Lately I have been sensing a turn of the narrative tide about the blockchain. More and more influential commentators are coming out with arguments that are strongly negative about it – or at least, more and more are making it into my Twitter timeline. Stephen Diehl is an obvious example; but I also see @smari in there.
A potential accelerator of this process is a video uploaded two days ago by a man called Dan Olson (@FoldableHuman on Twitter). It’s very long (over two hours), but super well researched, super high production value, super clear without trivializing the issues. As I write this, it already passed the 2 million visualizations. I recommend its use to get a big picture of the all crypto scene 13 years after the famous Satoshi Nakamoto White Paper: from Bitcoin all the way to NFTs.
There are too many insights for a TL;dr, but if I had to pick one it is this: people who participate in the crypto scene (outside of early adopters) are basically the perfect target for scams:
- “Barely middle class” – some disposable income.
- Insecure – high financial anxiety and FOMO.
- No business experience – they don’t think high returns on investment are suspicious.
The combination of money, FOMO and gullibility makes it so that any NFT Discord server is basically “a directory of potential marks”.
This explains a lot.
Do yourself a favour and watch it.
