158 - You're Not Bullish Enough on NFTs with Punk6529

I have this general approach to technology that when you're not sure, you should just try it. Most errors on the technology side, most people that start missing changes in technology, is because they try and read about it and figure out by reading about it if it makes sense.

Ethereum is proof-of-stake, and Bitcoin is proof-of-work. Solana does more transactions per second, but it's more centralized. You know who cares about this? Nobody. This is literally like saying... 'Look at this amazing application; it's called Instagram. Did you know that they're using python on the backend?' Literally not a single person has adopted Instagram because it uses python.

Every day, the last 20 years, it's going in one direction only. And what happens at the end, the end state of this, is you will have X firms... and Y government services... and all of those very large databases will intermediate everything. And once that choke point exists, once that honeypot exists, there is a danger; it will be exploited.

The thing that I find funnier is a lot of people who believed in Bitcoin couldn't get there to believe in Ethereum, and a lot of people who believe in Ethereum can't get there to believe in NFTs ... What cracks me up is that people who use Ethereum, or maybe DeFi, and don't use NFTs sometimes try to convince me that NFTs are a scam. I'm like, have you looked yourself in the mirror?

What is happening is a progressive erosion of freedom that is happening very quietly, very much in the background ... It's the technological equivalent of the medium is the message. And the medium, in this case, is large-scale big data companies that have network effects. And then, secondarily in some countries, governments.

We have gone from a point where cash was viewed neutrally to cash is now viewed with suspicion. There is no chance cash could have gotten launched today if it didn't already exist.

I think NFTs are our best shot—or if not our best shot, an equally good shot as everything else combined—at achieving this decentralization.

Do you know how many times I've been told crypto is a scam? Do you know how many times I've been told crypto is all wash training, its money laundering, it's a pump and dump, Ethereum is a scam.... I mean, my view of my average friends' capability to think sensibly about Ethereum is zero.

All of these things could have been protocols, should have been protocols. Twitter came the closest ... The whole idea that who is allowed to use the dominant short-form text messaging protocol in the West should be determined by who the CEO of Twitter is from time to time is ridiculous.

The metaverse in a decade is going to be your all-encompassing ambient digital environment. You'll be primarily in augmented reality; your field of vision will be infused with data, images, conference calls, whatever. You're going to have AI assisting you in there. It's going to be great.

If you can shut down transactions, you shut down everything else.

If we're going to go to some type of hybrid digital space, it makes sense that people are going to have profile pictures or avatars later when we're in 3D; and it also makes sense that not all of these are going to be your LinkedIn photo with your nice suit on or something like that. Why would they have have to be that?

You don't get to a consumer scale app by telling people about your technology stack—and all of crypto pre-NFTs is literally just harassing regular human beings with your technology stack.

Tell me, pro-crypto gentlemen, which large organizations are using Bitcoin and Ethereum in their day-to-day operations with large numbers of people. I will tell you which. None.

NFTs are the moment where we can take all of those feelings from an off-chain world on-chain.

When you start taking about the application, not the technology, you are at the beginning of the consumerization.

Contingent on crypto does not become unusable, I believe there are gigantic consumer apps for NFTs that do not exist for fungible tokens.