02 May 2022

MONEY IS A MASS DELUSION...but the US government still levies taxes in dollars, which it spends on a very real-world military.

Intro: Money is a mass delusion, and so people’s confidence in it matters.
Economists have stuff like “consumer confidence indices,” which are not necessary for the study of real things. A tree’s existence, for example, does not depend on confidence.
Bitcoin is a pure distillation of what John Maynard Keynes called finance’s “animal spirits.” Anyone who’s transacting in Bitcoin has joined a chosen community of fellow believers — Bitcoin is backed by, in practical terms, nothing.
The US dollar may not be pegged to gold anymore, but the US government still levies taxes in dollars, which it spends on a very real-world military.
Since Bitcoin doesn’t have that, the way people feel about it really matters.
 
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    Crypto is winning, and Bitcoin diehards are furious about it

    As cryptocurrency thrives, Bitcoiners seethe

    <div class=__reading__mode__extracted__imagecaption>CreditIllustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

    "In  last day of the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami Beach, comedian Donnell Rawlings starts his routine by noting there are a lot of white people in the audience and then asks if we were involved in storming the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. He’s just warming up. “I’m at a Bitcoin convention, and I don’t even know what the fuck a Bitcoin is,” Rawlings says. “I don’t know nothing about crypto, but I know some of the bangingest parties I’ve been to is some crypto parties.”

    He goes on: “I know I’m fucked because they paid me in crypto, and I don’t even know how to cash out.” Crypto has to be popular because he can count the number of people sitting in his set, and he knows “I should not be getting the amount of money I am getting paid tonight.”

    Rawlings has said “crypto” a lot, and it’s making the crowd restless. After a few more repetitions of the word “crypto,” several people in the crowd begin yelling “Bitcoin.” Crypto, after all, is the blanket term for all digital, blockchain-based assets. That includes everything from Ethereum, the popular blockchain used for decentralized apps and NFTs, to shitcoins, parlance for all non-Bitcoin tokens.

    “Listen, we don’t want no crypto-Bitcoin beef up in here, all right?” Rawlings says. The crowd laughs. But I keep thinking about this after the conference is over. To mainstream Bitcoin, the libertarian and anti-state politics associated with it may get shaved off — much as Eternal September changed the culture of the web itself.

    Welcome to Bitcoin 2022. Cryptocurrency is the most mainstream it’s ever been, but somehow at this conference, the tone is primarily aggrieved. . .

                

    Bored Ape Yacht Club creator’s metaverse mint rocks the Ethereum blockchain

    An illustration of a Bored Ape at the center of a vortex pulling in Meebits and CryptoPunks.

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    Millions were spent in gas fees

    "Yuga Labs, the web3 company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, disrupted the entire Ethereum blockchain as a flood of users rushed to purchase NFTs representing virtual plots of land in its upcoming metaverse project, Otherside. A total of 55,000 Otherdeeds sold at a flat price of 305 ApeCoin, or around $5,800 at the time of purchase (via CoinTelegraph), raising about $320 million in what was considered the “largest NFT mint in history.”

    Otherdeeds are minted in BAYC’s native ApeCoin, but still require Ethereum for gas fees. A gas fee is the cost associated with a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain. Fees typically increase as the network gets more congested because it becomes more work to process a transaction.

    Such a large volume of transactions during the Otherdeed mint caused gas fees to soar. As noted by CoinTelegraph, Reddit user u/johnfintech pointed out that some buyers shelled out anywhere from 2.6 ETH ($6,500) to 5 ETH ($14,000) in gas fees alone — more than the cost of an Otherdeed NFT (and in some cases, more than twice the cost). By the time the virtual land deeds sold out, buyers paid a total of about $123 million just to execute their transactions on the Ethereum blockchain (via Bloomberg).

    Yuga Labs issued an apology on Twitter shortly after the mint ended. “We’re sorry for turning off the lights on Ethereum for a while,” Yuga Labs said. “It seems abundantly clear that ApeCoin will need to migrate to its own chain in order to properly scale. We’d like to encourage the DAO [decentralized autonomous organization] to start thinking in this direction.” The ApeCoin DAO, the entity responsible for making decisions within the ApeCoin community, exists separately from Yuga Labs. The DAO’s decisions are carried out by the Ape Foundation’s Board, consisting of Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Animoca co-founder Yat Siu, and others. . .

    The disruption slowed transactions on Ethereum-linked services, like Uniswap, and caused the Ethereum transaction tracker, Etherscan, to crash. A number of users also reported losing thousands of dollars to gas fees in failed transactions. Yuga Labs promised to reimburse users for the gas fees associated with failed transactions, but it’s unclear what the refund process will look like. The Verge reached out to Yuga Labs with a request for comment but didn’t immediately hear back.

    As outlined in a post days before the mint, Yuga Lab’s original goal was to avoid an “apocalyptic” gas war, or a sudden spike in gas fees due to high demand. It said it would ditch the popular Dutch auction style of minting, in which an NFT goes up for sale at a certain ceiling price and is then incrementally lowered over time. It employed an alternate method instead, selling NFTs at a flat price and opting to gradually allow more mints to occur over time:

    [  ] The mess of a mint prompted some users to propose ways to improve the process in the future. Will Papper, the co-founder of Syndicate DAO, a platform that lets users create web3 investment clubs, suggested that Yuga Labs optimize its contracts to lower gas fees and adjust its mint mechanism.

    In March, Yuga Labs raised $450 million in funding to build the Otherside, a decentralized metaverse with elements of gamification. While it’s supposed to encompass Yuga Lab’s NFT brands, such as the newly-acquired CryptoPunks and Meebits, the company has goals to extend support to NFTs from other entities. A lot is still unknown about the prospective Otherside, but that clearly hasn’t stopped its enthusiastic community from investing in the project."

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