#nfts — Public Fediverse posts

UPDATE Senior Mass

Berlin, Samstag, 20. Juni um 13:00 MESZ

UPDATE

https://berlin.social/@rad_ts/116776936451859032

Es gibt eine amtliche Warnung für Berlin vor extremer Hitze. Wir machen deshalb maximal eine symbolische Fahrt zum nächsten schattigen Ort.
Eine längere SeniorMass holen wir nach.
Damit unterstreichen wir unsere Forderung nach Entsiegelung und mehr Straßengrün.
#fahrraddemo #Berlin

START 13:00 Wir versammeln uns an der Yorckstr. Ecke Katzlerstr. (S Yorckstr , U7 Yorckstr, Bus M19)

Wir radeln gemeinsam in gemütlichem Tempo und mit extra viel Sicherheitsabstand über den Ku'damm und wieder zurück zum Start. Wir sind eine bunte Truppe von aktuellen und zukünftigen Senior*innen, unseren Familien und Friends. Wir radeln auf verschiedensten Rädern: auf Zweirädern, Dreirädern und in Rikschas. Die Polizei sichert die Straßen für uns ab.

Alle sind herzlich eingeladen!

ZWISCHENKUNDGEBUNG: Fasanenplatz

ABSCHLUSS ca.15:00: Yorckstr. Ecke Katzlerstr. (S1 Yorckstr , U7 Yorckstr, Bus M19)

Länge der Strecke: ca. 10km

Mehr Info hier

Senior Mass ist eine Veranstaltung von Changing Cities und wird unterstützt von: Omas for Future, fLotte und fLotte Sozial, VCD, VCD Nordost, adfc Schöneberg, adfc Tempelhof, Ökumenische Umweltgruppe Lichtenrade, Behinderten- und Rehabilitations- Sportverband, Radeln ohne Alter.

Schirmherrin: Dota Kehr

Die Aktion wird gefördert von: Stiftung Berliner Leben

Wikipedia:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_Mass

https://fahrradtermine-berlin.de/event/update-senior-mass

Come one, come all, buy my NFCs before they run out!

https://piefed.social/c/historymemes/p/2100579/come-one-come-all-buy-my-nfcs-before-they-run-out

Come one, come all, buy my NFCs before they run out!

https://piefed.social/c/roughromanmemes/p/2100578/come-one-come-all-buy-my-nfcs-before-they-run-out

From Tulips to NFTs: The Long, Expensive History of Human Hype

A Satire of Tulip Mania by Jan Brueghel the Younger, c. 1640. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Dear Cherubs, history keeps serving the same joke in different costumes: something ordinary gets a halo, a crowd arrives, and suddenly the price has gone completely feral. Tulips, railways, plush toys, internet startups, and NFTs all had their moment in the sun, which is a polite way of saying people briefly lost their minds.

THE ORIGINAL HYPE CYCLE

Tulip Mania in the Dutch Republic peaked around 1637, when rare bulbs became status symbols and speculation outran common sense. Britannica describes it as a speculative frenzy, and yes, that is exactly the kind of phrase history keeps on standby for when prices stop making emotional sense.

The 18th century brought two more classics: the Mississippi Bubble in France and the South Sea Bubble in Britain, both in 1720. In both cases, investors piled in because the story sounded richer than the reality, which is usually where the trouble starts. Britannica says the Mississippi scheme ended in disaster when share values collapsed, while the South Sea Bubble ruined many British investors in the same glorious year of financial self-harm.

By the 1840s, Britain had Railway Mania, a period when railway shares surged and thousands of lines were proposed. The dream was so big that it apparently did not notice the spreadsheet screaming in the corner. According to RailwayMania.co.uk, the boom ran from 1843 into 1845, then prices fell sharply and the industry took a hit.

MODERN REMIX

Fast-forward to the late 20th century and you get Pet Rocks and Beanie Babies, the retail equivalent of “wait, people paid how much for that?” The Washington Post reported that Pet Rocks sold 1.5 million units at $3.95 each, while History.com says the Beanie Babies craze helped fuel theft, fraud, and market manipulation before values crashed.

