Crypto: The World’s Greatest Scam. - 이중 자막
What you're looking at,
depending on who you ask,
is either a revolution for the internet and countless industries as we know it, or the Ponzi scheme in human history.
Accused of being all of these things, is the world of cryptocurrencies, or the other labels associated with it.
NFTs, blockchains, Web 3.0.
From the bizarre onslaught of celebrity promotions and endorsements...
I got an Ape too.
Present community, both Ape's.
...to the eye-watering numbers and headlines...
Individual Beeple, the final bid...
$69 million to the grandiose claims about its potential.
It's the biggest technology that's ever happened in the of life.
I once described the world of cryptocurrencies as a story and I did that in hopeful, optimistic tones.
And now I don't think it's the story that I initially thought it was.
We make money because some other sucker lost more.
Have fun staying poor.
It amazes me that anybody is buying into this.
They are decentralized Ponzi teams.
They only think that you have to show his Ponzi games.
It's all bullshit.
For me and many others, it began here.
What you're looking at is a piece of artwork by a digital artist called Michael Joseph Winkleman, otherwise known as Beeple.
On February 25th of 2021, this artwork was put on auction.
Bidding started at $100.
It eventually $100.
sold for 69.3 million dollars making it one of the biggest sales in digital art history.
That's I do feel super lucky.
What happened afterwards?
Where do I begin?
A artwork by a relatively unknown American artist.
Sold for nearly 70 million dollars.
That's more than most Picasso's Monet's or Warhol's.
Then it doesn't exist in physical form.
It is only available digitally.
It's the first NFT ever sold at auction.
Non-fungible token, NFT.
NFT's or non-fungible token.
Explain NFT's to people that don't know what you're talking about.
Because I don't know.
suddenly the term NFT was just everywhere.
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, sells a picture of his first ever tweet as an NFT.
Jack auctioning his first tweet as digital art.
2.9 million dollars.
Even popular internet memes were selling as this NFT thing.
Nyan $60,999.
His Oscar Girl, $500,000, Doge, $4 million, overly attached girlfriend, $411,000, Bad Luck Brian, $36,000, Scumbag Steve, $57,000.
You had singer, songwriter, grime, selling $6 million worth of digital art as NFTs.
People were changing their profile pictures on social media to NFTs that they had purchased.
It like flexing an expensive car or a watch.
And suddenly all these big celebrities and artists and influences were also replacing their profile pictures with NFTs and announcing their own purchases of NFTs.
And the Apes.
The Apes were part of this bigger project of NFTs called Boardape Yacht Club.
I you had Snoop Dogg,
M&M,
DJ Khaled,
Lil Baby,
Post Malone, Stephen Curry, Gwyneth Paltrow to name a few, all them purchasing these pictures of apes for sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And amongst this sea of high ticket sales, you would hear that this is all part of something revolutionary.
It's the biggest technology that's ever happened in the history of life, outside of things like fire.
Regardless of how much you knew about NFTs, there was one message that was really clear.
Behind every story, every headline, there was an underlying premise.
Something is happening, and there is a lot of money to be made.
to the show and congrats I'm getting married this is a big deal unless you run the show I asked you to explain NFTs.
So popular talk show host Jimmy Fallon does this segment on his show with Paris Hilton where they show off their pictures of borders.
It's really cool like the shape.
I love the red hearts on glasses.
I the captain hat.
It reminded me of me a little bit.
Look at this.
They could be friends.
They're buddies.
This was the point in which I started to wonder, okay, what is actually happening?
And think a lot of people started too as well.
You start to realize that the purchase of people's artwork, that wasn't done through 69.3 million dollars in cash.
That purchase was made using cryptocurrencies.
In fact, all the NFT purchases that we were seeing, they were done through cryptocurrency.
The individual who purchased people's artwork that went by the pseudonym Metacovin turns out it's this guy called Vignesh Sundarisen who is already a cryptocurrency
entrepreneur and had a working relationship with people months prior to the big sale.
And there was all this talk about the revolutionary potential behind what we're seeing,
There was another side of the story that was being painted by people who are far more sceptical and those voices had a clear warning.
What you are witnessing is a mania.
We've got this system that is gleefully and gloriously corrupt.
A mania that is being driven by greed.
Get rich quick by investing cryptocurrency,
my ape is an interreflection of myself or as other critics put it it is a giant scam that has some of the largest names brands venture capital firms backing
it knowingly or not NFTs were just a component of a much bigger machine with a lot of moving
pieces and we When put those pieces together,
it creates a machine for one of the greatest scams in human history,
and it all begins here with a mysterious invention and a failed revolution.
Two thousand and eight.
That's where this really begins.
Apple are just getting hammered this morning.
We're down by between three and four and a half percent generally.
The United States is going through a recession.
It hasn't seen since the Great Depression.
The consumers strangled.
They're watching their housing prices go lower.
They're watching their 401ks get diminished.
You created the mess we're in.
And you're saying, sorry.
Amongst the backdrop of this war, is working on their own invention.
On the 31st of October, they send an email to a cryptography mailing list.
