Erin Ptahdmin

Okay, this did rounds on Twitter a few years ago, let’s see if I can keep up with a Tumblr version…

1 like = 1 rec for a #webcomic with major #LGBTQ characters!

(Probably starting with the ones in the fanart here – titles in the alt text <3)

First 10 recs are go!

1) Power Ballad

What if Batman’s secret identity was Beyoncé? And her personal assistant was patching up her body armor in between scheduling her social-media posts? And they fell in love? (Complete!)

2) O Human Star

Someone finally created a robot duplicate of the tech genius who kicked off the AI revolution. But who? And why? And if his boyfriend’s earlier attempt to resurrect him is now living as a teenage girl, does that mean something? (Complete!)

3) What Happens in Carpediem…

Naoto’s video-game character marries another guy for the XP. Sure would be awkward if they caught feelings, huh? Especially since Kurogawa’s offline self is, ah, more than he seems. (Complete!)

4) Lovespells

Chronic illness keeps witch Maria from having the adventures she dreams of. But hey, tutoring the incredibly hot magic knight Esther can be done from home, and it’s a pretty good consolation prize. (Hiatus)

5) Forward

It’s the post-gender fully-automated luxury communist future…and Lee is still anxious, bored, and depressed. An accidental friendship with a chatty sexbot might not solve their problems, but at least it’ll keep things interesting? (Ongoing!)

6) The Stoop-Gallants

A motley fantasy crew teams up to visit the big city and get advice from the professionals, on problems like “I accidentally summoned a zombie that won’t quit following me around” and “having incredible wizarding powers is giving me unacknowledged gender dysphoria.” Quirky, heartwarming, incredibly funny, an all-time fave. (Recently complete!)

7) Tea Dragon Society

Cute orc girl meets cute fantasy foundling, her two cute dads, and their menagerie of cute teacup dragons. A sweet, kid-friendly short story with beautiful art. (Complete! More stories in this universe available as books.)

8) Court of Roses

When you’re a half-elf bard with an instrument that nobody appreciates, you might as well join a party that’s Oops, All Queer Bards and get roped into solving a murder mystery. (Ongoing!)

9) Starward Lovers

Lonely Jen normally wouldn’t even have the nerve to talk to a hot femme, let alone get herself working under one (hah) in a secret alien-hunting squad. The artist also worked on Steven Universe, can you tell? (Complete!)

10) The Night Belongs To Us

Creatures of the night have a bureaucracy, which means when Hank gets turned werewolf by an unsavory character, she gets someone more-dependable assigned as her sire. Cute the interspecies crush on awkward vampire Ava. (Hiatus)

11) Lady of the Shard

The dorkiest, most earnest acolyte at the Space Temple accidentally summons her goddess back to the material plane. With good timing, because the universe is about to need saving again. (Complete!)

12) Chroma Key

An alien needs to recruit some humans to join a space battle, duplicates the gadgets and aesthetics from in-universe Power Rangers, and next thing you know she has a bunch of struggling nostalgic twentysomething nerds signing up. (Hiatus)

13) Sad to Gay

Slice-of-life gags about the tribulations of a gay trans guy (and occasionally his unicorn) (the unicorn is metaphorical). (Probably complete)

14) Serenity Rose

Sera is a smol shy bean who also happens to be one of the most powerful witches in the world. She lives in a big goth mansion near a town that’s built her up as a tourist attraction. She hasn’t gotten over her unrequited high-school Gay Yearning. Her friends drag her out to social events that immediately get attacked by vampires. For fun, sometimes she transmutes bits of the local architecture into heart-shaped skulls. She’s a treasure. (Complete!)

15) Magical How?

Gabe prrrrrobably should’ve asked the talking golf ball more questions before saying “I can be a cute magical boy in a cute skirt? I’m in!” (Ongoing!)

16) Skin Horse

Misadventures of the government department in charge of liasing with cryptids, robots, aliens, and mad-science experiments. Like if the X-Files was the CFPB. (Complete!)

17) broken

In a militaristic fantasy dystopia, a faerie general goes on the run with his emotional support zombie. Weird and gorgeous. (Ongoing!)

18) Always Human

In the vivid high-tech future, a VR designer who changes her look every few weeks falls for a girl who never uses body-mods at all. (Complete!)

19) The Last Halloween

When monsters are unleashed on this dimension, 10-year-old Mona teams up with a group of…other human children in costumes, probably?…to survive. (If they can save the world too, it’ll be a nice bonus.) (Hiatus)

20) Sleepless Domain

In a city where magical girls are celebrities and public life is organized around their monster-fighting schedules, Undine struggles with inter-team conflicts, complicated by things like “public attention” and “sponsorship deals.” (Ongoing!)

21) Phantomarine To save the ocean, a gender-agnostic death spirit must keep their supervillain instincts under control long enough to recruit the help of a ghost princess who hates them. (Ongoing!)

Crowdfunding Volume 1, with 9 days to go!

22) Starhammer

In a world with an established superhero bureaucracy, someone has to figure out how to train, regulate, and/or sanction an impulsive teenager who just got adopted by a super-powerful space weapon. (Ongoing!)

23) Cupcake War Machine

A terrifying murderbot from the cyber-war far future gets reactivated...in the pastel-colored post-war farther-future, where they just want him to...make desserts?? (Almost complete!)

24) Exorcism Academy (NSFW)

Follow a rookie team of the humans who are trained to summon and bind demons in order to fight other demons. (Gets very intense, in both the gruesome demon fights and the hot demon sex.) (Ongoing!)

25) The Rock Cocks (NSFW)

Comedy about a team of lovable misfits trying to get their sexy rock band off the ground. Will the growing ensemble of sexy managers, sexy employees, sexy co-stars, and sexy rivals help them, or distract them? (Ongoing!)

26) Cucumber Quest

Adorable bunny sublings go on a world-saving journey across a series of colorful fantasy kingdoms. Started in 2011, and the first few books were published by Scholastic, which may explain why the queer quotient isn’t so obvious at the start -- but it picks up. Whether or not it gets finished, the posted archives are funny, gorgeous, and artistically inspiring. (Hiatus)

27) Kochab

Girl gets lost in the forest in the middle of winter, meets and bonds with a cute confused fire spirit. Recently back from hiatus, but it’s another one I would’ve recced even if it wasn’t, for the beautiful art alone. (Ongoing!)

28) The Devil of Angel Classroom

Supposedly-plain anime girl tries to measure up to her gorgeous classmates, ends up with an irreverent succubus following her around, now she’s juggling ancient celestial drama with slice-of-life high-school drama. (Mostly worksafe, but if occasional sexy fanservice with anime teenagers will bother you, scroll on by.) (Ongoing!)

29) Goddess of Paradise

Goddess wakes up from a slightly-too-long nap to find the world has moved on. All her temples, gone! Can she find some worshippers -- c’mon, at least one -- and get the world back on track? (Hiatus)

30) What Happens Next

Even after Milo’s sentence is up, turns out it’s really hard to get healthy and build something constructive with his life when his only social systems are (a) the true-crime fandom and (b) 2010′s Tumblr. (Heads-up for murder, abuse, and all kinds of toxic behavior -- by a writer who thoroughly understands how this plays out when you’re Extremely Online.) (Ongoing!)

Okay, this did rounds on Twitter a few years ago, let’s see if I can keep up with a Tumblr version…

1 like = 1 rec for a #webcomic with major #LGBTQ characters!

(Probably starting with the ones in the fanart here – titles in the alt text <3)

First 10 recs are go!

1) Power Ballad

What if Batman's secret identity was Beyoncé? And her personal assistant was patching up her body armor in between scheduling her social-media posts? And they fell in love? (Complete!)

2) O Human Star

Someone finally created a robot duplicate of the tech genius who kicked off the AI revolution. But who? And why? And if his boyfriend's earlier attempt to resurrect him is now living as a teenage girl, does that mean something? (Complete!)

3) What Happens in Carpediem...

