NFTs aren't art -- they're just the Cult of Crypto's latest scam

Conversation with media analyst Dan Olson. Some aren't going to like it, but he makes some salient observations.

snip

If it looks like a scam, it's probably a scam.

Cryptocurrency and its ugly art spin-off, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), are perhaps the 21st century's greatest example of that eternal principle.

But don't try saying that to anyone who's been sucked into the Cult of Crypto, because the next hour — or five!— of your life is about to be spent buried in technobabble jargon to make this particular form of tulip-trading sound like it's simply mathematics on a plane too high for your small brain to comprehend.

snip (from the interview)

"The biggest problem that's been plaguing crypto since 2009 has been a lack of things to use it on and a lack of respectability that comes out of that. It's like, "nah, it's not a currency. You don't use it to buy and sell stuff." Crypto has a long history of not being spendable. There's nothing that you can actually use it on.

So NFTs effectively get built as a thing to spend crypto on. The two end up being unextractable from one another. NFTs, they're literally built on top of cryptocurrency. They literally share the same technological foundation. NFTs were basically these goods being wheeled into existence in order to provide something crypto can be spent on."

Compares to MLM schemes:

snip

"The product exists to sell the culture and the culture exists to get people to buy into the ecosystem and buy the starter pack and sign up and develop a downstream and recruit, recruit, recruit.

I think people accurately recognize that just by watching people get involved in crypto. You watch an artist who starts selling NFTs, and over the course of months, their artwork itself shifts and it starts becoming more and more about crypto itself. We see those shifts in the people around us and the people who get involved in it, it's like it becomes the singular thing that they talk about. It very much mirrors the same cultural trajectory of somebody getting involved in multi-level marketing."

https://www.salon.com/2022/02/16/nfts-arent-art--theyre-just-the-of-cryptos-latest-scam/


My take: I don't claim to be an expert on the subject, but if it walks like a duck ...
When a friend who gets involved with every scheme from MLM to an EST-spinoff self-improvement to get rich program got into Crypto I thought here we go again.