Either that or he’ll end up dumping the lot, unused, in Thailand.

bad_hair_day wrote:

GooberTheHat wrote:

Don't you use currency to buy stuff? I cannot imagine many people actually spending the things when you could just hodl and double your money (or not).

Seems the start of something bigger if Elon is getting involved. The CNN clip mentions buying Teslas with Bitcoins.

But who is going to chuck 3 bitcoin at a Tesla today, when it might only cost you 2 tomorrow, or maybe 20,000 in a week? I see it's volatility as a big weakness.

I don’t think it will replace currency. It will supplement real world commodities. There’s already talk of it being a replacement for gold.

Yossarian wrote:

bad_hair_day wrote:

Joking aside, isn’t it more a public currency not controlled by centralised banking cartels?

A what now?

JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, don’t those kind of big boy institutions have a hold on the money?

Clearly not clued up as you guys, which is why there’s a question mark in my posts. x

The only thing banks are allowed to do in terms of creating money is that they are allowed to essentially take money from the future that doesn't exist yet and give it to you in the present when you take out a loan as banks are not required to hold the complete value of a loan in reserve when they add the numbers to your account balance.

If you’re borrowing then you’re at the mercy of the lender, whether that’s a bank lending you pounds or a libertarian dudebro with a neckbeard and a fedora lending you bitcoin.

Gold as Rouj mentioned would definitely be the closest comparison for me.

Both have a use beyond investment but the price and demand isn't dictated by the use.
Both can be used as currency but rarely and to the discretion of the receiver.
Both cross national lines and aren't tied to one government (although that is somewhat of a grey area with gold).

Still, I guess laundering bitcoin wealth via Tesla car purchases and selling them on before they explode could be attractive to someone.

LivDiv wrote:

to the discretion of the receiver.

Apparently here in Ireland, nobody is obliged to accept "legal tender" in the form of cash. Some businesses are refusing cash because of covid and there's nothing we can do about it, payments must be made by card.

Refusing a sale is one thing but a blanket ban on cash just seems to undermine the point of it.

I haven’t looked in this thread before, but it seems like the right place to talk about cryptoart and NFTs.

Obvious bullshit first: The cryptoart scene is full of shysters and arseholes. It’s built on shaky foundations and I don’t like it one little bit. Obscene environmental impact thanks to the blockchain’s proof of work requirements, shitty quality of ‘art’, massive inequality/inaccessibility, questionable gatekeepers, old man shouts at cloud, etc.

Something I saw this morning raised a question. A Twitter bot that’s out there minting NFTs on demand for tweets. The key part being for other people’s tweets. For content that doesn’t belong to the person registering proof of ownership.

Which made me realise: Anybody can mint a token for any piece of digital content. Whether they own it or not. So this system of recording ownership and originality is fundamentally fucking broken, right? I could tokenise Yoss’s last post up there and sell ‘ownership’ of it to the highest bidder. Yoss can’t stop me.

I must have missed something. What have I missed?

Fuck it, maybe I’ve had a million dollar idea there. Maybe I can go tokenise one of Elon Musk’s stupid tweets and auction it off at Christie’s.

Roujin wrote:

poprock wrote:

What have I missed?

The part where these tokens don't have any use or value outside of bragging rights for techbros who want to own "the original" or "the one authenticated" piece of a particular digital artwork. Oh wow you own an original pepe? Amazing dude, that's rad, for some reason.  It's a dumpster fire system that doesn't mean anything.  Once the environmental stats came out on how much energy mining the NFTS and then running the blockchain ledgers consumes, it was curtains and everyone apart from total bastards or teenagers with no world view still hanging on.

I may have this wrong, but I couldnt really understand why someone would want to buy the "original" tweet. And yet, I have an early pressing of Master of Puppets Vinyl signed by Members of Metallica (Kirk & James fwiw) which apparently has decent value. Its not really that different is it? If you are of a digital generation it probably makes more sense.

Stupid people will always find ways to waste money.

In terms of value they are worth what someone will pay for it.
That is generally dictated by the name attached to it over quality or time and resource spent.
In that regard it really is not that different to the real art world.
Similar for the walled off community of selected sellers. Sure you can try and sell anything you paint but in reality you need to be selected by the art world to make the bug bucks.

The environment side of things is fucked up but dwarfed by crypto surely, which is just as vague in value being worth nothing or everything depending on what people will pay.

I cant say I'm into cryptoart but its problems are shared ones.