Naoto's video-game character marries another guy for the XP. Sure would be awkward if they caught feelings, huh? Especially since Kurogawa's offline self is, ah, more than he seems. (Complete!)

4) Lovespells

Chronic illness keeps witch Maria from having the adventures she dreams of. But hey, tutoring the incredibly hot magic knight Esther can be done from home, and it's a pretty good consolation prize. (Hiatus)

5) Forward

It's the post-gender fully-automated luxury communist future...and Lee is still anxious, bored, and depressed. An accidental friendship with a chatty sexbot might not solve their problems, but at least it'll keep things interesting? (Ongoing!)

6) The Stoop-Gallants

A motley fantasy crew teams up to visit the big city and get advice from the professionals, on problems like "I accidentally summoned a zombie that won't quit following me around" and "having incredible wizarding powers is giving me unacknowledged gender dysphoria." Quirky, heartwarming, incredibly funny, an all-time fave. (Recently complete!)

7) Tea Dragon Society

Cute orc girl meets cute fantasy foundling, her two cute dads, and their menagerie of cute teacup dragons. A sweet, kid-friendly short story with beautiful art. (Complete! More stories in this universe available as books.)

8) Court of Roses

When you're a half-elf bard with an instrument that nobody appreciates, you might as well join a party that's Oops, All Queer Bards and get roped into solving a murder mystery. (Ongoing!)

9) Starward Lovers

Lonely Jen normally wouldn't even have the nerve to talk to a hot femme, let alone get herself working under one (hah) in a secret alien-hunting squad. The artist also worked on Steven Universe, can you tell? (Complete!)

10) The Night Belongs To Us

Creatures of the night have a bureaucracy, which means when Hank gets turned werewolf by an unsavory character, she gets someone more-dependable assigned as her sire. Cute the interspecies crush on awkward vampire Ava. (Hiatus)

I honestly think this is just about impossible for most long-time AO3 users unless they spend a lot of time reading Wattpaders’ complaints or something.

AO3 is so incredibly intuitive to the specific community that built it that the un-obviousness of what the fandoms by media type index is is completely invisible.

People have either been on AO3 so long they’ve forgotten what it was like to be new or they were never new in that particular way in the first place.

I understand how AO3 could be confusing to someone unfamiliar with the site’s design. That being said, I really feel people have lost the art of just fucking around until they figure it out.

Because pretty much none of us were “taught” how to use databases/archives like AO3. Like any other website, we just used them until we caught on. Clicked around, used similarities from other sites where we could to help navigate, found the useful features, and over time got good at it. Same with forums, LJ, Myspace, FB, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr.

If you’re really stuck, there’s lots of people around to ask. And Google. Anything can be daunting when you’re new, it’s not a flaw of the site. It’s incredibly straightforward and well organized once you explore a little.

Yeah, like- the website isn’t going to explode if you click on the wrong thing. I’d thr message here rhat young people don’t cluck on things? Because that’s what I’m getting from this post and the notes. Maybe I’m exactly the kind of long-time user OP is talking about becaude I genuinely fundamentally cannot understand how you can look at a website and not think to click on things until you find what you’re looking for. In the notes I saw it mentioned that new users won’t necessarily think to click on the about page or the FAQ or the site map, and honestly- what? How are those not the first places you go when you want to familiarize yourself with a new website or organization? I can’t imagine approaching the internet that way.

Someone just commented on one of my fics asking me to...let them know when it updated.

They were very excited when I pointed them to the "Subscribe" button!

...so yeah, that’s not even “check the site map” or “read through the FAQ”, that’s “expect a Subscribe/Follow/Alert/Notify Me option, look for a row of buttons and check for those words.” I can’t imagine how you get an internet experience in 2022 that doesn’t train you to do that. But clearly it’s happening!

And I don’t know how to address that?

Like, sure, if you’re talking one-on-one with a specific person, just be cool and tell them there’s a button.

But on a bigger scale...? Is there any kind of interface Ao3 could use, any redesign they could make, that would make it more intuitive for new users who don’t show up with “look at the buttons and read what they do” as an already-learned reflex? I’m...not sure if there is.

WTF is an NTF? No matter how many times I’ve had it explained to me, it still makes no sense. The best I can figure that it’s a form of cryptocurrency with personalized artwork made on a really environmentally unfriendly material being sold for ridiculous prices just so suckers can get unique furry artz

Wwwwwelp, let me take a shot at it. *cracks knuckles*

Okay, so: you know how there are people who collect currency (the traditional, paper-and-coins type)?

And for some people, the specific thing they collect is “bills with unusual serial numbers”:

https://rarest.org/stuff/dollar-bills

So if you find a $1 bill with a serial number like “010101010″, a collector might be willing to pay $50 for that bill.

In general, currency is “fungible”, which just means interchangeable. If I loan you a $1 bill today, and you pay me back tomorrow with a different $1 bill, same difference, that’s an equal exchange.

But if you find a person who specifically thinks Bills With Weird Serial Numbers are a neat thing they like having – they’ll pay extra for the weird $1 bill. And they wouldn’t be willing to swap it for some other $1 bill with just any non-remarkable serial number. It is a Non-Fungible Bill.

…to the collector, anyway. Not to anybody else! You can’t take it to the grocery store and say “please give me $50 worth of groceries for this $1 bill because the serial number is interesting.”

(Although, hey…if you had a way to convince lots of people that (a) all of them should turn into collectors and (b) every single random serial number is a special one they should pay extra for…that sure would be a way to make a lot of money, huh?)

Non-Fungible Tokens are the same idea, but with cryptocurrency.

Bitcoins have ID numbers. (Same with any other crypto token – I’ll just use Bitcoin as our example here.) If you can find a collector who likes Bitcoins with weird ID numbers, maybe they’ll pay you 50 Bitcoin for it?

…okay, it turned out nobody cares about Bitcoin ID numbers for their own sake.

But! The ID can be used in a URL.

This is where the art comes in.

You upload an image to that URL. Then you tell people “look, if you buy this token from me, it’s like you’re buying the image! Art collections are fun and interesting, right? Someone give me 50 Bitcoins now.”

Note that the file doesn’t need to be personalized, or unique, or anything like that:

So if you’re thinking “this sounds like a stupid deal that makes no sense” – you’re right! You are understanding the situation perfectly. This is total stupid nonsense. For the buyer.

For the person who owns some Bitcoins, and would like an easy way to turn them into even more Bitcoins? This is a fantastic racket.

Pay me a ton of tokens – or, preferably, the US$ equivalent of tons of tokens – for this single token I have! It’s totally actually worth that much, I promise.

Also, go ahead and Venmo me $50 for every random $1 bill in my wallet. This is a great deal for you.

And if you believe all that…I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Sidenote: the “environmentally unfriendly” part isn’t about material, it’s about energy. Producing and exchanging cryptocurrency takes an obscene amount of computing power, which uses an obscene amount of electricity. And it’s not a special thing about NFTs – it’s how all cryptocurrency works.

(A comparison I saw recently is, at the current rate, “people mining Bitcoin” for 1 day uses about the same amount of energy as “powering every commercial building in the United States” for 2 months.)

Sidenote 2: pretty sure the reason so much NFT art is ugly is, most of the Actual Artists have thought about it for 5 seconds and realized it’s a big racket. (Or been warned off it by other Actual Artists.) And the people who want to buy Actual Art are commissioning the artists directly, same as always.

So the people left in the NFT-buying scene are mostly people who…don’t care about the art quality at all. They just want in on the hype.

This is an absolutely amazing explanation! But it leaves me with another question, how does “mining” for cryptocurrency use more energy than normal internet use?

Whoo boy, let’s dive into this one…

Short answer: because it was designed that way. On purpose.

Long answer: for a currency to have any useful value, the amount and production has to be limited somehow.

(Which makes sense, right? If we tried to pay people in leaves, nobody would go to work for 15 leaves an hour, not when they could go for a hike and pick 15 leaves off the trees in 15 seconds.)

Precious metals – gold, silver, copper – have been popular for all of recorded history, because the limiting factor is “this material is physically difficult to dig out of the ground.”

