Tag: Jack Dorsey

Cash App’s dangerous new feature — bet your paycheck on bitcoin

Volatility, the frequency with which you experience big wins and losses, is one of the hallmarks of gambling. One day you win big, the next, you could lose your shirt. It’s what makes gambling so attractive to addicts. 

It’s why you see people in Las Vegas sitting next to slot machines, zoned out, feeding their coins in one by one. They are waiting for that jackpot. It doesn’t matter if the game is rigged or if most people lose most of the time. Someone wins big sometimes, and it could be them. 

At least with slot machines, you’re only putting in one coin at a time. 

Cash App, a mobile payment service, just introduced a new feature that will allow you to funnel your entire paycheck directly into bitcoin. It’s called “Get Paid in Bitcoin.”

If you receive your paycheck through Cash App’s direct deposit feature, you can opt to receive all or a portion of your salary in bitcoin. 

In other words, you can send 100% of your hard-earned cash directly into a naturally occurring Ponzi scheme.  

Instead of paying rent, or tucking money away into your 401K, you can gamble on the erratic price movements of bitcoin. When you can’t pay your rent because the crypto markets took a tumble, you can tell your landlady you lost everything in the decentralized casino. 

Over 8 million people, many of whom recently learned they were victims of a data breach, use Cash App’s investing product to buy stock and bitcoin.

Cash App isn’t breaking new ground. Crypto exchange Coinbase has a direct deposit feature that allows you to have your paycheck deposited into Coinbase and get paid in crypto. Other companies, including Strike and BitPay, also offer some form of crypto payroll, invoicing, or benefits.

What it is doing is contributing to a dangerous trend that has been developing over the past few years, where companies are making it increasingly easy for people to gamble their livelihoods on crypto. 

Play to lose

Bitcoin is a negative-sum game. Stocks pay dividends and have buybacks. In contrast, money is continually taken out of bitcoin by miners, who generate 900 new bitcoins per day. They sell these coins for cash — or borrow against them — to pay their monstrous power bills. That money will never come back to investors.  

The only money that comes out of bitcoin is from new traders putting money into the system. Bitcoin’s price is completely fictitious and wildly unpredictable. 

After setting a record of $69,000 in November, bitcoin lost half its value by the end of January. It’s now trading at $43,000, meaning anyone who bought at the high, believing that bitcoin was headed for the moon, lost the better part of their investment. 

After converting a $750,000 paycheck into bitcoin in November, NFL player Odell Beckham Jr. suffered a major loss in salary when the price fell months later. At least, he could afford the loss. Not everybody can. 

Meet the missionary

Cash App is operated by Block, the company founded and headed by Jack Dorsey, who stepped down as CEO of Twitter last year to focus on his growing crypto obsession. 

Dorsey is a missionary who preaches the gospel of bitcoin to his six million Twitter followers. He is known for bizarre tweets like: “#Bitcoin will unite a deeply divided country. (and eventually: world).” In March 2021, he sold an NFT of his first tweet for $2.9 million, in crypto. Proceeds went to a charity.

It’s hard to know if Dorsey, whose net worth is $7.5 billion, according to Forbes, believes his own sermons or if he is a grifter, looking for suckers whose pockets he can purge to feed his own hubris. 

Dorsey’s company is sitting on a large stash of bitcoin. In October 2020, Block bought 4,709 bitcoin. Four months later, the company purchased another 3,318 BTC, for a total spend of $220 million. 

In early 2021, Block announced that it was going to start a bitcoin mining system. 

Dorsey is deep into crypto, so naturally, he wants you to become deep into crypto too, whether or not you can afford the risk.

Low on cash

Cash App’s new feature is timely.  There are signs that the cryptoverse is running desperately low on real money. 

Bitcoin miners are stockpiling bitcoin — while companies like investment management firm Galaxy Digital and VC firm Digital Currency Group lend them cash, so they can pay their power bills and keep their businesses afloat.

A Mt Gox settlement is about to hit the market soon. When those creditors get their 141,686 bitcoin after waiting for eight long years, a good guess is many will be anxious to sell. Where will the cash come from to buy their $6 billion worth of BTC?

The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), which owns 3.5% of the world’s bitcoin, is trading 25% below the value of its underlying asset.  