Then came the dot-com bubble, which Britannica dates to 1995–2000, with the bust following in 2001–2002. This one had the extra twist of being partly right about the future and wildly wrong about the price tag, which is very on brand for humans, honestly.

And then, of course, NFTs. Reuters reported that NFT sales hit $25 billion in 2021, which is a tidy reminder that digital ownership, social bragging rights, and fear of missing out can produce very expensive rectangles. As noted by thisclaimer.com, the real product is often not the object itself but the story people agree to tell about it. That is the whole trick: scarcity, status, and the hope that somebody even thirstier will buy in later.

So yes, the names change, the packaging changes, and the century changes. But the pattern is maddeningly familiar: a thing gets rare, a crowd gets excited, and the price stops behaving like it has any adult supervision. That is the bubble, plain and simple. Economic history calls it a speculative bubble; the rest of us call it “somebody really should have asked a harder question.”

Britannica — https://www.britannica.com/money/Tulip-Mania
Britannica — https://www.britannica.com/money/Mississippi-Bubble
Britannica — https://www.britannica.com/money/South-Sea-Bubble
Railway Mania — https://www.railwaymania.co.uk/
The Washington Post — https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/04/01/pet-rock-inventor-gary-dahl-dies-at-78/
History.com — https://www.history.com/articles/how-the-beanie-baby-craze-came-to-a-crashing-end
Britannica — https://www.britannica.com/money/dot-com-bubble
Reuters — https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/nft-sales-hit-25-billion-2021-growth-shows-signs-slowing-2022-01-10/
thisclaimer.com — https://thisclaimer.com

The Thisclaimer logo blends a classic warning symbol with a brain icon to represent critical thinking, curiosity, and thoughtful disclaimers. #beanieBabies #dotComBubble #marketMania #mississippiBubble #nfts #petRock #railwayMania #southSeaBubble #speculativeBubbles #tulipMania #viral

@caohuak @silverpill Well, to be honest, that crypto stuff doesn't have its bad rep entirely undeservedly. It appears to be used as a cash grab or for get-rick-quick schemes more often than not.

The massive gambling with the big cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ethereum that causes both to be highly volatile.

Gigantic Ethereum mining farms with countless high-end graphics cards that eat up more electricity than a bigger town, often even fossil or nuclear energy because there simply isn't enough renewable energy available where they're located.

NFT hypes. Masses of NFTs that were procedurally generated and sold for insane amounts of money. See Bored Apes. They've made a few people very rich with next to zero effort. Others have lost a lot of money because these NFTs are literally absolutely worthless today.

And this is a field that I'm pretty familiar with: The Metaverse. Mind you, I'm not talking about Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads. That isn't the Metaverse. I'm not talking about "the Metaverse" a.k.a. "the Meta Metaverse" a.k.a. "the Facebook Metaverse" a.k.a. "Zuckerberg's Metaverse" either which, by the way, is actually named Horizon.

No, I'm talking about cryptobros jumping upon the Metaverse bandwagon, hoping to squeeze some money out of it.

The blueprint of this all has to be a virtual world named Decentraland which was opened in February, 2020, just in time for the COVID-19 pandemic that caused real-life social interaction to grind to a complete halt and made virtual worlds the more popular.

In fact, it was a crypto platform before it became a virtual world. In 2017 already, its own cryptocurrency MANA, which is on the Ethereum blockchain, was first traded to raise money to get the world itself started. And even as a virtual world, it's a crypto platform because Decentraland is pretty much all about minting and selling NFTs.

Part of its concept is that deeds to parcels of land are minted as NFTs and then sold. And these parcels aren't even that big. Better yet, they were sold before they even existed as actual virtual land. Basically, Decentraland sold deeds to something that they yet had to make. But they got enough customers to bite, including big fashion brands, but also real-estate companies that scooped up land to sell it with a big profit.

Users, especially right-wing extremists, created avatars with slurs for names just to mint them as NFTs and sell them for a fortune. Nothing was done against it. I mean, the more NFTs were sold for MANA, the more MANA was traded, the more volatile it became, the higher profits one could make by trading it.

Decentraland advertises itself as "the first decentralised Metaverse". This is nonsense. Yes, it's "decentralised" in the sense that MANA is not running on the Bitcoin blockchain. Yes, it's also "decentralised" in the sense of being governed by a DAO.