With US dollars, the limit is part “bills are printed with complicated techniques that you need special equipment to pull off” and part “it’s illegal to for anyone except the government to print new dollars, and we will take you to jail if we catch you at it.”

With cryptocurrency, it’s all digital, so there’s no naturally-rare mineral involved. And it’s decentralized, so nobody has the authority to claim “we are the Bitcoin Police and we can take you to jail if you do this wrong.”

If you want it to work, you have to come up with some artificial limit, and then build that directly into the base code.

I’m not any kind of expert in the technical details here, so please nobody get too picky about it…but the general idea is, the blockchain will only spit out a new coin in response to a computer running calculations.

And for every new coin, it demands more calculations than the last one.

If you could still get a new Bitcoin by, say, “not using the internet for a day, have your computer use that power for mining instead,” then nobody would spend thousands of dollars to exchange for one Bitcoin, right? Anybody who wanted one would just take a day off Tumblr to mine it themselves.

Basically, there’s no reason to buy a Bitcoin for a dramatically higher price than it would cost you to mine a Bitcoin.

And the mining process keeps requiring more power, so:

When the exchange rate for Bitcoin is at $10,000, that implies “the cost of the equipment, maintenance, and power bills to mint 1 Bitcoin is now so high that people would rather pay $10,000 cash than deal with it.”

…okay, this is a little oversimplified – there’s also gambling and speculating involved. Say, you think oil prices are about to go up, maybe you pay a little more than the current rate, figuring the power costs of mining are about to get more expensive and you’ll come out ahead. Or say Elon Musk said something mean about a coin you have, maybe you sell all your tokens for a lower price, figuring it’s better to get out now than wait for it to crash even farther.

But you can see how they’re generally connected. Nobody would pay around $10,000 if the production cost was around $10.

One more link (which explains some of the same things in different words, in case mine aren’t working for everyone):

Here Is The Article You Can Send To People When They Say “But The Environmental Issues With Cryptoart Will Be Solved Soon, Right?”

And, finally, let’s tie this back to NFTs:

Another thing you need for your currency to work: it has to be useful for something other than “gambling on the price.”

It can’t just be something you endlessly swap for other currencies and hope the exchange rate works in your favor! There have to be places that say “we will take this in exchange for Tangible Goods And Services.”

Bitcoin has this, at least a little bit. Most places aren’t lining up to accept it, but it’s been around long enough to build up some credibility, so there are a few.

If I started a new cryptocurrency tomorrow where the cost of mining the first token was $10K, nobody would bother. Because it has no credibility, no staying power, no way to ever convert that currency into actual stuff.

To be clear, people are launching new cryptocurrencies all the time.

Most of them aren’t even trying to be useful, they’re just pump-and-dump schemes. Meaning the founders pump up people’s interest with “ScamToken will be the next Bitcoin, don’t miss this amazing opportunity, convert your $$$ into ScamToken now while it’s cheap!” Then they dump all their tokens, selling them to all the people they’ve convinced to buy. It isn’t long before the hype fades, the cold reality of “we can’t do anything with this” sets in, and the buyers are left with wallets full of tokens nobody new will buy, while the founders walk away with the $$$.

But some people are playing a longer game. They don’t want their currency to get “an afternoon’s worth of excitement from hyped-up crypto speculators” and then immediately flop. They want it to be useful for actually buying something, so it has a legitimate basis for getting some actual, stable value in the long run.

Or, failing that…they want it to appear to be useful for buying something. So it looks more credible. So the excitement lasts longer. So you reach outside the circle of “people who follow crypto for its own sake” and get the attention of “people who don’t care about crypto at all, but who do care about whatever Something you’ve convinced them your token will buy.”

So, hey: how big, do you think, is the market of people who care about digital art?

Now start paying attention to how many press releases for “an amazing opportunity to buy some cool new Non-Fungible Tokens” include “by the way, the specific Tokens we’re selling are from a cryptocurrency you’ve never heard of, let alone bought.”

This explanation is fairly concise and still gets to the point. I don’t think you could cover all of these facets that are relevant to the topic with meaningfully less text. And the post is still that long.

That’s another aspect of the crypto/NFT scam: you need to understand how cryptography and economics works and all the connecting parts between them. If someone levels a critique against them, crypto bros can always come out of the woodwork with another level of this whole construct and likely catch the complainer off guard with something they don’t know about or aren’t confident in.

The thing is though, most crypto bros are marks and also don’t understand how this works, instead they are psychologically committed to think that crypto is great because otherwise they lost a house worth of money for nothing but an ugly lion picture. The rest of them are true scammers, know exactly how this works, and rely on the complexity of it all to keep their marks in the dark.

That’s really dangerous! Almost nobody knows how this works! Legislators don’t know how crypto works, these people still don’t understand how facebook could possibly make money! And we expect them to regulate it?

It’s even worse though. Crypto exchanges are currently going mainstream, and wallstreet people are thinking about expanding their portfolios into crypto as well. I mean, why not? Bullshit investment instruments that serve no real purpose, that no normal person can understand and that are woefully underregulated is their whole deal! As soon as that happens the current crypto bro scammers will probably be edged out by the entrenched scam industry, i.e. the international financial sector.

Once that happens, it will practically be impossible to regulate crypto in any way. If finance has a tool to make money off, it will use its considerable influence over the political system that is stays that way.

That’s why I think it’s so important to make fun of crypto and NFTs now. It’s not just because it’s fun to laugh at those idiots (even though it really is fun). The narrative on crypto still hasn’t solidified. The average person has basically only heard of it and probably thinks it’s some kind of new techy invention that will revolutionise the economy (just like previous techy inventions that revolutionised the economy - at least that’s what the story is) and that some people got really rich off it. That might be good, right?

If instead the prevalent association with the term NFT is some losers with purple lion icons losing their shit because they paid 200k for an ugly image and then someone downloaded it from twitter, the whole “industry” suddenly loses a lot of its cool factor.

By the way, this is why I use “dunning-krugerrand” as the tag for crypto stuff. The Dunning-Kruger effect is when competent people falsely consider themselves incompetent or when incompetent people falsely consider themselves competent. Crypto technology and culture is set up in such a way that it accomplishes both.

ive always wondered how its possible to do this with other peoples art without getting sued. is the answer that the art is just an image that happens to be at the url, and legally, has no actual tie to the transaction?

Unfortunately, the answer is just “most artists don’t have the time or money to bring a lawsuit every time their art gets stolen.”

And even if you manage to get one art-theft account shut down, there are 10 more being created to take its place.

We mostly rely on the hosting/sales platforms to take an active role in stomping this stuff out. Some rise to the occasion -- I had a good experience reporting art theft on eBay, for instance. But the NFT marketplaces are enjoying their cut of the profits too much.

communications from Kickstarter this week be like

Transcript

Kickstarter: I was able to obtain an amazing new innovation made possible by blockchain technology.

Every programmer, everyone in the Open Source community, everyone who's ever looked at a database for 5 minutes: Is it actually a thing that's been available for years, and any non-blockchain website or app that really wanted it could install it right now?

Kickstarter: I don't understand.

Everyone: I want to see a new thing that we NEED a blockchain to do. Is that what you have, or do you have a thing that every programmer knows how to do, and if we had ever once tried to get it, we'd be running it already?

Kickstarter: I have the new thing.

Everyone: You're sure? You have a Needs A Blockchain To Be Possible thing, and not a Literally Anyone Could Already Do It thing?

Kickstarter: That is correct. I have a new function you can ONLY unlock by moving to a blockchain. I do not have an even-Wordpress-plugins-already-do-it thing.

Everyone: Excellent! Please, give me the new thing.

(Kickstarter hands over "Making our code open-source for anyone to use," adding it to "Integrate with any other site that's interested," "Letting the userbase vote on new features," and "Letting any coder contribute a plugin")

(End transcript)

You know what’s cute? Tiny people in perfume bottles, that’s what’s cute.