Luring fresh cash into the system is a priority for crypto boosters, which is why Grayscale is pushing so desperately for the Securities and Exchange Commission to approve its application for a spot bitcoin ETF. 

Unlike cash-settled bitcoin futures, spot bitcoin ETFs are designed to buy and hold bitcoin directly, injecting much-needed U.S. dollars into the crypto universe. 

Bitcoin doesn’t work as a payment system. Nobody uses bitcoin to buy anything other than drugs or pay for ransomware. The market has long been manipulated by tethers, a dubiously backed stablecoin, but cash is the lifeblood of crypto. Insiders need real money, so they can dump their coins. And miners need it to pay their electric bills.

Preying on the vulnerable

Bitcoin has gotten progressively easier for people to buy, which means a larger share of the public is exposed when the market goes south. 

In November 2020, payment giant PayPal announced that all account holders in the U.S. would be able to buy and sell crypto including bitcoin through its platform. PayPal has 400 million users.

In April 2021, Venmo (owned by PayPal) announced that its customers will be able to buy, sell, and trade as little as $1 worth of crypto. Venmo has more than 70 million customers.

It’s worth noting that PayPal and Venmo don’t actually allow users to buy bitcoin. You can’t make deposits or withdrawals on the platform. You can only “buy” bitcoin from the company, sell it to the company, or trade it with other users within the app. 

In other words, these companies have become online casinos, where people can bet real money on the future price of bitcoin.

Stock trading app Robinhood allows users to buy and trade cryptocurrency, a feature it started adding in early 2018. 

If you don’t want to purchase bitcoin on an app on your smartphone, there are 33,000 bitcoin ATMs and tellers throughout the U.S. that will gladly accept your cash for BTC, as long as you don’t mind paying the high fees.  

You can also go on Coinbase and buy crypto with money taken directly out of your bank account. Or you can pay with a debit card, PayPal, Apple Pay, or Google Pay. 

If you are a compulsive gambler, addicted to bigger and bigger risks, you can mainline bitcoin by signing up for Cash Apps’ Get Paid in Bitcoin. 

Systems that make it easy to buy bitcoin prey upon society’s most vulnerable — those who can least afford the risk and those who don’t understand that the game is rigged.

When the crypto markets crash — and it is no longer an “if” but a “when” — people are going to get hurt. Features that allow people to invest their paychecks in crypto are an irresponsible abomination.

If you like my work, consider supporting my writing by subscribing to my Patreon account for as little as $5 a month. 

Posted on by Amy Castor 1

News: Signal goes worldwide with payments, IRS sets sights on NFTs, Bukele’s bad bets on BTC

Encrypted messaging app Signal made its new payments feature, which uses MobileCoin (MOB), available to the world in mid-November. Signal made no big announcement at the time, but the stories are coming out now. (Wired)

I wrote about MobileCoin back in April 2020 — and so did David Gerard — when Signal first announced the feature. MobileCoin was a side hustle for Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike. He was an advisor to the project and then got Signal to integrate the token.

I suspect Marlinspike was paid in MOB — advisors to crypto projects typically are paid in shitcoins — and is now looking to dump his bags. (My blog; David Gerard) 

Other messaging apps, like Whatsapp and Facebook, have payments built in. What sets Signal apart is it wants to combine end-to-end encryption in messaging and a cryptocurrency with privacy features designed to make any transactions anonymous.

That has Signal employees worried. They’re concerned anonymous payments will attract criminals and thus draw regulator scrutiny, ruining everything that’s good about Signal. Signal supporters warned Signal this was a terrible idea. Signal went ahead with its plans anyway. (Verge)

Anyone can use MobileCoin via the Signal mobile app to make payments — the directions are here. The problem is getting MOB to put in your wallet. MOB is listed on Bitfinex and FTX, but it’s not available to U.S. consumers. You would have to use a VPN to get around that. 

Marlinspike wrote a blog post about Web3 that’s gotten a lot of attention. (Fortune)

The story is good; he blasts Web3. However, in it, he says he was “never particularly drawn” to crypto. That’s not quite accurate. He simply put his crypto into his messaging app.

