Web3 is a disaster
That’s a big misunderstanding.
Kings of Leon sold some lifetime concert tickets.
A business model that has won over the music industry. After all, artists hardly earn from streaming platforms these days.
So you might think it’s a good idea, and artists with solo careers who can’t live off their art are hoping for new sources of income.
But what does a buyer really gain from owning a picture, other than reselling it?
What happens when at Kings Of Leon concerts the security guard looks at your NFT in disbelief and flips you the bird?
Or the band breaks up?
A supposed advantage of NFTs
Is that they are decentralized.
Nobody regulates them.
That means that you can’t sue for your rights anywhere. And if you can’t sue for rights, you don’t have any.
If you don’t go to the Kings Of Leon concert with your lifetime ticket because the security guards don’t know, because you lost it, because it was stolen or deleted, then you are out of luck. In that case, you better go home and put on your pajamas.
Then you have lost a lot of money.
If even the iTunes business model of selling copy-protected music for $1 per song didn’t work, why should anyone buy art from unknown artists as NFTs?
NFTs are a way to make rich artists richer. Because they benefit from every resale.
There is always a fool who falls in love with this kind of artificial scarcity.
Web3 is a myth
Jürgen Geuter (computer scientist) has presented the problems of blockchain technology in a simple and clear essay.
He comes to the conclusion that the so-called Web 3.0, which is based on blockchain technology, is not only a catastrophe from an environmental point of view but also simply a rip-off. A scam.
He compares this to the music industry’s attempts in the early 2000s to put copy protection on CDs to artificially restrict the copying of music.
Here are some of his conclusions:
Blockchains don’t work
The Ethereum blockchain has the processing power of an old Apple II box. It uses as much electricity as Belgium, but the thing is slow in terms of computing power.
Bitcoin can only do about 4.5 transactions per second.
Ethereum is a little better and can handle about 30 transactions per second. That is ridiculously low.
The VISA credit card processing network can process up to 24,000 transactions per second (currently about 1,740 per second).
Existing Web3 services can work because they are used mainly by a few geeks. They are not architecturally suited to do anything on a large scale.
Web3 is a security disaster
Credit card details get stolen and when it is yours it is very annoying. You need to get a new card and inform the credit card company that some transactions were fraudulent.
You can pee your pants.
But there are systems that protect you.
They are not perfect, but they work very well.
With a blockchain-based system, all those things disappear. For there is no “undoing.” If you have your bitcoin savings and someone has access to your key, those coins are gone forever.
We all know how easy it is to get people to click on a phishing email or simply let people infect your computer with a virus, the risk is in the walls.
If a virus can wipe out all your assets without the ability to correct that mistake, that is not a world we should want.
Web3 is just an attempt to find a use case for blockchain
When an engineer deals with a problem, he first collects the requirements.
What the system to be built has to do and how and for whom, etc. Then they look at existing technologies and see which technology and platform best meet the requirements.
With Web3 it is the opposite.
People had a blockchain that was only useful for trading unregulated securities without paying taxes. We are talking about Bitcoin. But they really wanted to use it somewhere.
With no real use cases in the 10 years that blockchains have been around, they simply redesigned a problem (the web is centralized and controlled by a few companies), put it in the blockchain, and claimed to have a solution.
NFTs don’t do what they claim to do
Web3 still wants to model real things through tokens, specifically NFTs.
But just because I created an NFT claiming that I own a Van Gogh painting, does not mean that I own that Van Gogh painting.
Regardless of what the token says.
NFTs also have no legal title to anything.
You can own an NFT that has a link pointing to some bad monkey artwork, but you don’t automatically have a license to the artwork or are the actual owner.
You own one thing says that you own the other thing. But you have no power over it.
I can create an NFT, pointing to “your” monkey and claiming to own it. Why should your NFT be better than mine?
NFTs are not even necessary for anything.
If it really came down to selling digital art, we have been doing that for a long time.
For some time now, people have been selling digital art as well.
The game Diablo even had a marketplace to sell the digital items to other players.
NFTs are not a revolution, they are a complicated re-implementation of things we have already done or are already doing better and more efficiently.
It is based on pyramid schemes
Cryptocurrencies are a so-called zero-sum game.
This means that all the money that someone receives must be paid back by someone else.
One person’s gains are another person’s losses.
That is one of the reasons why NFTs have become so big. It brought more people into the system who had to buy Ethereum to create it or buy their NFTs.
And that is the money that the people who hold the coins can use to pay.
The purpose of a system is what it does, and if what a system does is cheating and pyramid schemes, then that is its purpose. And that is a system that should die.
Join 400+ people who are getting free content on my Substack. It costs $0.