April’s new Patreon wallpaper  features lil’ glass-bottled versions of Juniper, Birch, Violet, Rowan, and Pascentia, from Leif & Thorn. Mostly with flowers/berries/leaves from the plant they’re named after. Didn’t really work for Pas, so I gave her amethysts and dove feathers. Comes in a whole bunch of sizes! Download whichever one(s) fit your needs.

Now with a sequel!

The Patreon wallpaper for September features tiny bottled versions of Dexie, Hermosa, Delphinium, the Woman in Black, and…Kale. (Don’t worry, he’s on the opposite side of the table from Dex.)

WTF is an NTF? No matter how many times I’ve had it explained to me, it still makes no sense. The best I can figure that it’s a form of cryptocurrency with personalized artwork made on a really environmentally unfriendly material being sold for ridiculous prices just so suckers can get unique furry artz

Wwwwwelp, let me take a shot at it. *cracks knuckles*

Okay, so: you know how there are people who collect currency (the traditional, paper-and-coins type)?

And for some people, the specific thing they collect is “bills with unusual serial numbers”:

https://rarest.org/stuff/dollar-bills

So if you find a $1 bill with a serial number like “010101010″, a collector might be willing to pay $50 for that bill.

In general, currency is “fungible”, which just means interchangeable. If I loan you a $1 bill today, and you pay me back tomorrow with a different $1 bill, same difference, that’s an equal exchange.

But if you find a person who specifically thinks Bills With Weird Serial Numbers are a neat thing they like having – they’ll pay extra for the weird $1 bill. And they wouldn’t be willing to swap it for some other $1 bill with just any non-remarkable serial number. It is a Non-Fungible Bill.

…to the collector, anyway. Not to anybody else! You can’t take it to the grocery store and say “please give me $50 worth of groceries for this $1 bill because the serial number is interesting.”

(Although, hey…if you had a way to convince lots of people that (a) all of them should turn into collectors and (b) every single random serial number is a special one they should pay extra for…that sure would be a way to make a lot of money, huh?)

Non-Fungible Tokens are the same idea, but with cryptocurrency.

Bitcoins have ID numbers. (Same with any other crypto token – I’ll just use Bitcoin as our example here.) If you can find a collector who likes Bitcoins with weird ID numbers, maybe they’ll pay you 50 Bitcoin for it?

…okay, it turned out nobody cares about Bitcoin ID numbers for their own sake.

But! The ID can be used in a URL.

This is where the art comes in.

You upload an image to that URL. Then you tell people “look, if you buy this token from me, it’s like you’re buying the image! Art collections are fun and interesting, right? Someone give me 50 Bitcoins now.”

Note that the file doesn’t need to be personalized, or unique, or anything like that:

So if you’re thinking “this sounds like a stupid deal that makes no sense” – you’re right! You are understanding the situation perfectly. This is total stupid nonsense. For the buyer.

For the person who owns some Bitcoins, and would like an easy way to turn them into even more Bitcoins? This is a fantastic racket.

Pay me a ton of tokens – or, preferably, the US$ equivalent of tons of tokens – for this single token I have! It’s totally actually worth that much, I promise.

Also, go ahead and Venmo me $50 for every random $1 bill in my wallet. This is a great deal for you.

And if you believe all that…I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Sidenote: the “environmentally unfriendly” part isn’t about material, it’s about energy. Producing and exchanging cryptocurrency takes an obscene amount of computing power, which uses an obscene amount of electricity. And it’s not a special thing about NFTs – it’s how all cryptocurrency works.

(A comparison I saw recently is, at the current rate, “people mining Bitcoin” for 1 day uses about the same amount of energy as “powering every commercial building in the United States” for 2 months.)

Sidenote 2: pretty sure the reason so much NFT art is ugly is, most of the Actual Artists have thought about it for 5 seconds and realized it’s a big racket. (Or been warned off it by other Actual Artists.) And the people who want to buy Actual Art are commissioning the artists directly, same as always.

So the people left in the NFT-buying scene are mostly people who…don’t care about the art quality at all. They just want in on the hype.

This is an absolutely amazing explanation! But it leaves me with another question, how does “mining” for cryptocurrency use more energy than normal internet use?

Whoo boy, let’s dive into this one…

Short answer: because it was designed that way. On purpose.

Long answer: for a currency to have any useful value, the amount and production has to be limited somehow.

(Which makes sense, right? If we tried to pay people in leaves, nobody would go to work for 15 leaves an hour, not when they could go for a hike and pick 15 leaves off the trees in 15 seconds.)

Precious metals – gold, silver, copper – have been popular for all of recorded history, because the limiting factor is “this material is physically difficult to dig out of the ground.”

With US dollars, the limit is part “bills are printed with complicated techniques that you need special equipment to pull off” and part “it’s illegal to for anyone except the government to print new dollars, and we will take you to jail if we catch you at it.”

With cryptocurrency, it’s all digital, so there’s no naturally-rare mineral involved. And it’s decentralized, so nobody has the authority to claim “we are the Bitcoin Police and we can take you to jail if you do this wrong.”

If you want it to work, you have to come up with some artificial limit, and then build that directly into the base code.

I’m not any kind of expert in the technical details here, so please nobody get too picky about it…but the general idea is, the blockchain will only spit out a new coin in response to a computer running calculations.

And for every new coin, it demands more calculations than the last one.

If you could still get a new Bitcoin by, say, “not using the internet for a day, have your computer use that power for mining instead,” then nobody would spend thousands of dollars to exchange for one Bitcoin, right? Anybody who wanted one would just take a day off Tumblr to mine it themselves.

Basically, there’s no reason to buy a Bitcoin for a dramatically higher price than it would cost you to mine a Bitcoin.

And the mining process keeps requiring more power, so:

When the exchange rate for Bitcoin is at $10,000, that implies “the cost of the equipment, maintenance, and power bills to mint 1 Bitcoin is now so high that people would rather pay $10,000 cash than deal with it.”

…okay, this is a little oversimplified – there’s also gambling and speculating involved. Say, you think oil prices are about to go up, maybe you pay a little more than the current rate, figuring the power costs of mining are about to get more expensive and you’ll come out ahead. Or say Elon Musk said something mean about a coin you have, maybe you sell all your tokens for a lower price, figuring it’s better to get out now than wait for it to crash even farther.

But you can see how they’re generally connected. Nobody would pay around $10,000 if the production cost was around $10.

One more link (which explains some of the same things in different words, in case mine aren’t working for everyone):

Here Is The Article You Can Send To People When They Say “But The Environmental Issues With Cryptoart Will Be Solved Soon, Right?”

And, finally, let’s tie this back to NFTs:

Another thing you need for your currency to work: it has to be useful for something other than “gambling on the price.”

It can’t just be something you endlessly swap for other currencies and hope the exchange rate works in your favor! There have to be places that say “we will take this in exchange for Tangible Goods And Services.”

Bitcoin has this, at least a little bit. Most places aren’t lining up to accept it, but it’s been around long enough to build up some credibility, so there are a few.

If I started a new cryptocurrency tomorrow where the cost of mining the first token was $10K, nobody would bother. Because it has no credibility, no staying power, no way to ever convert that currency into actual stuff.

To be clear, people are launching new cryptocurrencies all the time.

Most of them aren’t even trying to be useful, they’re just pump-and-dump schemes. Meaning the founders pump up people’s interest with “ScamToken will be the next Bitcoin, don’t miss this amazing opportunity, convert your $$$ into ScamToken now while it’s cheap!” Then they dump all their tokens, selling them to all the people they’ve convinced to buy. It isn’t long before the hype fades, the cold reality of “we can’t do anything with this” sets in, and the buyers are left with wallets full of tokens nobody new will buy, while the founders walk away with the $$$.

But some people are playing a longer game. They don’t want their currency to get “an afternoon’s worth of excitement from hyped-up crypto speculators” and then immediately flop. They want it to be useful for actually buying something, so it has a legitimate basis for getting some actual, stable value in the long run.