But the virtual world system itself is a centralised, monolithic silo owned and operated by one and the same entity. The actual "first decentralised Metaverse" is made up of the worlds based on OpenSimulator from as early as 2007. This, by the way, is where I regularly am.

It's every bit as decentralised as any Fediverse software out there. As in, you can have an avatar in one world and teleport to another world, on another server, under another domain, owned and operated by other people, appearance, inventory and all. As in, the five developers, including only one actual coder, don't own anything beyond their own patches of land.

Another aspect that makes blatantly clear just how Decentraland is a crypto cash grab more than anything else: The actual world itself is buggy as hell. And precious little is done to fix these bugs. In fact, they don't even seem to matter because Decentraland is not about spending time in-world, which is why it's rather deserted and empty, but about minting, selling and buying NFTs.

As COVID brought with itself a virtual world boom from which even Second Life could profit, crypto-based virtual world started spreading. For example, The Sandbox had already been bought out, and it came back in March as a crypto-based world.

Hundreds of virtual worlds were at least announced in the early 2020s, all copying Decentraland's concept of minting deeds to virtual land as NFTs, backed by nothing more than an announcement and a promise, before even getting started with the actual virtual world. The latter was to be quickly and cheaply cobbled together using some 3-D game engine like Unity or Unreal Engine, neither of which is really fit for virtual worlds in which users can build stuff.

The best outcome was an actual virtual world which was barely in a functional state. It only existed for there to be something backing the NFTs. Oftentimes, the financial assets behind the world were kept in cryptocurrencies, hoping that they rise in value which would create more financial assets out of nothing. But when the cryptocurrency crashed, it became impossible to pay for the operation of the world or whatever employees it had. Crypto crashes kept killing crypto-based worlds left and right. It didn't help that most crypto-based virtual worlds used existing cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin.

In many other cases, however, there never was an actual virtual world to begin with. They never got it running. So their customers were sitting their with their expensive NFT land deeds and waiting for the actual land to be made. The longer it took for an announced virtual world to materialise, the harder it got to sell more NFT land deeds because the more unlikely it became that the actual land would ever exist. If plummeting land sales didn't put an end to the endeavour, the next crypto crash did.

I think there were even scammers among these cryptobros. They, too, announced a hot new crypto-based virtual world. They, too, started selling land deeds as NFTs. But they never had the intention to actually create and launch a virtual world. They sold shit-tons of NFTs for shit-tons of crypto money. Then they waited for the cryptocurrency to soar. If they were smart, they traded it all for millions in fiat money and made away with it to someplace offshore. If they weren't, if they wanted to keep on gambling, they, too, lost almost everything in a crypto crash.

Lastly: Around 2021/2022, many cryptobros staunchly insisted in virtual worlds absolutely requiring a blockchain, a cryptocurrency and NFTs for everything. According to them, it's technologically absolutely impossible to build virtual worlds without even only one of these. This was to keep people from getting interested (and invested) in non-crypto virtual worlds.

As a matter of fact, however, there are lots of virtual worlds that don't use a blockchain, that don't have a cryptocurrency, that don't have NFTs for anything. Second Life doesn't, and it never has since its launch in 2002. And Second Life still generates more revenue per user and month than Facebook, legally even.

OpenSim doesn't anywhere. Sansar didn't. High Fidelity didn't. Vircadia doesn't. Overte doesn't. Roblox doesn't. VRChat doesn't. Rec Room didn't. (Formerly Mozilla) Hubs doesn't. Horizon doesn't. Just to name a few. Some of these don't have any in-world payment system at all.

All these blatant lies, the total neglect of the actual virtual worlds and their misuse as a money printer don't really make me trust in crypto. Neither do the rampant gambling and the volatility.

Oh, and don't get me started about land prices in Decentraland vs Second Life vs OpenSim.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #VirtualWorlds #Metaverse #TheMetaverse #Decentraland #TheSandbox #Blockchain #Crypto #Cryptocurrency #Cryptocurrencies #NFT #NFTs #Cryptobros #Cryptomining #CryptoScam #CryptoCrash #NFTCrash