| What I find sad about cryptocurrencies is that they combine the addictive contagion of pseudo-science conspiracies, with the drive and vigour of ponzi schemes.
Just imagine a Marxist trying to argue with a straight face that cryptomining is labour, and you’ll see what I mean. They have to keep arguing in order to bring new suckers into the scam, and the topic is just esoteric enough that it is unfalsifiable. I mean *is* cryptomining labour? Let me type fifty pages explaining why, and watch you get gassed out of the fight.
Like a good conspiracy theory, it’s malleable enough to adapt to any ideology, though radicals are usually so adept at ignoring sneers and jibes that they are especially vulnerable to ideas that plainly defy common sense. Ethereum is being heralded as the “leftist cryptocoin” to Bitcoins’ tech-bro profile… because any minute now, Ethereum is going to switch from the enviro-destroying “proof of work” to the wonder tech of “proof of stake!” Because billions of people are currently unbanked and crypto is the answer! Because you’ve just been brainwashed by the big banks!
Meanwhile, I’ve never met a crypto nerd who had anything at all to say about credit unions as an alternative to banks. Not a list of why they are just as bad as banks, not an interest in checking them out, not a witty comeback about how they are a front for the capitalist conspiracies - just a failure to grapple with an actual non-profit paradigm that challenges the really profit-making motivation of most crypto projects. I can understand that Reagan joining a credit union harder, because he was a fascist jerk, but it’s not THAT hard.
Invest in community!? "No, I’ve got a bundle stashed on the hardware wallet buried in my backyard!!"
"I hate inflation! That’s why I own Bitcoin which at any moment could fork into *two fucking currencies at once* like Captain Kirk and his evil self becoming two entities.”
Imagine if the US dollar could suddenly fork into two projects? How many cities would burn as people panicked about which fork would actually hold value the following week? “I’ll just hold USD and trade all my USD+ for Doge!"
Like the anti-maskers, a crypto bro can always just shout “do your own research.”
I agree with Rachel. Wow.
Gaming the system is a feature, not a bug, of the financial markets. After you analyze it for a while (as I did for about a decade) you just get too disgusted to go on. New technologies/same principles. I didn't know that Hirst and Jopling were behind the diamond skull episode, but it's par for the course.
What's so sad is not only that we are relentlessly told that this is the best way of allocating capital to productive enterprise. Or for that matter, that we are relentlessly told the blockchain will save us from corrupt banks and governments. What's tragic is that the scams of the oligarchy - or what Veblen called the "New Barbarians" - are consistently able to fascinate global public opinion, while the lived environment decays.
I am not "just" talking about CO2, nor "just" about basic infrastructure, but also about decaying social relations between the impoverished/abused and all the rest. American cities got close to urban warfare this summer. You gotta wonder what next time will be like.
In that regard, the hacker fascination with cryptocurrencies is a symptom of the same disease. There's no use going further with it. In the end, no one will be liberated. Everyone will be stuck with worse conditions on the ground. This is a dead-end avenue for culture. Crptocurrencies are the electronic mirror of the New Barbarians.
wow. that story reminds me of the auction of Damian Hirst's For the Love of God in 2007 (the diamond skull). it sold for something staggering like $100 million to a private collector, but the collector was later revealed to be an investment consortium consisting of Hirst, his dealer Jay Joplin and a third unnamed party.
On 14.03.21 14:25, Rachel O' Dwyer wrote:
> The article includes a discussion of economic *'signalling' *that was
> prompted by conversations with Ruth Catlow which chimes with Felix's
> questions about what the digital art purchase 'says'.
Doma alerted me to this analysis, and if it's correct, then this is
basically a "pump-and-dump" scheme.
https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beeple-art-buyer-and-his-nft-defi-scheme
I suspect there is more to it, more layers of scamminess, but so far the
story goes like this:
The buyer, MetaKovan, and the seller, Metapurse, are entities
controlled by the same person, Vignesh Sundaresan.
Metapurse is a fund which owns digital art works. It's mission is to
"democratize access and ownership to artwork." Quite a statement to make
in relation to digital art, but the entire story is full of scammy
rhetoric.
You can buy into this fund, called B20, then you own a tiny portion of
its art works. You do this by buying special B.20 tokens. The value of
these tokens reflects some speculative position on the underlying value
of the art works held by the funds or profits to be made from selling
these works.
There are 10 million tokens minted. 56% of these are owned by
Metapurse/MetaKovan who thus controls the entire process in terms of
writing to the blockchain. 2% are owned by Beeple himself (oh!). In
December, Metapurse bought Beeple's art work for 2.2 million. On January
23, Metapurse sold 1.6 million tokens at $0.36 a pop.
After the sale, which greatly inflated the value of the "assets" held by
the fund, the value of the tokens rose to 23.00 and then fell back to
16.00. Given that buyer and seller are controlled by the same person,
the actual costs for the purchase are only the feeds to be paid to
Christie's, some 9 million.
You can do he math yourself, but the profit margins are staggering, if
Sundaresan manages to to get cash out his own tokens while it lasts.
What I find remarkable is the role of Christie's in generating the
narrative. Auction houses seem to have specialized in this lately,
perhaps they always have. But, remember Sotheby's sold a Banksy work
that shredded itself (Oct 2018). Well, almost shredded. The story went
around the world, greatly enhancing the value of the work. It's hard to
phantom that Sotheby's did not examine the art work before hence
realized that there was something hidden in the frame. Or, when
Christie's auctioned off the "Portrait of Edmond de Belamy" in December
2018. The value is really generated by the story, told by a blue-chip
auction house.
The fact that all of this is so scammy doesn't seem to matter, because
it's the money that makes it real, the sheer scale is self-validating,
even if the money itself is barely real to begin with.
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