Or, failing that…they want it to appear to be useful for buying something. So it looks more credible. So the excitement lasts longer. So you reach outside the circle of “people who follow crypto for its own sake” and get the attention of “people who don’t care about crypto at all, but who do care about whatever Something you’ve convinced them your token will buy.”

So, hey: how big, do you think, is the market of people who care about digital art?

Now start paying attention to how many press releases for “an amazing opportunity to buy some cool new Non-Fungible Tokens” include “by the way, the specific Tokens we’re selling are from a cryptocurrency you’ve never heard of, let alone bought.”

This explanation is fairly concise and still gets to the point. I don’t think you could cover all of these facets that are relevant to the topic with meaningfully less text. And the post is still that long.

That’s another aspect of the crypto/NFT scam: you need to understand how cryptography and economics works and all the connecting parts between them. If someone levels a critique against them, crypto bros can always come out of the woodwork with another level of this whole construct and likely catch the complainer off guard with something they don’t know about or aren’t confident in.

The thing is though, most crypto bros are marks and also don’t understand how this works, instead they are psychologically committed to think that crypto is great because otherwise they lost a house worth of money for nothing but an ugly lion picture. The rest of them are true scammers, know exactly how this works, and rely on the complexity of it all to keep their marks in the dark.

That’s really dangerous! Almost nobody knows how this works! Legislators don’t know how crypto works, these people still don’t understand how facebook could possibly make money! And we expect them to regulate it?

It’s even worse though. Crypto exchanges are currently going mainstream, and wallstreet people are thinking about expanding their portfolios into crypto as well. I mean, why not? Bullshit investment instruments that serve no real purpose, that no normal person can understand and that are woefully underregulated is their whole deal! As soon as that happens the current crypto bro scammers will probably be edged out by the entrenched scam industry, i.e. the international financial sector.

Once that happens, it will practically be impossible to regulate crypto in any way. If finance has a tool to make money off, it will use its considerable influence over the political system that is stays that way.

That’s why I think it’s so important to make fun of crypto and NFTs now. It’s not just because it’s fun to laugh at those idiots (even though it really is fun). The narrative on crypto still hasn’t solidified. The average person has basically only heard of it and probably thinks it’s some kind of new techy invention that will revolutionise the economy (just like previous techy inventions that revolutionised the economy - at least that’s what the story is) and that some people got really rich off it. That might be good, right?

If instead the prevalent association with the term NFT is some losers with purple lion icons losing their shit because they paid 200k for an ugly image and then someone downloaded it from twitter, the whole “industry” suddenly loses a lot of its cool factor.

I’d just like to add some notes here in defence of the TECHNOLOGY. Not in defence of the use cases ect above.

There are other versions and methods for implementing Crypto-currency blockchains. These do NOT require GPUs. And are much like the above question about how is Crypto/NFTs different from general internet.

Etherium the second biggest Crypto-currency is currently in the transition to completely dropping GPU mining.

You can look up Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake to learn about their new implementation.

Bitcoin was the first implementation of a new technology and that’s basically always going to be the WORST the technology will ever be. Bitcoin does suck and it does need to either rapidly change or die.

And that goes for the points I’m making below too. There is room for improvement and development just like any new technology.

NFTs for Art? Yeah they suck and are dumb.

NFTs for online games? Potentially amazing.

Store game items/loot data in an NFT and give it to the user. The user now owns a copy of that data, and it exists inside AND outside the game. They can trade it outside the game, gift it, destroy it, whatever. It’s theirs.

When the game shuts down forever? You still own your items, your NFTs, as collectibles.

Your efforts and achievements don’t die with the game. Sure they might not be worth anything to anyone but you. But I know there are items I’ve earned I’d like a more permanent copy of. Also as they are collectibles at that point they may become worth money to others at any point in time and allow you to cash in on your hard work earning them.

The decentralized nature of Crypto-blockchains also has advantages but I don’t know if I can make them clearly valuable to anything above except as long as people, any random people, want to keep them alive they basically can without corporations or over large controlling bodies in control. And with the hell scape of capitalism we live in, that might become more and more important.

Check out WAX / WAX cloud for a carbon neutral blockchain all about games 😊

Print game items/loot data on a trading card and mail it to the user.

The user now owns a copy of that data. They can trade it, gift it, destroy it, whatever. They still own it as a collectible if/when the game shuts down. If it ever becomes worth money to someone else, they can re-sell it.

And any random person can keep their trading card indefinitely, no corporation or government controlling what you do with it. For no ongoing energy costs at all!

So can we stop pretending any of these things are Amazing Revolutionary Advantages of Blockchain Tech?

They were all possible with the tech we had before the invention of the internet.

Also: let’s stop talking up proof-of-stake until it actually happens.

Also also: proof-of-stake “requires users to leverage their existing cache of ether as a means to verify transactions and mint new tokens.”

So...the bigger account balance you already have of a currency, the more control you have over the network? Power is literally, directly centralized in whichever people/groups are the richest?

This isn’t escaping capitalism. This is reinventing it.

And on some level -- if you dig deep enough into who’s promoting this -- I guarantee you’ll find a pack of shameless grifters, who know perfectly well that their real goal is "suck a critical mass of open-hearted idealists into a new system of capitalism where we’re the ones with the capital.”

WTF is an NTF? No matter how many times I’ve had it explained to me, it still makes no sense. The best I can figure that it’s a form of cryptocurrency with personalized artwork made on a really environmentally unfriendly material being sold for ridiculous prices just so suckers can get unique furry artz

Wwwwwelp, let me take a shot at it. *cracks knuckles*

Okay, so: you know how there are people who collect currency (the traditional, paper-and-coins type)?

And for some people, the specific thing they collect is “bills with unusual serial numbers”:

https://rarest.org/stuff/dollar-bills

So if you find a $1 bill with a serial number like “010101010″, a collector might be willing to pay $50 for that bill.

In general, currency is “fungible”, which just means interchangeable. If I loan you a $1 bill today, and you pay me back tomorrow with a different $1 bill, same difference, that’s an equal exchange.

But if you find a person who specifically thinks Bills With Weird Serial Numbers are a neat thing they like having – they’ll pay extra for the weird $1 bill. And they wouldn’t be willing to swap it for some other $1 bill with just any non-remarkable serial number. It is a Non-Fungible Bill.

…to the collector, anyway. Not to anybody else! You can’t take it to the grocery store and say “please give me $50 worth of groceries for this $1 bill because the serial number is interesting.”

(Although, hey…if you had a way to convince lots of people that (a) all of them should turn into collectors and (b) every single random serial number is a special one they should pay extra for…that sure would be a way to make a lot of money, huh?)

Non-Fungible Tokens are the same idea, but with cryptocurrency.

Bitcoins have ID numbers. (Same with any other crypto token – I’ll just use Bitcoin as our example here.) If you can find a collector who likes Bitcoins with weird ID numbers, maybe they’ll pay you 50 Bitcoin for it?

…okay, it turned out nobody cares about Bitcoin ID numbers for their own sake.

But! The ID can be used in a URL.

This is where the art comes in.

You upload an image to that URL. Then you tell people “look, if you buy this token from me, it’s like you’re buying the image! Art collections are fun and interesting, right? Someone give me 50 Bitcoins now.”

Note that the file doesn’t need to be personalized, or unique, or anything like that:

So if you’re thinking “this sounds like a stupid deal that makes no sense” – you’re right! You are understanding the situation perfectly. This is total stupid nonsense. For the buyer.

For the person who owns some Bitcoins, and would like an easy way to turn them into even more Bitcoins? This is a fantastic racket.

Pay me a ton of tokens – or, preferably, the US$ equivalent of tons of tokens – for this single token I have! It’s totally actually worth that much, I promise.

Also, go ahead and Venmo me $50 for every random $1 bill in my wallet. This is a great deal for you.

And if you believe all that…I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Sidenote: the “environmentally unfriendly” part isn’t about material, it’s about energy. Producing and exchanging cryptocurrency takes an obscene amount of computing power, which uses an obscene amount of electricity. And it’s not a special thing about NFTs – it’s how all cryptocurrency works.

(A comparison I saw recently is, at the current rate, “people mining Bitcoin” for 1 day uses about the same amount of energy as “powering every commercial building in the United States” for 2 months.)

Sidenote 2: pretty sure the reason so much NFT art is ugly is, most of the Actual Artists have thought about it for 5 seconds and realized it’s a big racket. (Or been warned off it by other Actual Artists.) And the people who want to buy Actual Art are commissioning the artists directly, same as always.

So the people left in the NFT-buying scene are mostly people who…don’t care about the art quality at all. They just want in on the hype.

This is an absolutely amazing explanation! But it leaves me with another question, how does “mining” for cryptocurrency use more energy than normal internet use?

Whoo boy, let’s dive into this one…

Short answer: because it was designed that way. On purpose.

Long answer: for a currency to have any useful value, the amount and production has to be limited somehow.

(Which makes sense, right? If we tried to pay people in leaves, nobody would go to work for 15 leaves an hour, not when they could go for a hike and pick 15 leaves off the trees in 15 seconds.)

Precious metals – gold, silver, copper – have been popular for all of recorded history, because the limiting factor is “this material is physically difficult to dig out of the ground.”

With US dollars, the limit is part “bills are printed with complicated techniques that you need special equipment to pull off” and part “it’s illegal to for anyone except the government to print new dollars, and we will take you to jail if we catch you at it.”

With cryptocurrency, it’s all digital, so there’s no naturally-rare mineral involved. And it’s decentralized, so nobody has the authority to claim “we are the Bitcoin Police and we can take you to jail if you do this wrong.”

If you want it to work, you have to come up with some artificial limit, and then build that directly into the base code.

I’m not any kind of expert in the technical details here, so please nobody get too picky about it…but the general idea is, the blockchain will only spit out a new coin in response to a computer running calculations.

And for every new coin, it demands more calculations than the last one.

If you could still get a new Bitcoin by, say, “not using the internet for a day, have your computer use that power for mining instead,” then nobody would spend thousands of dollars to exchange for one Bitcoin, right? Anybody who wanted one would just take a day off Tumblr to mine it themselves.

Basically, there’s no reason to buy a Bitcoin for a dramatically higher price than it would cost you to mine a Bitcoin.

And the mining process keeps requiring more power, so:

When the exchange rate for Bitcoin is at $10,000, that implies “the cost of the equipment, maintenance, and power bills to mint 1 Bitcoin is now so high that people would rather pay $10,000 cash than deal with it.”

…okay, this is a little oversimplified – there’s also gambling and speculating involved. Say, you think oil prices are about to go up, maybe you pay a little more than the current rate, figuring the power costs of mining are about to get more expensive and you’ll come out ahead. Or say Elon Musk said something mean about a coin you have, maybe you sell all your tokens for a lower price, figuring it’s better to get out now than wait for it to crash even farther.

But you can see how they’re generally connected. Nobody would pay around $10,000 if the production cost was around $10.

One more link (which explains some of the same things in different words, in case mine aren’t working for everyone):

Here Is The Article You Can Send To People When They Say “But The Environmental Issues With Cryptoart Will Be Solved Soon, Right?”

And, finally, let’s tie this back to NFTs:

Another thing you need for your currency to work: it has to be useful for something other than “gambling on the price.”

It can’t just be something you endlessly swap for other currencies and hope the exchange rate works in your favor! There have to be places that say “we will take this in exchange for Tangible Goods And Services.”

Bitcoin has this, at least a little bit. Most places aren’t lining up to accept it, but it’s been around long enough to build up some credibility, so there are a few.

If I started a new cryptocurrency tomorrow where the cost of mining the first token was $10K, nobody would bother. Because it has no credibility, no staying power, no way to ever convert that currency into actual stuff.

To be clear, people are launching new cryptocurrencies all the time.

Most of them aren’t even trying to be useful, they’re just pump-and-dump schemes. Meaning the founders pump up people’s interest with “ScamToken will be the next Bitcoin, don’t miss this amazing opportunity, convert your $$$ into ScamToken now while it’s cheap!” Then they dump all their tokens, selling them to all the people they’ve convinced to buy. It isn’t long before the hype fades, the cold reality of “we can’t do anything with this” sets in, and the buyers are left with wallets full of tokens nobody new will buy, while the founders walk away with the $$$.

But some people are playing a longer game. They don’t want their currency to get “an afternoon’s worth of excitement from hyped-up crypto speculators” and then immediately flop. They want it to be useful for actually buying something, so it has a legitimate basis for getting some actual, stable value in the long run.

Or, failing that…they want it to appear to be useful for buying something. So it looks more credible. So the excitement lasts longer. So you reach outside the circle of “people who follow crypto for its own sake” and get the attention of “people who don’t care about crypto at all, but who do care about whatever Something you’ve convinced them your token will buy.”

So, hey: how big, do you think, is the market of people who care about digital art?

Now start paying attention to how many press releases for “an amazing opportunity to buy some cool new Non-Fungible Tokens” include “by the way, the specific Tokens we’re selling are from a cryptocurrency you’ve never heard of, let alone bought.”

This explanation is fairly concise and still gets to the point. I don’t think you could cover all of these facets that are relevant to the topic with meaningfully less text. And the post is still that long.

That’s another aspect of the crypto/NFT scam: you need to understand how cryptography and economics works and all the connecting parts between them. If someone levels a critique against them, crypto bros can always come out of the woodwork with another level of this whole construct and likely catch the complainer off guard with something they don’t know about or aren’t confident in.

The thing is though, most crypto bros are marks and also don’t understand how this works, instead they are psychologically committed to think that crypto is great because otherwise they lost a house worth of money for nothing but an ugly lion picture. The rest of them are true scammers, know exactly how this works, and rely on the complexity of it all to keep their marks in the dark.

That’s really dangerous! Almost nobody knows how this works! Legislators don’t know how crypto works, these people still don’t understand how facebook could possibly make money! And we expect them to regulate it?

It’s even worse though. Crypto exchanges are currently going mainstream, and wallstreet people are thinking about expanding their portfolios into crypto as well. I mean, why not? Bullshit investment instruments that serve no real purpose, that no normal person can understand and that are woefully underregulated is their whole deal! As soon as that happens the current crypto bro scammers will probably be edged out by the entrenched scam industry, i.e. the international financial sector.

Once that happens, it will practically be impossible to regulate crypto in any way. If finance has a tool to make money off, it will use its considerable influence over the political system that is stays that way.

That’s why I think it’s so important to make fun of crypto and NFTs now. It’s not just because it’s fun to laugh at those idiots (even though it really is fun). The narrative on crypto still hasn’t solidified. The average person has basically only heard of it and probably thinks it’s some kind of new techy invention that will revolutionise the economy (just like previous techy inventions that revolutionised the economy - at least that’s what the story is) and that some people got really rich off it. That might be good, right?

If instead the prevalent association with the term NFT is some losers with purple lion icons losing their shit because they paid 200k for an ugly image and then someone downloaded it from twitter, the whole “industry” suddenly loses a lot of its cool factor.

So one question I’ve had about the environmental impact is how it would compare to, say, facebooks server system. Or really any large database that requires hundreds/thousands of servers and computers and AC?

You got me wanting the numbers too, so I googled some:

So Bitcoin -- not including all other cryptocurrencies! Just the one! -- burns around 2,400% as much energy a year as Facebook, and somewhere between 30%-60% as much as every data center on Earth put together.

(bonus note, while I’m here: one of these other reblogs corrected me that the blockchain code doesn’t make mining costs go up. Not directly. It just incentivizes users to win by out-spending each other, and humans have responded by launching into a power-usage arms race. So, in theory, we could make it go down! In practice...historically, that doesn’t happen without a level of international cooperation and regulation that is really, really hard to pull off.)

Noticed my Gumroad layout got borked at some point, so I gave it a quick redesign, check it out:

https://erinptah.gumroad.com/

Okay, as long as I’m getting new followers for making anti-NFT posts...