On Jan. 11, only a few days after word of Signal’s shitcoin hit the whirling blades of the fan, Marlinspike  stepped down as CEO of Signal — with no notice and no replacement. Executive chairman Brian Acton will serve as acting CEO until someone new is found. (Moxie’s blog post)

Signal, which was introduced in 2014, gets its support via donations. With 40 million active users, the project is now poised to transition into a sustainable and profitable model, so it will be telling to see who steps in to take over.

In the meantime, Signal supporters are losing confidence in the app.  

Nicholas Weaver, an infosec expert and staff researcher at UC Berkeley, says that even by shitcoin standards, MobileCoin is “high on the fraud factor.” (Twitter Thread).​​

MobileCoin’s primary privacy mechanism is that the ledger runs inside the SGX enclave (a separate and encrypted region on the Intel chip for code and data), which means privacy rests entirely on the hardware — not the blockchain. You have to trust the nodes in the system. 

Marlinspike is a cryptographer and a computer security researcher. He should know better.

“Put bluntly, the only way as a security professional you would endorse this as a valid ‘privacy coin,’ let alone push it out to your huge user base, is if you were faced with a dump-truck full of money,” Weaver said. “I hope Moxie’s dump-truck was suitably large.”

Day trading is hard

El Salvador President Nayib Bukele has been day trading public bitcoin, and he is not very good at it. Bloomberg says he is probably losing money. (Bloomberg)

The country is about $1 billion in debt already. It doesn’t help that bitcoin took a nosedive recently, losing 40% of its value since its early November high of $69,000.

I know of someone else who gambled away other people’s money: Gerald Cotten, the CEO of failed Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX. The exchange carried the seeds of its demise for two years before the Ponzi was exposed. Cotten died mysteriously in India just before things fell apart.

I don’t see Bukele disappearing, so who will he blame when things fall apart? Probably his adoring bitcoin supporters.

We know Bukele doesn’t like the press. Turns out he has been spying on them. Since mid-2020, dozens of journalists in El Salvador have been subjected to phone hacks using Pegasus software, according to Citizen Lab and Access Now. Pegasus is the spyware developed by Israeli company NSO Group for governments. It can infect phones running either iOS or Android. (Project Torogoz, Reuters)

If you can get past the bitcoin boosterism, this story in Bitcoin Magazine by Anita Posch has a wealth of information in it about Bukele’s plans for bitcoin in El Salvador. 

I wrote before about “volcano bonds” — bonds Bukele is using to lure $1 billion from outside investors he will use to buy more bitcoin and build a crypto metropolis. Bitcoin City is set to go near the Conchagua volcano, so geothermal energy can power the city. It is uncertain whether the volcano is even active. “I was told that the volcano is dead, and there is no geothermal energy left to be used,” said Posch.  

We don’t hear much from Strike CEO Jack Maller on El Salvador anymore. Rumor has it, the reason he didn’t build the government’s official Chivo wallet is because he wanted $300 million for the job, and because Algorand or Cardano or Koibanx paid the government $20 million to get the contract.

Mallers is now boasting about how Strike is going to save the poor in Argentina. “Today, we use the world’s open monetary network, bitcoin, to give hope to the people of Argentina,” he tweeted. Only he left out the part where it only works with tethers, not bitcoin. (Decrypt)  

NFTs collectors, the IRS wants your money

The NFT market ballooned to $44 billion in 2021, and the IRS is on the case. It wants its cut of the profits.

It’s not clear if NFTs are taxed as regular capital gains or as “collectibles,” which means you will have to pay slightly more — but that doesn’t mean you should put off filing. (Bloomberg)

Media outfit Dirt raised money selling NFTs. Now it wants to incorporate those NFTs into a DAO, so members can vote on the editorial process. What could possibly go wrong? (Verge)

CityDAO bought 40 acres of land in Wyoming for a blockchain city. The group is offering citizenship and governance tokens in exchange for the purchase of a “land NFT,” which gives you rights to a plot of land. Everything was going swimmingly until the project’s Discord server was hacked and members’ funds were stolen. So far investors have lost 29.67 ETH, worth about $92,000. (Vice)

The news industry is struggling. The Associated Press has found a solution: It is launching a marketplace for selling NFTs of its photojournalism. (Press release; Verge)

