This is not interesting or worthy of an article, The Atlantic must be having a slow day. Everything popular always has its most ardent haters, just look at any big tech company like Google, Facebook or popstar like Justin Bieber, Drake, etc. This is not unique to crypto. Anything that attracts such enormous wealth is naturally going to attract the get-rich-quick schemers, scammers, charlatans, moonbois, etc. Any bold new concepts and grandiose claims like web3 and NFTs will be met with skepticism just like anytime a popular tech platform redesigns its UI or algorithm.
Virtually all of the extreme vitriol is pure nonsense and entirely misplaced. People bashing NFTs because jpegs of apes are selling for millions are completely missing the point. It's equivalent to bashing the email protocol because of the existence of spammers, or hating tech in 2001 because of pets.com. A grammy-winning artist yesterday wrote a nice thread about how NFTs have changed his life by enabling him to better monetize his work [1]
Not to excuse scammers/spammers and charlatans because obviously that stuff is irritating. I personally despite the crappy NFT art collections selling for millions, NFT profile pictures, Ponzi-like play-to-earn crypto games as much as any hater. But I'm also aware that nobody is forcing me to buy a digital ape or play Axie Infinity, and that stuff is only a tiny fraction of what NFTs and crypto enable.
It's important to realize that we're still in very very early stages, not even the first inning of the web3 decentralized future, so at this point much of the talk is just prophecy. But there's no doubt in my mind that crypto, smart contracts, and decentralized technology (eg. IPFS) enable a ton of applications that were not possible before. Rather than fixating on bored apes, I'd rather focus on the real innovation (eg. with defi, zero knowledge proofs, DAOs, NFTs with real application, IPFS) and join in on building the future.
Say you are a game developer and you are creating a game like WoW or EVE online where items can be traded via an in-game market. You can design the whole system from scratch yourself or plug in to the various blockchains and use the dev cycles elsewhere. You could represent each item with a 32byte id and each player’s inventory with a wallet.
Bonus: say a new WoW private server spawns up (there are tons of these around). You can offer the option to a player to “migrate” from another server and keep all their items. All they have to do is provide a digital signature from the original server to show that they own the items.
Typically in game need systems of control in place to prevent cheaters, if the inventories are stored externally this might present an issue? Also I don't think that trading system itself is that huge of an investment so much as the management and interface of it all which would still need to be developed so... seems dubious to say the least.
Even the simple ability to send crypto to/from anywhere in the world at a fixed fee without having to rely on centralized institutions is huge. For countries like Argentina with hyperinflating currencies, strict capital controls, distrust of banks is so high (due to a bank run 20 years ago) people buy houses with cash, the advantage is obvious. Even in first world countries however it's advantageous to be able to transact without being at the mercy of a few payment providers that shut down your account and blacklist you on a whim, and there's nothing you can do about it [1]
Decentralized finance is huge. Borrowing/lending without having to rely on a central intermediary. Insurance without any central intermediary [2]. The ability to trade tokens without any central intermediary.
Tokenization itself enables decentralized governance in the form of DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), and to for example fundraise without having to give 5+% to private companies like Kickstarter, Patreon, or whoever. There's an attempt to create a universal basic income [3] Tokens themselves enable communities to have a vested financial interest in their own success, which sure could be a bunch of people holding apes and attending yacht parties, but could also be ENS [4] or MakerDAO managing a decentralized stablecoin with billions in value.
NFTs enable creators more opportunity to monetize their work such as via selling NFTs with exclusive privileges where the creator can even obtain royalties upon retrading, decentralized marketplaces for digital or even real life goods like ticketing or real estate, the ability to reuse digital assets across different applications/games. People here love to fixate on the stupid jpegs and the fact that the URL often points to a centralized server, but that's really not the point. NFT again is just digital scarcity (see the Twitter thread I linked in the parent comment [5])
Decentralization and users owning their own data is huge. Imagine owning your own content, and being able to utilize various frontends and/or build on top of the data. This means having a digital identity that can be reused across different platforms (eg. keeping your posts + followers). Don't like Youtube's algorithm? Use a different one. And of course there's censorship resistance. The modular nature of all this would enable enormous innovation, just like it already has in defi (for example look up dex aggregators like 1inch and matcha, or Curve and Convex finance)
Zero knowledge proofs in addition to enabling privacy and scaled computing also enable trustless anonymous voting. Meaning that an election can be run in a decentralized manner that's mathematically proven to be legitimate without revealing anyone's individual votes. This is massive.
I could go on all day but then I might as well write a damn article. This slide deck is a nice summary [6], as well as these threads from Chris Dixon [7] [8]. It seems most commenters here would rather just complain about bored apes and scammers, but there actually is a lot of cool stuff going on if one actually takes the time to do their research.
Virtually all of the extreme vitriol is pure nonsense and entirely misplaced. People bashing NFTs because jpegs of apes are selling for millions are completely missing the point. It's equivalent to bashing the email protocol because of the existence of spammers, or hating tech in 2001 because of pets.com. A grammy-winning artist yesterday wrote a nice thread about how NFTs have changed his life by enabling him to better monetize his work [1]
Not to excuse scammers/spammers and charlatans because obviously that stuff is irritating. I personally despite the crappy NFT art collections selling for millions, NFT profile pictures, Ponzi-like play-to-earn crypto games as much as any hater. But I'm also aware that nobody is forcing me to buy a digital ape or play Axie Infinity, and that stuff is only a tiny fraction of what NFTs and crypto enable.
It's important to realize that we're still in very very early stages, not even the first inning of the web3 decentralized future, so at this point much of the talk is just prophecy. But there's no doubt in my mind that crypto, smart contracts, and decentralized technology (eg. IPFS) enable a ton of applications that were not possible before. Rather than fixating on bored apes, I'd rather focus on the real innovation (eg. with defi, zero knowledge proofs, DAOs, NFTs with real application, IPFS) and join in on building the future.
[1] https://twitter.com/RAC/status/1490431018792226817