Want to buy Actual Digital Art, in a way that actually supports the artist, and doesn’t melt any glaciers in the process? I make comics! You should buy some.

You can also support my art on Patreon, where you’ll get bonus art and other locked content that I don’t post in public feeds.

I’m not pretending these files are limited, or impossible to duplicate, or that you’ll be able to re-sell them for thousands of dollars one day. I’m saying they’re good work! I put actual time and effort into making them! They’re worth spending money on because you will enjoy them.

I do sell Exclusive "Ownership” Rights to individual comic strip URLs. But those still don’t involve cryptocurrency or blockchains -- I just put your name with the URL on a Google spreadsheet.

WTF is an NTF? No matter how many times I've had it explained to me, it still makes no sense. The best I can figure that it's a form of cryptocurrency with personalized artwork made on a really environmentally unfriendly material being sold for ridiculous prices just so suckers can get unique furry artz

Wwwwwelp, let me take a shot at it. *cracks knuckles*

Okay, so: you know how there are people who collect currency (the traditional, paper-and-coins type)?

And for some people, the specific thing they collect is “bills with unusual serial numbers”:

https://rarest.org/stuff/dollar-bills

So if you find a $1 bill with a serial number like “010101010″, a collector might be willing to pay $50 for that bill.

In general, currency is “fungible”, which just means interchangeable. If I loan you a $1 bill today, and you pay me back tomorrow with a different $1 bill, same difference, that’s an equal exchange.

But if you find a person who specifically thinks Bills With Weird Serial Numbers are a neat thing they like having -- they’ll pay extra for the weird $1 bill. And they wouldn’t be willing to swap it for some other $1 bill with just any non-remarkable serial number. It is a Non-Fungible Bill.

...to the collector, anyway. Not to anybody else! You can’t take it to the grocery store and say “please give me $50 worth of groceries for this $1 bill because the serial number is interesting.”

(Although, hey...if you had a way to convince lots of people that (a) all of them should turn into collectors and (b) every single random serial number is a special one they should pay extra for...that sure would be a way to make a lot of money, huh?)

Non-Fungible Tokens are the same idea, but with cryptocurrency.

Bitcoins have ID numbers. (Same with any other crypto token -- I’ll just use Bitcoin as our example here.) If you can find a collector who likes Bitcoins with weird ID numbers, maybe they’ll pay you 50 Bitcoin for it?

...okay, it turned out nobody cares about Bitcoin ID numbers for their own sake.

But! The ID can be used in a URL.

This is where the art comes in.

You upload an image to that URL. Then you tell people “look, if you buy this token from me, it’s like you’re buying the image! Art collections are fun and interesting, right? Someone give me 50 Bitcoins now.”

Note that the file doesn’t need to be personalized, or unique, or anything like that:

So if you’re thinking “this sounds like a stupid deal that makes no sense” -- you’re right! You are understanding the situation perfectly. This is total stupid nonsense. For the buyer.

For the person who owns some Bitcoins, and would like an easy way to turn them into even more Bitcoins? This is a fantastic racket.

Pay me a ton of tokens -- or, preferably, the US$ equivalent of tons of tokens -- for this single token I have! It’s totally actually worth that much, I promise.

Also, go ahead and Venmo me $50 for every random $1 bill in my wallet. This is a great deal for you.

And if you believe all that...I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Sidenote: the “environmentally unfriendly” part isn’t about material, it’s about energy. Producing and exchanging cryptocurrency takes an obscene amount of computing power, which uses an obscene amount of electricity. And it’s not a special thing about NFTs -- it’s how all cryptocurrency works.

(A comparison I saw recently is, at the current rate, “people mining Bitcoin” for 1 day uses about the same amount of energy as "powering every commercial building in the United States” for 2 months.)

Sidenote 2: pretty sure the reason so much NFT art is ugly is, most of the Actual Artists have thought about it for 5 seconds and realized it’s a big racket. (Or been warned off it by other Actual Artists.) And the people who want to buy Actual Art are commissioning the artists directly, same as always.

So the people left in the NFT-buying scene are mostly people who...don’t care about the art quality at all. They just want in on the hype.

This is an absolutely amazing explanation! But it leaves me with another question, how does “mining” for cryptocurrency use more energy than normal internet use?

Whoo boy, let’s dive into this one...

Short answer: because it was designed that way. On purpose.

Long answer: for a currency to have any useful value, the amount and production has to be limited somehow.

(Which makes sense, right? If we tried to pay people in leaves, nobody would go to work for 15 leaves an hour, not when they could go for a hike and pick 15 leaves off the trees in 15 seconds.)

Precious metals -- gold, silver, copper -- have been popular for all of recorded history, because the limiting factor is “this material is physically difficult to dig out of the ground.”

With US dollars, the limit is part “bills are printed with complicated techniques that you need special equipment to pull off” and part “it’s illegal to for anyone except the government to print new dollars, and we will take you to jail if we catch you at it.”

With cryptocurrency, it’s all digital, so there’s no naturally-rare mineral involved. And it’s decentralized, so nobody has the authority to claim “we are the Bitcoin Police and we can take you to jail if you do this wrong.”

If you want it to work, you have to come up with some artificial limit, and then build that directly into the base code.

I’m not any kind of expert in the technical details here, so please nobody get too picky about it...but the general idea is, the blockchain will only spit out a new coin in response to a computer running calculations.

And for every new coin, it demands more calculations than the last one.

If you could still get a new Bitcoin by, say, “not using the internet for a day, have your computer use that power for mining instead,” then nobody would spend thousands of dollars to exchange for one Bitcoin, right? Anybody who wanted one would just take a day off Tumblr to mine it themselves.

Basically, there’s no reason to buy a Bitcoin for a dramatically higher price than it would cost you to mine a Bitcoin.

And the mining process keeps requiring more power, so:

When the exchange rate for Bitcoin is at $10,000, that implies “the cost of the equipment, maintenance, and power bills to mint 1 Bitcoin is now so high that people would rather pay $10,000 cash than deal with it.”

...okay, this is a little oversimplified -- there’s also gambling and speculating involved. Say, you think oil prices are about to go up, maybe you pay a little more than the current rate, figuring the power costs of mining are about to get more expensive and you’ll come out ahead. Or say Elon Musk said something mean about a coin you have, maybe you sell all your tokens for a lower price, figuring it’s better to get out now than wait for it to crash even farther.

But you can see how they’re generally connected. Nobody would pay around $10,000 if the production cost was around $10.

One more link (which explains some of the same things in different words, in case mine aren’t working for everyone):

Here Is The Article You Can Send To People When They Say “But The Environmental Issues With Cryptoart Will Be Solved Soon, Right?”

And, finally, let’s tie this back to NFTs:

Another thing you need for your currency to work: it has to be useful for something other than “gambling on the price.”

It can’t just be something you endlessly swap for other currencies and hope the exchange rate works in your favor! There have to be places that say “we will take this in exchange for Tangible Goods And Services.”

Bitcoin has this, at least a little bit. Most places aren’t lining up to accept it, but it’s been around long enough to build up some credibility, so there are a few.

If I started a new cryptocurrency tomorrow where the cost of mining the first token was $10K, nobody would bother. Because it has no credibility, no staying power, no way to ever convert that currency into actual stuff.

To be clear, people are launching new cryptocurrencies all the time.

Most of them aren’t even trying to be useful, they’re just pump-and-dump schemes. Meaning the founders pump up people’s interest with “ScamToken will be the next Bitcoin, don’t miss this amazing opportunity, convert your $$$ into ScamToken now while it’s cheap!” Then they dump all their tokens, selling them to all the people they’ve convinced to buy. It isn’t long before the hype fades, the cold reality of “we can’t do anything with this” sets in, and the buyers are left with wallets full of tokens nobody new will buy, while the founders walk away with the $$$.

But some people are playing a longer game. They don’t want their currency to get “an afternoon’s worth of excitement from hyped-up crypto speculators” and then immediately flop. They want it to be useful for actually buying something, so it has a legitimate basis for getting some actual, stable value in the long run.

