckic ways to support artists. Buying prints or merchandise, Patreon accounts, throwing money at them via Twitch and letting Amazon suck up 25-40% of it, or literally paying them to draw something for you.
The only advantage an NFT offers is that. if one were to resell it, the artist would get a cut. Which seems pretty big, except for the fact that we still haven’t addressed the problem of why someone would buy an NFT in the first place. If all you care about is the bragging rights, or if you want to talk about how awesome you are for supporting an artist, you can just pay the artist to make what you want them to. Hell, they’d probably get more money that way than whatever they’d get from you selling the NFT. The fame is attached to the artist as much as the original piece, after all. Owning a Leonardo da Vinci painting would still still worth plenty of bragging rights even if it wasn’t the Mona Lisa, and some of the most famous and powerful people of the Italian Renaissance era are famous in part for how much they paid artists to create stuff.
There’s no reason to buy an NFT other than to treat art like yet another fucking commodity, and there’s no reason for an artist to sell an NFT other than to admit they suck at making money off their art in ways that don’t destroy the planet. Which brings us to that tl;dr I promised:
