I was specifically referring to big artists not wanting to create the base materials for the procedurally generated NF Ts the various groups have. It's super time consuming and unengaging and none of those groups ever seem to actually credit their source in any meaningful way.
In general, the only people who can get into NF Ts on any sort of scale already have money because it costs money to mint them.
Also need to add, that for videogames this is already the case. Read Steam's Terms of Service, or that of any digital platform. You don't own the software. You own a license to access it.
NF Ts would just be a different medium to the same thing.
The real way you can tell the NF Ts are almost completely worthless for artists? Furries, who will pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars for commissions and love to have avatars of their fursonas haven't touched it.
The meme NF Ts from the first wave were mostly bought up by one specific guy who's gone quiet since, the artists who put their own stuff up rarely go anywhere and generally lose money, and the market is rampant with massive amounts of art theft, with multiple copies of some pieces on the various different sites, with places like Opensea actively aiding and abetting in the art theft. Anyone who seriously thinks it's good for artists is in severe denial or is a straight up idiot.
I've seen some stories around that make it pretty obvious that the NFT people aren't actually hiring freelance artists, they're hiring the companies that make art for ads and clipart and stuff and paying bottom of the barrel prices. At least some of them are probably supposed to be the "proof of effort" stuff to show that it's being worked on, but the NFT idiots didn't realize that and just paid for and used them without realizing they're unfinished.
Edited by Zendervai on Jan 25th 2022 at 8:51:26 AM
Funny thing: after this vid I tried to download a crypto wallet by curiosity, just to see how it worked (Monero GUI it’s called), but my antivirus immediately screamed at me to shut this fucking thing down if I knew what was good for my computer.
So yeah, I’m not gonna push the experiment further lol.
(also the wallet weighed 90GB, holy shit)
Edited by Lyendith on Jan 26th 2022 at 2:10:20 PM
It's actually fairly common because of the included crypto miner, who gets flagged because by nature of how cryptomining is done it asks for a ton of weird access permissions from your PC. And a lot of Crypto miner malware also exists (Coz of course you'd want to turn a botnet into a bunch of cryptominers)
As noted, it also came out at a very precise moment when NF Ts and crypto were facing a crash. Really hit a sweet zeitgeist.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."It's also the definitive documentary on cryptocurrency and NF Ts at the moment. The are few, if any available videos that are as comprehensive and none that have the same level of production value.
Also it really highlights Dan's ability to pace a video.
Dan talks on twitter on the Crypto world's reaction to his video
I haven't felt the need to reply to much of anything because the crypto ecosystem's reality speaks for itself.
The most pointed of these criticisms is the absence of positives. Why not draw attention to the things that *are* to some degree working and not complete trash fires?
In an earlier, much more fractured draft that was a lot of what became Chapter 11, and it ultimately got cut down into just talking briefly about Hic Et Nunc.
Big reason for that is just boring realities of writing: the flow just wasn't working, I couldn't find the structure.
Then in taking a critical look at this part of the script that already wasn't working I admitted to myself that it was just a faux-centrist diplomatic gesture to make a hypothetical pro-crypto viewer less mad, and in doing so distracted from the forest by staring at trees.
Edited by Ghilz on Feb 2nd 2022 at 12:22:23 PM
I was wondering if any countries had taken steps to regulate this shit, maybe even ban it, and then I stumbled an articled mentioning that China had done exactly that a few months ago, dismantling 26 crypto farms in the Sichuan region in the process. India is planning to do the same, with both countries supposedly aiming at creating their own digital currencies.
So things are taking an interesting turn.
Quoting the article:
"In late 2017, cryptocurrency exchange platformes − which centralized 93% of the world’s bitcoin transactions in 2016 − were banned on Chinese territory. A few months later, the Central Bank announced the blocking of all cryptocurrency exchange websites (including foreign ones) on the Chinese web. In 2021, it all accelerated: the government forbid… forbade? for… banned financial institutions from proposing cryptocurrency-related services. In June, twety-six bitcoin "farms", deemed to consume too much energy, were closed in Sichuan. Cryptocurrency transactions and "mining" activities were finally declared illegal in September and October 2021.
Thus, in just a few years, China, which was a bitcoin heaven, became an existential threat to it. Other countries could follow its example. India apparently intends to ban transactions and payments in cryptocurrencies, while tolerating their possession as assets, like gold or financial assets. With a similar objective to China: launching an Indian digital currency. In January 21, the Russian Central Bank announced its plan to ban cryptocurrencies."
Now I’m not sure if the remaining farms on Chinese soil are still… "usable" from abroad even if cryptos themselves are banned in China?
Edited by Lyendith on Feb 2nd 2022 at 9:47:22 PM
Seems weird that the advice is "take all the steps that are materially indistinguishable from money laundering" but maybe that's just my lack of an appropriate grindset speaking.
That reminds me of something. One trap that people fall into is assuming that all of the seeming true believers are actually in on the scam and are just trying to get other people hooked on it too.
Except that a lot of people will refuse to admit that being scammed is even possible and they'll kind of...reorient their worldview to assume that their experiences are normal and expected.
"Well of course you have to do this ludicrously complicated and absurdly counter-intuitive thing, that's what I do, and I can't admit to myself that I may have made a mistake."
The part that makes it sad and disturbing is that people who fall into that lose all perspective. Humans are, effectively, designed to normalize whatever situation they're in. It's not really that functional (there's a minimum level of comfort and security that we need for it to work right), but it means that people will get these insane mindsets built around spending thousands on crypto and never ever taking any of it out (because it could always go up more tomorrow, right?), with truly bizarre and excessively convoluted rituals to make it work properly...and they'll have no idea that the way they're acting is so strange. Their brains just...replaced the concept of normal for them and they refuse to really think about it.

You say that, but there was at least one controversy about some farily big NSFW artist deciding to sell NFTs despite already making money hand over fist.
Which is actually not uncommon, as far as I can tell - whatever artists are pushing NFTs are usually also not the ones hurting for money in the first place, while smaller ones are the ones getting their art stolen and "mined".
Almost as if the whole "NFTs will help artists" thing was utter bullshit from the start.
Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Jan 24th 2022 at 4:55:17 PM
We learn from history that we do not learn from history