Arthur Suszko was into Beanie Babies as a kid and began collecting them again as an adult. His current project is to create NFTs of his Beanie Babies. “It’s a merger of my childhood dreams and modern passions coming together,” he said. (Vox)

The Seattle NFT Museum is charging $175 to $200 a ticket for opening weekend, for those who want to “explore the future of art,” ensuring only the most gullible will walk through its doors. (Eventbrite)

Did you read about the woman selling fart jars as NFTs? It turns out the farts-in-a-jar story was just a big publicity stunt. The entire thing appears to be made up. (Input Mag)

CZ wants to give it all away

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (aka “CZ”) has a net worth of $96 billion. This is impressive given that his company does not even have an official headquarters. (Bloomberg)

That’s okay because CZ told the AP he is giving it all away. When you are constantly on the move dodging regulators, it’s nearly impossible to buy a mansion and settle down anyway. 

CZ said the only coin he holds is Binance Coin because he doesn’t like a conflict of interest and he doesn’t want to do anything unethical. Binance never does anything unethical. (AP)

An undercover journalist applied for a job at Binance under a fake name with fake credentials. Four interviews later, he was offered the senior role in Binance’s futures business. (Disruption Banking)

Elsewhere in the news

Crypto venture capital firm Paradigm is investing in Citadel Securities. Sequoia Capital and Paradigm will invest a total of $1.15 billion in the stock trading giant at a valuation of about $22 billion. 

Citadel handles 27% of the shares that are traded in the U.S. stock market. A large part of that comes from processing trades for online brokerages such as Robinhood. (Press release, WSJ)

Citadel does not trade crypto. CEO Ken Griffin has been dismissive of crypto in the past — “I don’t see the economic underpinning of cryptocurrencies,” he told CNBC. But something changed his mind, probably the money.

After banning crypto mining in the country in an effort to deal with its energy crisis, Kosovo police seized hundreds of crypto miners. One crypto-miner admitted to paying 170 euros ($193) per month for electricity and getting 2,400 euros ($2,700) per month in profit. (Kosovo police, Balkan Insight)

Metamask is a popular browser plugin that serves as an Ethereum wallet. Matthew Green, a cryptographer and computer scientist, took a casual look at its code. He came back with “an uncomfortable feeling about the complexity and quality of MetaMask’s (current) crypto code, and some unhappy feelings about its dependency structure.” (Blog post)

Tesla now accepts dogecoin for accessories. It takes up to six hours for a transaction to go through. You cannot cancel an order. You cannot return or exchange an item bought with dogecoin. All purchases made with dogecoin are final. The future of finance! (Tesla website, Verge)

The disclaimer from Tesla’s merch store is worth a read. “..if you enter an amount MORE than the Dogecoin price, we might not be able to return the extra amount.”

Block (formerly Square) CEO Jack Dorsey is pissed off at Craig Wright’s legal nonsense. He is leading a legal defense fund for bitcoin developers, according to an email he sent to the bitcoin developers list. The fund’s first task will be to assist developers facing a lawsuit from Tulip Trading Limited, the firm associated with Wright. (Email, NYT)

Last year, Wright filed a lawsuit against bitcoin core developers after losing a pile of bitcoin in a hack, saying they refused to help him recover the lost coins. 

Dorsey manages a bitcoin exchange, a bitcoin development fund, a bitcoin L2 project — and now a legal defense fund. Bitcoin is decentralized. 

Cryptoland is a dream project to turn a private Fijian island into a libertarian utopia. After software engineer and Wikipedia editor Molly White made fun of them on Twitter, Cryptoland sent a cease and desist letter to her for making fun of them on Twitter. (Twitter)

They also sent a “cease and decease.” (Twitter)

After getting a lot of bad press, Cryptoland is fighting back! (FT)

As part of that, Cryptoland took down its cringe-worthy video. However, the Internet is decentralized. Someone uploaded a copy to Peertube. There is also an extended version if you really enjoy torture.

Celsius Network is a crypto lending and borrowing platform, whose former CFO was arrested last year. Network data shows CEO and founder Alex Mashinsky and his wife Krissy have sold approximately 20 million CEL since October 2020, netting at least $60 million. (blog post)

How Matt Damon thought we’d react to his crypto.com commercial. (Youtube)

Jamie Zawinski, the creator of Mozilla, who makes the Firefox web browser, wrote “Today on Sick Sad World: How The Cryptobros Have Fallen.”