The email begins.
I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer to peer with no trusted third party.
It was signed by somebody under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.
Whoever this Nakamoto person was, they had a vision.
The vision was to create a type of currency that existed digitally that could be controlled by no government or single individual that
could be used to transact in globally no matter where you were or what time it was.
The name of this currency and invention?
Bitcoin.
On January the 3rd 2009 Nakamoto launches his invention creating the first ever bitcoins to exist it was an attractive
pitch You know especially to people who held anti-state control sentiments,
you know talking about anarchists techno anarchists libertarians cypherpunks
These were individuals who likely saw the government the banks the entire financial institution Constitution as just untrustworthy,
that they can't be allowed to control monetary policy.
And was these factions that became the first adopters of Bitcoin influencing its early culture.
The was simple, preach the message of Bitcoin to others and increase its adoption.
Bitcoin was kind of like a religion of its own, right?
like Satoshi Nakamoto was this Jesus-like figure that would communicate with his disciples on online forums.
He would talk of this future vision of the world,
you know,
one where the dollar no longer existed and all transactions would be made through Bitcoin,
the global currency of the people that was owned by no central entity.
To those early adopters of Bitcoin, they really felt like they were on the cusp of something revolutionary.
It so happened that the more people started buying into the message
the higher bitcoins value rose and the more people were willing to put real dollars into buying bitcoins.
Bitcoin is now up to $111.
Bitcoin drawing attention from places it probably wasn't expecting.
or even wanting.
Stealing their initial idea of Facebook, they found out about Bitcoin on a holiday trip to Ibiza, and started buying as much as they could.
They stockpiling the currency.
It by around 2013 that they were rumored to own about 1% of all Bitcoin in circulation.
That, I think, was a perfect early warning of what was to come.
Bitcoin was doomed from the start.
That's a lot of crypto skeptics will tell you, and I understand why.
Relying on computer code and the ideals of tech anarchists probably isn't the best place to entrust a reimagining of the financial system.
Bitcoin had a fixed supply of 21 million coins, which makes it deflationary by nature.
So if one Bitcoin is worth it.
more tomorrow than it is today.
Why would you want to use it to transact with?
It's a pretty bad incentive to have if you're trying to make a global currency.
But that is already assuming that Bitcoin had the technical capabilities to become this worldwide currency, which it didn't.
Bitcoin had scaling issues thanks to design decisions that Nakamoto themselves had made.
It could only process 7 transactions per second compared to other traditional payment networks
like Visa which can process 1,700 transactions per second or MasterCard which handles 5,000
transactions per second and keeping the Bitcoin network running wasted a lot of energy.
Bitcoin aimed to be decentralized meaning a government or single entity had control over it.
But order to do that, Nakamoto employed what is called a proof-of-work consensus model.
All this meant was that computers on the Bitcoin network would be forced to use real-world energy in order to solve algorithmic problems.
And whichever computer solved the problem first would be rewarded with more bitcoins.
It was a processed coin.
mining and that process is insanely wasteful of energy and what ends up
happening proof of work incentivize this arms race between computers on the
Bitcoin network all of them looking to build more and more powerful computers to
have a better chance of mining Bitcoin and the more powerful those computers
grew the more real world energy they ended up taking despite the fact that the transactions per second remained the same.
Most Bitcoin mining done today is done by huge mining farms in warehouses.
Bitcoin, for the most part, failed in its objective of trying to become a global currency.
Outside of illegal use purposes, Bitcoin just wasn't being used to transact with.
So, the obvious question...
becomes how?
How is it that despite its failings, Bitcoin still survived and is very much present to this day?
But that's just the thing.
The Bitcoin that we see today is a shell of its former identity,
where most of the purchasing of Bitcoin today happens on centralized exchanges that have to comply with the laws of centralized institutions.
institutions in the instances where you've heard about Bitcoin or if you've ever been encouraged to buy Bitcoin under what context is that
Always framed by 2014 the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto
Effectively vanished from the internet and hasn't been heard from since what was left of his invention was no longer a currency
was something entirely different.
Bernie made off.
This was a guy who was well respected on Wall Street.
He ran a brokerage firm with a wealth management branch.
He had many clients investing with his firm
under the promise of great returns on their money
until the FBI arrested him this morning
He told senior employees yesterday that his business was a giant Ponzi scheme made
off had been running the largest Ponzi scheme in history for the last 17 years and potentially longer worth around $64.8 billion.
He would essentially put his investors money inside a bank account and then simply pay out
early investors with the money
that new investors were giving now made off eventually pleaded guilty and he was in prison
up until his death in 2021 that is the essence of Eddie Ponzi scheme people invest into the
scheme under this promise that they're going to make a great amount of returns and then early
investors are paid using the money of new investors and this process is repeated
on and on until eventually you run out of new recruits to keep investing money into the scheme,
or eventually people start trying to cash out in it just collapses,
which tends to leave early investors with profits and the large majority of others with nothing but losses.
People hearing about Bitcoin would hear about two things.
One, that it was revolutionary.
And two, that it was a valuable, that if you buy now, you could be rich later.
