A Developer's Scathing Critique of the NFT Hype
Description
A multi-part, rant-style meme with a bold, black headline on a white background that reads, 'STOP DOING NFTs'. The image lists several arguments against NFTs, starting with '- JPEGS WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO COST MONEY' and criticizing blockchain's lack of real-world use cases beyond hacking. It sarcastically compares NFT ownership to 'MONOPOLY and FANTASY FOOTBALL and MMORPG OUTFITS' and mocks a hypothetical transaction for a 'LIMITED-EDITION JPEG'. Below this, a section reads, 'LOOK at what Cryptominers have been demanding your Respect for all this time, with all the hashing algorithms we built for them:'. This introduces three images: one depicting virtual properties mapped to real-world houses, another showing cartoonish NFT art (similar to CryptoKitties), and a third of a man servicing a cryptocurrency mining rig, all captioned with '??????????'. The meme concludes with the phrases, '"Hello I would like to own the abstract concept of this GIF and resell it at a profit"' and the punchline, 'They have played us for absolute fools'. The meme channels the frustration of software engineers who see the immense computational power and cryptographic innovation of blockchain being used for what they perceive as frivolous, absurd, and valueless applications. It's a direct critique of the speculative bubble and the disconnect between the technology's potential and its application in the NFT space
Comments
18Comment deleted
An NFT is just a pointer to a URL, which makes it the most expensive, non-fungible 404 error in history
Spent years ripping out global locks to make our systems scale, and along comes NFTs saying: “What if the lock cost $300 in gas, burned a megawatt, and protected… a JPEG?”
We spent a decade building distributed consensus algorithms just to discover the hardest problem in computer science is still convincing VCs that a pointer to a JPEG isn't a business model
After years of optimizing hash functions for distributed systems and cryptographic security, we finally found the killer app: convincing people to pay gas fees higher than AWS Lambda costs just to mint a JPEG they could've right-clicked. It's like we built a globally distributed, energy-intensive database with eventual consistency guarantees... to solve a problem that didn't exist. At least when we over-engineer microservices, we can blame Conway's Law - but this? This is just proof-of-work proving we'll work really hard to avoid admitting we built a solution in search of a problem
We burned megawatts for Byzantine consensus and Merkle proofs to own a mutable URI to a JPEG - the link 404s, but the receipt is immutably yours
We spent a decade optimizing PoW hash throughput to anchor a JSON that points to a JPEG on S3 and call it ownership - five nines of immutability, zero nines of semantics
Blockchain perfected Byzantine fault tolerance for the ages - turns out the killer app was auctioning JPEGs with worse UX than eBay
Jeez, those miners and “artists”. This reminds me of the artist who has recently sold the air, as a sculpture) Comment deleted
I am pretty sure most deals in this stuff are just money laundering, pure and simple. Comment deleted
That makes some perfect sense) have never thought about that, but seems like you’ve got the point) Comment deleted
https://t.me/hacker_news_feed/75842 Comment deleted
Money is abstract. Dollars on you saving account even don’t exist, they are just piece of data in bank database. So shut up and admit. Comment deleted
At least those dollars don't need to generate an entire country's worth of carbon emissions to be valuable Comment deleted
Actually it do because you have to produce a bunch of goods to pay all those bankers who process your payments. Comment deleted
in case you haven't caught this: payment fees are minimal when talking about actual money. And bankers mostly live off of loans, not transaction fees. Additionally, even if the transaction fee would be some incredibly high number, like 10%, assuming a transaction of 1000€, you won't even come close to the amount of carbon released by mining one block of Bitcoin, even if you spent all of the money purely on stuff to burn. Comment deleted
What is NFT? Comment deleted
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token Comment deleted
Nice, ty Comment deleted