I've on my socials pretty thoroughly expounded on my position on NFTs and the Cryptocurrencies.
These are technological solutions in search of problems.
Do I really need to explain either concept? Maybe there's one person who needs the cliff-notes; The blockchain is both a system of validating transactions and also kind of a cloud storage, but it's way better at the former than the latter. Just think about a bunch of computers keeping full copies of a database, and whenever something needs to change, all of those computers need to agree that the the change is legit. Non-fungible Tokens and Cryptocurrencies are built on top of blockchains. It is the data that goes into the database. It's resistant to man-in-the-middle attacks but those are relatively rare. And now I've given you a one paragraph version of Folding Ideas' Line Goes Up. It's a good video. You should watch it.
Blockchain technology is interesting but has as of yet only really been great for the grifter; Do you want to run a ponzi scheme without running a ponzi scheme? Invent your own crypto coin. Do you want to part some easy marks from their money? Mint some NFTs. You can even set the system up so the minting cost is bore entirely by the buyer.
And just to be clear, I say 'easy marks' but often there are sincere investors looking to expand their personal portfolios and they just don't know any better. These folks can sometimes be very annoying and very over-zealous but truly, they do not deserve to be scammed like this.
Now, I'm hesistant to put Web3 as a concept in with NFTs and Crypto, mostly because while NFT and Crypto follow the philosophy of decentralization, rather than one company owning the servers your data goes on, it's separate entities cooperating and potentially hosting entirely bespoke data... A lot of Web3 is smoke and snake oil. See the excellent Web3 Is Going Great blog for just how much of a trashfire it's been.
The most solid and promising ventures I've seen are in the landscape of decentralized web applications; Mastodon, Peertube and the like. This is actually very cool. But it's also a trend backwards, showing a version of the internet where private individuals create and share things they themselves host, much like it was before 7 corporations bought everything.
Blockchain is an inefficient solution to a problem that's not that big a problem and the pure electricity cost is staggering. NFTs have yet to show anything worthwhile, there's very little you can even buy with your Bitcoin.
But I suppose none of it matters anyway since the grift has moved on towards generative AI. The crypto grift is dead, long live the AI grift.
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