If you really, really want to become wealthy in the future, I'd suggest you take one frickin' dollar, buy some Bitcoin.
Bitcoin, to me, it's not just an investment, it's not just a maybe a get-rich-quick scheme as a lot of people put it, but I...
see it as the future of currency.
I it as the future of the financial system.
So you realize that most of the people buying Bitcoin, they're not buying it to use as a currency.
They're buying it as an investment.
And therein lies the contradiction.
Because the more people who used Bitcoin like an investment, the less liable Bitcoin became as a currency, the very thing, it's being pinned.
has been revolutionary as.
So you know what you end up with, right?
Bitcoin is a get rich quick scheme.
The promise is you can get rich for free, magical internet money.
Anyone buys into the idea of Bitcoin is doing so to sell it for a higher price at a future date and the people that buy it of
those people are also looking to sell it for a higher price.
price at a future day, the only way to make money from your bitcoin investment is using the money of new investors.
You hear about people making money in bitcoin, they only make money because some other sucker lost more.
Here you have an entity that isn't owned by anyone, or some would argue isn't a decentralized currency.
It's a decentralized Ponzi scheme.
Now Ponzi schemes are kept alive by continuously finding new recruits and new markets to tap
into so that money is continuously being poured into the scheme.
And so you start to see this similar incentive.
develop in the crypto space,
this desperate need to find a use case for this stuff, and that use case has to be revolutionary enough to justify its rising value.
Bitcoin may have been the first part of this machine, but things were about to get a whole lot more interesting.
Bitcoin had something going for it.
The blockchain system that kept it running was somewhat unique okay so let's not complicate things right you can think
of bitcoin like a digital spreadsheet that records transactions being used in the currency it's not
a physical coin it's just data on a database after a certain number of transactions are made
a brand new spreadsheet is created that links to the previous one and on and on and on it goes.
Instead using real names, users are recognized through what are called wallet addresses, which as a random string of numbers and letters.
And all of this is kind of kept together using computer code,
cryptography, and the network of miners that are running it, which is where the word cryptocurrency comes from.
So what was essentially just an immutable, appartable appartable.
The-only database was touted as revolutionary, you blockchain was no longer just blockchain, it was blockchain technology.
And it wasn't long before people started to see the success and the ideals that Bitcoin
was based off and begin creating their own cryptocurrencies using this blockchain system.
A teenager who decided to quit his favourite video game World of Warcraft after his warlock
character had a damage component removed by the game developers.
Vitalik says that he cried himself to sleep that night, that was the day that he realised the horrors that centralised services bring.
It sounds a bit ridiculous but Vitalik...
end up discovering bitcoin in 2011 and he would start writing for a bitcoin magazine.
It appealed to his ideals.
In 2015, Vitalik and several other co-founders launched the creation of their own blockchain-based invention.
It called Ethereum.
Much like Bitcoin, Ethereum had its own blockchain and it had its own native currency.
which was called Ether.
There one important difference though.
You see, Ethereum allowed its users to actually program applications on its blockchain.
Put it this way,
if Bitcoin was like a spreadsheet, then Ethereum was like an Excel spreadsheet that allowed users to create functions to perform various different tasks.
It was, you know, a little more advanced.
It a glimpse of hope at finding the revolutionary use cases in the cryptocurrency world needed in order to justify the growing value that was being pumped into the system.
So, what was the first thing that people started using Ethereum for?
Creating more cryptocurrencies.
And today we will be creating our own cryptocurrency.
currency in under 10 or maybe even under five minutes.
Rather than needing to create your own blockchain and network,
you could just use Ethereum's blockchain to create your own cryptocurrencies or crypto assets as people called them.
These assets that existed without their own native blockchain were called tokens.
There are now over 1,500 crypto assets.
It became known as the ICO mania.
It supposed to be this new way to fund your business.
Businesses could create their own token coins,
release what is called a white paper,
which explains what the project aimed to do, and then they could sell those tokens to the public, otherwise known as an initial coin offering.
ICO.
A whole...
wave of these token coins were being released.
Some of them parodies and others were just blatant scams.
It's coin.
The Wobber coin.
Trump coin.
Kodak coin.
Insane coin.
But here it is.
I created Dick Tudor coin.
Jesus coin was a token coin that was promising to decentralize Jesus on the blockchain.
On its white paper.
It's creators stated they were in a- early talks with churches to provide miracles exclusively to Jesus coin owners.
Ponzi coin was very much open about the fact that it was a scam.
Their website literally said it right there,
it's as much as a scam as 99% of the ICOs out there, but it's more transparent about it.
Ponzi coin still managed to raise $250,000, it didn't matter.
if the idea was good enough or not or if it even solved the problems it was claiming to solve all
the matter was that people believed in the token enough so that the value would rise and it would
pay off the early investors who got in at the start.
There one that you invested in that saw like two thousand percent growth last month?
Yep.
What it?
That was difficult.
ICOs also marked the beginning of a unlikely friendship between those in the cryptocurrency space and influencers and celebrities.