Or, failing that...they want it to appear to be useful for buying something. So it looks more credible. So the excitement lasts longer. So you reach outside the circle of “people who follow crypto for its own sake” and get the attention of “people who don’t care about crypto at all, but who do care about whatever Something you’ve convinced them your token will buy.”

So, hey: how big, do you think, is the market of people who care about digital art?

Now start paying attention to how many press releases for “an amazing opportunity to buy some cool new Non-Fungible Tokens” include "by the way, the specific Tokens we’re selling are from a cryptocurrency you’ve never heard of, let alone bought.”

WTF is an NTF? No matter how many times I've had it explained to me, it still makes no sense. The best I can figure that it's a form of cryptocurrency with personalized artwork made on a really environmentally unfriendly material being sold for ridiculous prices just so suckers can get unique furry artz

Wwwwwelp, let me take a shot at it. *cracks knuckles*

Okay, so: you know how there are people who collect currency (the traditional, paper-and-coins type)?

And for some people, the specific thing they collect is “bills with unusual serial numbers”:

https://rarest.org/stuff/dollar-bills

So if you find a $1 bill with a serial number like “010101010″, a collector might be willing to pay $50 for that bill.

In general, currency is “fungible”, which just means interchangeable. If I loan you a $1 bill today, and you pay me back tomorrow with a different $1 bill, same difference, that’s an equal exchange.

But if you find a person who specifically thinks Bills With Weird Serial Numbers are a neat thing they like having -- they’ll pay extra for the weird $1 bill. And they wouldn’t be willing to swap it for some other $1 bill with just any non-remarkable serial number. It is a Non-Fungible Bill.

...to the collector, anyway. Not to anybody else! You can’t take it to the grocery store and say “please give me $50 worth of groceries for this $1 bill because the serial number is interesting.”

(Although, hey...if you had a way to convince lots of people that (a) all of them should turn into collectors and (b) every single random serial number is a special one they should pay extra for...that sure would be a way to make a lot of money, huh?)

Non-Fungible Tokens are the same idea, but with cryptocurrency.

Bitcoins have ID numbers. (Same with any other crypto token -- I’ll just use Bitcoin as our example here.) If you can find a collector who likes Bitcoins with weird ID numbers, maybe they’ll pay you 50 Bitcoin for it?

...okay, it turned out nobody cares about Bitcoin ID numbers for their own sake.

But! The ID can be used in a URL.

This is where the art comes in.

You upload an image to that URL. Then you tell people “look, if you buy this token from me, it’s like you’re buying the image! Art collections are fun and interesting, right? Someone give me 50 Bitcoins now.”

Note that the file doesn’t need to be personalized, or unique, or anything like that:

So if you’re thinking “this sounds like a stupid deal that makes no sense” -- you’re right! You are understanding the situation perfectly. This is total stupid nonsense. For the buyer.

For the person who owns some Bitcoins, and would like an easy way to turn them into even more Bitcoins? This is a fantastic racket.

Pay me a ton of tokens -- or, preferably, the US$ equivalent of tons of tokens -- for this single token I have! It’s totally actually worth that much, I promise.

Also, go ahead and Venmo me $50 for every random $1 bill in my wallet. This is a great deal for you.

And if you believe all that...I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Sidenote: the “environmentally unfriendly” part isn’t about material, it’s about energy. Producing and exchanging cryptocurrency takes an obscene amount of computing power, which uses an obscene amount of electricity. And it’s not a special thing about NFTs -- it’s how all cryptocurrency works.

(A comparison I saw recently is, at the current rate, “people mining Bitcoin” for 1 day uses about the same amount of energy as "powering every commercial building in the United States” for 2 months.)

Sidenote 2: pretty sure the reason so much NFT art is ugly is, most of the Actual Artists have thought about it for 5 seconds and realized it’s a big racket. (Or been warned off it by other Actual Artists.) And the people who want to buy Actual Art are commissioning the artists directly, same as always.

So the people left in the NFT-buying scene are mostly people who...don’t care about the art quality at all. They just want in on the hype.

Seriously though, that is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. Like, why would anyone buy into that?

Thanks for the explanation though. It could not have been easy trying to make that level of nonsense understandable.

Definitely not easy, lol. First I heard of it was all the genuinely-cool-sounding hype, so I had to work this out by starting from there and working backward.

The arc I went through, and that I’ve seen a whole bunch of other digital artists go through, is something like this

Unfortunately, there are people making a lot of money off the hype. Who would not be making that money if they led with a straightforward explanation of what’s actually happening.

Soooo the financial motive to keep it Vague and Mysterious and Only Buzzkills Care About Those Details Anyway is strong :|

WTF is an NTF? No matter how many times I've had it explained to me, it still makes no sense. The best I can figure that it's a form of cryptocurrency with personalized artwork made on a really environmentally unfriendly material being sold for ridiculous prices just so suckers can get unique furry artz

Wwwwwelp, let me take a shot at it. *cracks knuckles*

Okay, so: you know how there are people who collect currency (the traditional, paper-and-coins type)?

And for some people, the specific thing they collect is “bills with unusual serial numbers”:

https://rarest.org/stuff/dollar-bills

So if you find a $1 bill with a serial number like “010101010″, a collector might be willing to pay $50 for that bill.

In general, currency is “fungible”, which just means interchangeable. If I loan you a $1 bill today, and you pay me back tomorrow with a different $1 bill, same difference, that’s an equal exchange.

But if you find a person who specifically thinks Bills With Weird Serial Numbers are a neat thing they like having -- they’ll pay extra for the weird $1 bill. And they wouldn’t be willing to swap it for some other $1 bill with just any non-remarkable serial number. It is a Non-Fungible Bill.

...to the collector, anyway. Not to anybody else! You can’t take it to the grocery store and say “please give me $50 worth of groceries for this $1 bill because the serial number is interesting.”

(Although, hey...if you had a way to convince lots of people that (a) all of them should turn into collectors and (b) every single random serial number is a special one they should pay extra for...that sure would be a way to make a lot of money, huh?)

Non-Fungible Tokens are the same idea, but with cryptocurrency.

Bitcoins have ID numbers. (Same with any other crypto token -- I’ll just use Bitcoin as our example here.) If you can find a collector who likes Bitcoins with weird ID numbers, maybe they’ll pay you 50 Bitcoin for it?

...okay, it turned out nobody cares about Bitcoin ID numbers for their own sake.

But! The ID can be used in a URL.

This is where the art comes in.

You upload an image to that URL. Then you tell people “look, if you buy this token from me, it’s like you’re buying the image! Art collections are fun and interesting, right? Someone give me 50 Bitcoins now.”

Note that the file doesn’t need to be personalized, or unique, or anything like that:

So if you’re thinking “this sounds like a stupid deal that makes no sense” -- you’re right! You are understanding the situation perfectly. This is total stupid nonsense. For the buyer.

For the person who owns some Bitcoins, and would like an easy way to turn them into even more Bitcoins? This is a fantastic racket.

Pay me a ton of tokens -- or, preferably, the US$ equivalent of tons of tokens -- for this single token I have! It’s totally actually worth that much, I promise.

Also, go ahead and Venmo me $50 for every random $1 bill in my wallet. This is a great deal for you.

And if you believe all that...I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Sidenote: the “environmentally unfriendly” part isn’t about material, it’s about energy. Producing and exchanging cryptocurrency takes an obscene amount of computing power, which uses an obscene amount of electricity. And it’s not a special thing about NFTs -- it’s how all cryptocurrency works.

(A comparison I saw recently is, at the current rate, “people mining Bitcoin” for 1 day uses about the same amount of energy as "powering every commercial building in the United States” for 2 months.)

Sidenote 2: pretty sure the reason so much NFT art is ugly is, most of the Actual Artists have thought about it for 5 seconds and realized it’s a big racket. (Or been warned off it by other Actual Artists.) And the people who want to buy Actual Art are commissioning the artists directly, same as always.

So the people left in the NFT-buying scene are mostly people who...don’t care about the art quality at all. They just want in on the hype.