If token coins were fueled by hype and attention, then celebrities and influencers were the ones that were running the gas stations.
Famous boxer Floyd Mayweather, along with producer DJ Khaled, were paid $100,000 and $50,000 respectively.
to promote the token coin Centra Tech in 2017.
Centra Tech was a project that was promising to deliver financial services to the cryptocurrency world.
The coin had raised $32 million dollars.
Turns out,
they lied about their CEO who wasn't even a real person that existed,
they about business deals with MasterCard and Visa, and it's co-founder, founder, Sam Sharma, was eventually sentenced to eight years in prison.
ICOs effectively became a casino to gamble on registered securities, but you have to remember the hidden incentives.
No matter how fraudulent or bizarre everything looks on the outside in the crypto world,
you have to keep clushing a potential use cases or anything that will just
It's value constantly rising to new investors and whilst the ICO mania of 2017 was continuing a whole new idea was coming to fruition
So how many of y have heard of this new game that came out recently?
I know how you how do we actually describe what these things are and today we're talking about crypto kitties crypto kitties was
probably one of the first NFT projects to make it into the spotlight.
You logged onto the site,
you created an account that was connected to your crypto wallet and you'd play this game in which you would collect,
breed and sell virtual cats for crypto.
though currency.
The pitch here though is that every cat is its own unique token that exists on the Ethereum blockchain making them what you would essentially call non-fungible or as they're often
called now a non-fungible token, an NFT.
Think of it like a digital beanie babies.
Now if that sounds a little weird it's because It is crypto keys became like its own mania.
It three million dollars within its first week of launch and accounted for roughly 10 to 13% of all traffic on Ethereum's network.
And where was everyone's focus during that mania?
Okay, that's two thousand seven hundred dollars for this little guy.
Why use that?
these crypto kitties $450,000 for this ugly month the same reason you started out
with the cryptocurrency to make money guys this is a potential way to make some
money this is insane most users are trying to breed their cats at the moment
not because it's kind of cool but also because they can be very expensive there
are thousands of people playing on the crypto kitties website once everyone's starting rushing to join in on the hype.
The of the game began to falter as the supply of crypto kitties stretched far beyond the demand,
eventually to a crash in the price of crypto kitties and a fall in average users.
Because as you continue to see time and time again, almost everyone was there to make money.
But what we're The of that saga was the idea of non-fungible assets.
A new package, a new pitch, a new route to find use cases for cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.
This stuff was initially pitched to digital artists.
The idea was that you would make artwork, artwork, which just means turning it into a token that exists on a blockchain like Ethereum.
If you wanted to know who owned the artwork,
all you had to do was just go and check the blockchain records and see which wallet was associated with the artwork.
In theory, you could digitally verify the ownership of your art.
Sounds exciting.
You might think.
I did too.
digital artist Michael Winkleman otherwise known as Beeple began a challenge in
2007 where he would create one piece of artwork every single day and continue to do so throughout the years.
It was known as his everyday's collection.
But me the bigger project is this long-term everyday's project which is a project that I've been working on,
you know, every single day for over 12 years.
It was reportedly around October of 2020 when people was put in touch with an
anonymous NFT artist called PAC and PAC informed people about the world of NFTs.
Only a few months later,
he would end up auctioning a piece of artwork that contained a collage of the first thousand images of the Every Days series titled Every Days the first 5,000 days.
$69.3 million was how much it sold for in the Ether cryptocurrency,
one of the largest sales in digital art history, the very sale that sent the search term NFT skyrocketing.
So now the question becomes
Who decided to make that purchase so you purchased a collection of 5,000 pieces of digital art that anyone can easily see online
for 69 million dollars Why did you do that?
Metacovan or as they were later revealed to be Vignesh Sunda recent a crypto entrepreneur who
recently co-founded a crypto investment firm with his business partner called Metapurse.
Only a few months before this big $69 million purchase,
Metacovent and his business partner had already bought another collection of NFTs from Beeple for over $2.2 million.
They actually wrote a blog post about their purchase eluding
to the fact that this was only part of a much bigger project that they had in mind that will
quote flip the art world status quo on its head and what was that project that they were talking about?
The B20 token coin.
They were going to bundle their purchases of Beeple's NFTs collection and put it in a virtual museum where those who purchased the B20 token
and coin could access and view the artwork.
Owning the B-20 token was supposed to represent a type of fractional ownership in the virtual museum and the contents inside of it.
Here's the thing.
Metacovin and his business partner conveniently owned 59% of the total supply of B-20 tokens.
Beeple was also given.
2% of that supply.
Beeple and Metacovin already had a working relationship before the big every day's 5,000 sale.
When that sale happened and the media frenzy ensued,
the B20 token rose in value to $23 as more people began obviously looking into who Metacovin was.
People have accused that sale of essentially being a giant marketing stunt to increase the value of the B20 token.
Even in their calls together,
you can hear people express skepticism around the whole thing, only for Metacovin and the others to kind of bring him around.
work and like splitting it in a million pieces and reselling most pieces,
that I would be very surprised if other artists did not have a very strong dislike of that.
But what I find the most insane about this saga was that the B20 virtual museum that
was supposed to flip Despite art world status quo was nothing impressive,
the B20 token has fallen over 99% in value since it's all time high.
Despite all of this, Metacovans sales sent headlines skyrocketing.
Suddenly, NFTs were being created out of internet memes or anything really that was culturally relevant.
to the internet.
into NFT projects.
These contained up to thousands of NFTs inside of them, usually following a certain theme or concept.
What are crypto punks?
These are the crypto punks.
They're basically 25 by 25 pixels.
Yeah, they're icons of zombies and uh, alien zombies and yeah, they all have different mohawks and glasses and beard type.
What is Cool Cats, the coolest NFTs on the Block King?
This project is previously known as Akira.
It's got Pudgy penguins on the chopping block today.
it had been with Bitcoin and token coins,
the name of the game was about hyping up a project that you can sell it for profit later.
NFTs though were cooler than your average token coins, so they had art behind them.
You could show them off by replacing your social media profile picture with an NFT you purchased.
More so than ever, hype and attention became an important part of growing the value of an NFT, which brings us to the apes.
One of the most significant projects created after Beeple's sale was the Board Ape Yacht Club, otherwise shortened to just Basie.
Founded by the company Yugelabs, the project featured 10,000 different pictures of apes with this distinct board expression on their face.
The Board Ape Yacht Club project had managed to arrive into the NFT space at just the right time,
about a month after Beeple's big sale.
There were a few popular people inside of the NFT space,
already one of which went by the name of Jimmy McNeill's,
otherwise known as Jimmy Eath on Twitter, who shortly after finding out about the project, announces their purchase of hundreds of bordape NFTs.
Then another popular figure in the NFT space,
Pranksi, who had around 50,000 followers at the time, tweets their own purchase of 250 bordates, which later grows to 1,250.
And all the time these guys are tweeting about their purchases to their followers, it starts to create this buzz.
inside of the crypto space.
and changing their profile pictures to those apes.
In August, the popular DJ Steve Aoki tweets his own $40,000 purchase of a board ape to his millions of followers.
Hashtag ape.
Follow ape.
They began trending immediately.
Famous digital artists, people tweeting about it and creating an artwork about it which continue to drive up the price on board.
One of the shadiest parts about everything that followed were the bloodlines
between celebrities and influencers clearly manipulating a market to pump up the value of their NFTs and genuine posts simply just showing off their purchases.
You had Justin Bieber in January of this year.
a picture of a board 8 number 3001 to his 251 million followers, a purchase that was reportedly worth 1.3 million dollars.
Everyone sort of assumes that Justin was the one that made the purchase himself right and he's just posting it on his Instagram.
But then Twitter users started to look into the records and they find that Justin sub
The proposed wallet had received 900 Ether from another wallet address,
and that wallet address was associated with an individual named Jan Piero di Alessandro, or, as many others may recognise him, Justin Bieber's business partner.
And Jan Piero owned his own NFT collection called Inbetweeners, which Bieber had been promoting on social media already.
In those posts no disclaimer was made suggesting that Bieber had been paid to promote them I just got my first NFT.
Are you dead?
What was it?
I threw moon pay In some of the announcements from celebrities about their NFT purchases
There was this constant reference to a company called moon pay thanking them for help with purchasing their NFT Turns out,
Moonpay was a company that was launched in 2019, which according to their website had one singular aim, to increase cryptocurrency adoption.
So begs the question, what is the relationship between Moonpay and the supposed celebrities and influencers?
is their helping buy NFTs.
Isn't it a little shady that you have the CEO of a guy called Ivan Soto Wright,
who is an active participant in the NFT market,
who is clearly well connected to the celebrities using his company's service,
who has access to insider information and likely knows when celebrities may purchase an NFT before they do it.
And surprise, people started finding out that right on numerous occasions, has purchased NFT projects right before celebrities end up purchasing them.
Prominent crypto skeptic and author David Gerard had this post on his blog.
It titled Cryptogrifters Try to Scam Artists Again.
He wrote, the NFT grift works like this.
One, tell artists There's a gusher of free money.
And if it sees all the future, if you want to get another piece, you're guaranteed to make some money because it's new, it's fresh.
Two, they need to buy into crypto to get the gusher of free money.
Three, they become crypto advocates and make excuses for proof of work and so on.
Four, a few artists really are making life-changing money.
from this, five, you probably won't be one of them.
It's sold to you as this amazing thing where art is digitally verified on the blockchain.
And that pitch makes you think that on the blockchain,
when you purchase an NFT, there's literally an entry that shows your wallet and the actual image of the NFT you purchased right there.
You want to know what is actually the case.
case with most NFTs, there is no picture attached to the transaction.
Instead, it's usually a HTTPS or IPFS link containing the stored NFT image.
So what you're purchasing with most NFTs is just an entry in a database that contains a link to the image that anyone else
can also access.
leading to call that ownership.
But I guess at the end of the day,
that doesn't matter when, just like ICOs, NFTs were just another speculative financial investment to throw your money into.
And to do that, you had to buy into cryptocurrencies.
More money funneled into the machine.
In my experience of looking into crypto communities and its culture and various projects, there is this game that is being played.
Some are blatant about it and others less so, but the game is this.
Everyone is playing a role in promoting their project,
calling it revolutionary,
saying that this isn't like the others,
but ultimately everyone knows that at some point they're going to sell
And perhaps it is because of the greater full nature of the crypto ecosystem where everyone
is incentivized to keep putting money into the system and to keep pushing it while simultaneously dismissing criticism.
On the surface, everything is supposed to be positive and optimistic.
You have catchphrases and actions that are commonly used in cryptocurrency communities.
Hoddle, short for hold on for dear life, which to holding onto your crypto assets, no matter what.
Hoddling is seen as a good thing.
Today we're gonna be talking about the art of the whole.
Wagami, short for we're all going to make it, which is used as both a greeting and an easy catch phrase to keep morale high.
We're all gonna make it.
We're still early is a sentiment often echoed in crypto communities,
an encouraging message for those who are both new and old in the space letting them know that they haven't
missed out on the opportunity and further riches are on the horizon, don't.
abandoned hope.
Is it too late to get into crypto?
No, never.
It's never to late.
It's actually too early.
It's extremely early still.
Those who hold on to their crypto assets, even when there is really good reason to sell, are called diamond hands.
Diamond hands is actually a requirement.
Keep diamond hands in, okay?
A positive tree that is encouraged, whereas those who do sell, are labelled paper hands, a negative tray, which is actively discouraged.
The worst part about paper-handed investors is that it influences other people to grow paper on their hands.
Most crypto communities are encouraged to say good morning and good night to each other every day.
Shorten to just a GM and GM.
kind of like a regular check-in and check-out with members.
Negativity is usually handled in the same way, since one group's negativity can actually devalue a project and affect everyone else's ability to make money.
If there's some bad news about a particular cryptocurrency project or cryptocurrencies in general, it can be dismissed as FUD, a abbreviation for FUD.
fear, uncertainty and doubt.
have fun staying poor, which is a not-so-subtle nod to people's true intentions within the space.
Or criticism is actually spun into a good thing for the project.
These are all very convenient actions to encourage when keeping someone engaged and hopeful in a crypto project is financially beneficial to everyone else.
The NFT mania did something.
I think it grew so big and so in your face from influencers and celebrities that it started making people mud.
you guys for allowing me to scream about NFT cartoons.
I hate this stuff.
It's getting worse.
Check this out.
I got a board bunny and not only is a board bunny but it looks like me.
Look at that.
Nothing makes people hate you faster than NFT shilling.
You're young and naive just like my brother and you want to get into NFTs.
You should check out board bunny.
New bunny and NFT project has now been classified as a scam.
Welcome David Dobert to the long list of influencers promoting scams.
Further claiming the team has disappeared with six million dollars.
It's great to be a part of this project.
I love the designs inspired by Pokemon.
It's a Pokemon knockoff.
It's just like stealing money from people who are fans of Pokemon.
You hope I don't not miss this.
They promised Pokemon.
on partnerships and it was all a lie and it ended up raking in 6.3 million dollars.
For the last six months I've been working on my own NFT project.
So the project is called CryptoZoo.
I believe it's going to change the game.
CryptoZoo, Logan Paul's newest project are basically a bunch of stock photos from Adobe that have been poor.
whenever a big celebrity or influencer would post something related to NFTs on their social media,
you'd see a whole slew of people responding with, oh no.
no, not you too.
And this wasn't just limited to individuals either.
Companies getting a lot of flack for even talking about or dabbling into NFTs.
In 2021, people found out what cryptocurrency actually wasn't like hated.
It is all get-rich quick schemes promoted using technology as the cover.
All of it.
That's what crypto is.
NFTs and NFTs.
I think in June of 1500 computer scientists and technologists who wrote to Congress calling for more responsible regulation of crypto assets.
They said the catastrophies and externalities related to blockchain technologies and crypto
asset investments are the inevitable outcomes of a technology that is not built for purpose and will remain forever unsuitable.
as a foundation for large-scale economic activity.
And you start to wonder, like, okay, like, what's going to happen?
And I know that it really shouldn't surprise me.
But a whole new packaging had been in the works, and a brand new word was taking the stage.
Our mission at Moonpay is to onboard the world to web.
I have to admit, it's a pretty convincing narrative.
The iteration of the internet, Web.0, was essentially the first version of the web, mostly consisting of web pages and information.
There much you could actually interact with.
Then came along Web 2.0, which brought access to many new features it focused on.
on user-generated content, social media, and forms of participation.
This of the internet became dominated by large corporations.
Web.0 is our current modern day version of the internet.
But now, Web 3.0 is coming.
It kind of just referred to a bunch of different things,
but the idea was that a new
version of the internet is here where your online activity was going to be making use of blockchains and tokens to some degree or another.
So in theory the now centralized version of the internet owned by Big Tech would become owned now by its users.
In its initial bubble NFTs were seen as just digital art right which is quite limiting.
At end of the day,
NFTs are just data on a public database that can act as a receipt of ownership over whatever that data contained.
You whether it was a coin or it was a web link to a digital piece of art.
The idea was that if NFTs could prove ownership over something, then you could put anything on the blockchain.
Real estate titles, medical records, universes.
university degrees, legal records.
In case of Web3, you'd have social media sites and video games all incorporating blockchain and NFTs into their business model.
It didn't really matter what it was or how it would work exactly.
It just became this game of insert anything here but on the blockchain.
And just like that, you've made it revolutionary.
You've just recreated the entire mortgage infrastructure that already exists today.
On the blockchain.
But that's exactly it.
The in real estate is going to be pretty mainstream, five to ten years from now.
You see solar grids, electric grids, self-driving car grids that will essentially be machine-run and controlled and administered by blockchains.
Best use case for blockchain is health care.
What can and can't be turned into an entity?
Ultimately what we're talking about is the tokenization of everything.
Never mind if blockchains or tokenization actually fixed the issues that it was claiming to solve in these industries.
It was literally the definition of a solution in search of a problem.
And then I'm lost as to like why the on the blockchain part matters, besides basically what everyone means.
they mean, oh, I want a public record of the transaction.
Okay.
I mean,
people suggested that you could replace legal contracts with smart contracts,
which are programs that are built on the blockchain, and that's usually accompanied with the phrase, code is law.
This is a smart contract, and this is a legal contract.
These two things aren't the same.
same, right?
You have law being acted by computer code because law inherently requires third parties to assess evidence,
intentions, and a bunch of other variables that you just can't outsource that to computer code, especially when that code is on the blockchain and it
cannot be altered.
Nicholas a researcher and lecturer at UC Berkeley's Department for Computer Science, has this interview.
with current affairs and he brought up what he called weavers iron law of blockchain when somebody
says you can solve x with blockchain they don't understand x and you can just ignore them so you
start to wonder right who is behind all of this money that's coming and pouring into the
crypto and web three space where is it coming from and why either i'm not seeing the revolutionary potential that all of this has,
or this genuinely is a massive mania and bubble that is being fueled by greed and delusion.
It's so called the next version of the internet that's attracting a big money from a venture capital.
Venture firm called Andreessen Horowitz, have you guys heard of it?
I kept seeing this venture capital name,
We've been in the space for a long time kind of a big deal running the crypto fund with more than 7 billion and capital to deploy
Andreessen Horowitz
Otherwise known as a 16z they're one of the largest venture capital firms
They have a crypto fund with around 7.6 billion to be invested in crypto and web 3 startups and have
been investing in crypto companies dating back to 2013.
If wanted to meet the smart money behind all of this, then these guys were the best place to start.
They say that crypto is far more than just a financial innovation.
It's social, cultural, technological.
In the month of October of 2021, A16Z led a funding of $150 million towards the company that was behind Axie Infinity.
A16Z general partner Ariana Simpson claimed that this was an example of where Web3 is going to revolutionize the internet.
In own words,
literally, Axie embodies a new generation of games, what this means for the future of games,
and the web as we know it, is as big as your imagination will allow, where do I begin?
Axie Infinity was what you would call a play to earn game,
it this new genre of games appearing in the web3 space which as the name suggests allows players to make money when
they play the game.
In case of Axie Infinity what you had was this game where people would breed, collect and collect collect.
fight with these creatures called axes.
When inside the game it was possible to earn this token called SLP, which could actually be traded for real money.
So started happening?
Well, people started playing the game, but instead of focusing on the fun of the game, the focus became on how to earn or SLP.
How do we profit from Axie and Finney?
The most expensive Axie ever sold was worth about $800,000.
I've invested $13,232.
To even play Axie Infinity, you had to purchase three Axie NFTs, right?
And the value of Axie NFTs started to rise, certain players wouldn't be able to afford the buy-in price.
guess what started happening.
Those who had the money to buy three axes began to lend their creatures out to players who couldn't afford it and they were called scholars.
How set up your own scholarship program as a manager in Axie Infinity.
I'll be giving out a scholarship every two weeks so that's another six scholarships is my goal.
Scholars would then play the game using Using their rented axes, earn SLP and then give a cut of their earnings to their managers.
gaming juggernaut that has led people in countries like Philippines and Evanna Zuela to make a living.
These players from the Philippines who are making a living playing
access in it most of the scholars who couldn't afford the buy-in price they
were from developing countries right people who likely saw Axie Infinity not
as a game of leisure but as a means of producing income I am here to I can play 6-12 hours a day,
just for playing acid infinity.
I want to help my family under expenses and save up money for my tuition and college.
What you ended up with was a game where players are playing in order to make money.
People are basically feeding their entire villagers playing our game.
But the only reason that they're making money is because others are buying in to also make money.
of things like Axie and Finney, there are a of innocent victims, right?
And you run a pyramid scheme,
unfortunately, you get a bunch of poor people in the Philippines who are poor when they start, and they're just hoping to make some money, but then what happens
is actually lose money.
The value of SLP, which is the token that people use to actually make money in the game, has fallen 99% since its peak.
And it's user base has been in decline since.
Times Magazine came out with this article and it was interviewing this guy called Samerson O'Rias,
a line cook from the Philippines who was facing financial stress after his mother had a stroke and electricity and grocery bills were stacking up.
O'Rias jumped into the Axie Infinity game and then exited 14 months later.
He described it as boring, and stressful.
Again, I find myself coming back to the same question.
What is it that VC firms are seeing the potential in in this crypto space?
Why do they keep pouring money into it?
The overwhelming majority of tokens are securities.
But being dumped onto retail investors.
is being done explicitly by venture firms,
I won't mention any names, who are buying into companies early, getting into tokens, and then those tokens are being listed on exchanges.
The public is buying into them in order to get a financial gain.
They have no interest in using those tokens for any utility.
VC firms have a commonly used strategy.
They invest in a bunch of startups,
most of those startups will fail,
a few will succeed and with the ones that succeed,
a VC needs to decide on an exit strategy, an event that allows them to liquidate their position in a company and essentially make money.
This is a process that can take years.
So there's another idea that is proposed by Skeptics,
that the world,
of crypto offers an incentive for VC firms to invest in a crypto company,
receive a percentage of their tokens and then sell those tokens to retail traders when it becomes publicly available,
all achievable within months, highly profitable and fairly unregulated.
With crypto tokens,
they can cash out in a few months and the way that this actually works is they encourage their fundees to basically issue unregistered securities.
Anderson Horowitz invested in a bunch of startups that all issued tokens that all got
dumped on retail including Anderson Horowitz dumping a lot of them on retail.
This is blatant.
securities front, but they didn't commit the securities front.
It just the companies they invested in.
On the surface,
Web3 has this narrative,
which is all about taking money out of the hands of the rich and the big tech and giving it back to the users.
But is the exact same company that has funded some of the biggest Web2 companies.
companies like Facebook and Twitter.
I'm sure that there are many inside of these
firms that really believe in the potential of Web3 or crypto or blockchains or whatever buzzword you wanna use,
but it becomes increasingly harder to see that as anything other than hyper-optimism or another word for it, delusion.
There's this interview.
with Mark Andreessen,
who's the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz,
and he's on this podcast episode with an economist and blogger called Tyler Cohen,
and he proposes the idea for podcasts to make use of Web3.
The well-known podcast host, how does that person get paid in a better way through Web3.0?
Make that more concrete for us.
Now, Mark Andreessen is someone that by all accounts should have a good answer to this question.
But instead, I mean, they can pick their business model.
I they can pick their business model.
They decide just to face this model.
Microtransactions, they can pick whatever model they want.
They also have indirect, you there's this whole new rise of this, kind of the non-punchable token.
And when pressed to give an actual use case,
what you get is an answer with all the right buzz words and phrases, but little actual substance.
narrative that a lot of crypto enthusiasts will also use.
You hate it, you may think it's a fad, but crypto and web 3.0 are just like the internet.
Even I made this comparison when I looked at the entire space in a more favourable light.
Now though, I just think it's another form of smoke and mirrors.
It is the biggest technology shift since the internet, the blockchain.
the consumer blockchain's the biggest new thing since the internet itself.
Bitcoin began in 2009.
Arguably blockchain technology and the foundations for it began even earlier than that.
It's been 13 years since this story began with Bitcoin.
13 years to find a solid use case, where at least one that justifies the hype and is already better than an existing system.
crypto and web 3 is really great at one thing which is trading its speculation and there is absolutely no democratization of anything the centralization of exchanges
centralization of miners centralization of crypto world is the most concentrated amount of centralized world in the history of humanity,
worse than we see it, worse than we see it, it's all bullshit.
13 years after 1983, which is considered to be the birth of the internet, we were already seeing very clear car use cases.
Even in those early days,
people could get weather reports, they could check the news, they could send emails and many other uses that we still use to this day.
I sent a message to my doctor asking for a repeat prescription and he's left the prescription for me in the chemist.
By even making the comparison to one of the biggest revolutions in information and communication
is already assuming that cryptocurrencies are revolutionary and they're bound to find
mass adoption at some point when that is the very few
We're putting into question
One recent post that I remember on the Bitcoin subreddit was titled
Does anyone else feel like Bitcoin is their literal last ditch effort to become wealthy in their lifetime?
I don't imagine that this is the only person in the crypto space that is thinking that way the crypto machine has continued running,
new packaging of ideas,
more money funneled into the system, and a constant search to find a use case that justifies the hype and the claims of revolutionary technology.
If the critics are right, then what we're looking at is a ticking time bomb.
If the critics are right, then this is a scheme that will leave tons of people.
of regular individuals left holding their bags wondering how this managed to happen.
It has.
A scheme that managed to infiltrate the realm of media and entertainment that managed to make use of social media's ability to spread this fear of missing out,
the on greed and a get-rich-quick mentality.
If critics are right, then I suppose only one question that remains.
At what point does the ticking time ball go off?
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