Dave Troy, the creator of Mailstrom, has a great thread on the awful history of cryptocurrency. (Twitter)

(Updated on Jan. 17 to include how much money investors lost on CityDAO.)

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News: Tether surpasses 50B, Coinbase lists USDT, reported $2B crypto scam in Turkey

Bitcoin is sitting at around $54,000, and Tether has hit a new milestone: 50 billion tethers in circulation, something it’s quite proud of. “Will we reach $100B before 2022?”

So far, in April, Tether has issued 9 billion tethers—and the month isn’t even over yet. Tether has been minting 2 billion tethers at a time—the largest single batches we’ve seen to date.

Per the NY AG settlement agreement, Tether is supposed to provide a breakdown of its reserves in May. And they are already whining about how unfair and unjust this is.  

Stuart Hoegner, Tether’s general counsel, complained on Twitter: “The second-biggest stablecoin issuer [USDC] doesn’t give a breakdown of their reserves, either. Observers should ask why our detractors are pushing one rule for them and another for us.”

Oh, I don’t know, Maybe because USDC wasn’t caught hiding the fact it lost access to $850 million?

(USDC—a stablecoin bootstrapped by Coinbase and Circle—has issued 13.5 billion USDC to date, not quite the level of Tether, but it’s working its way up there.)

Coinbase debuts on Wall Street, then lists USDT

Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the U.S., debuted on Wall Street on April 14. Trading opened at $381 a share—a 52% increase over a $250 reference price set by Nasdaq. COIN swung as high as $429 that first day. (Though, now it is at $291.)

It was the moment Coinbase execs and its VC backers had all been waiting for. They didn’t waste any time dumping their shares on retailers, according to data from Capital Market Laboratories. 

Insiders sold off $4.6 billion in COIN on the first day of trading, and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong sold shares worth $292 million. (SEC filing) (Cointelegraph)

Less than two weeks later, Coinbase—being the respected operation that it is—dropped the bomb that it is listing tether on Coinbase Pro.

Ecstatic bitcoiners claim the move legitimizes Tether. Actually, the move delegitimizes Coinbase.

Listing tether makes Coinbase look shady, like they’ll do anything to boost profits and keep share prices up so insiders can continue their sell-off. (My blog post)

Tether is a wildcat bank, operating with no oversight. It has been largely responsible for boosting the price of bitcoin because it allows unregulated crypto exchanges to thrive and funnels them a steady stream of dubiously backed tethers.

Thanks to Tether, Coinbase had a hugely profitable Q1. And thanks to Tether, Brian Armstrong is a wealthy man indeed. 

Was it a coincidence that BTC tapped a new all-time high of $63,275 the day before Coinbase went public? Or was that simply irrational exuberance?

When Tether gets taken down, liquidity will evaporate and crypto markets will crash. Those who get hurt will be naive retailers, who didn’t understand the system was rigged from the get-go. 

Bernie—gone but not forgotten

Bernie Madoff died in jail on the same day that Coinbase went public. He ran the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, and it went on for 25 years. Paper losses totaled $64.8 billion. Madoff took billions from investors and simply stole the money instead of investing. 

Why didn’t the SEC catch Madoff sooner? Why didn’t they step in and do something to protect investors? They were tipped off eight years before, and yet they failed to act.

Here we are watching a similar drama unfold with Tether. All the red flags are waving. And no regulator or authority has stepped in to take strong action. 

If you are wondering how fraudsters live with themselves—they rationalize and minimize. 

David Sheehan, a trustee who worked to recover money stolen from investors, met with Madoff a dozen times. He told WSJ: “[Madoff] didn’t think he was harming anybody. He actually thought his scheme would work, that it just got out of hand and he couldn’t control it.”

$2 billion crypto scam in Turkey?

When Thodex, one of the largest crypto exchanges in Turkey, suspended trading on April 18 for five days of “maintenance,” users began to complain they couldn’t access their funds. 

Now a manhunt is underway for the exchange’s 27-year-old founder, Faruk Fatih Özer, who has reportedly fled to the capital of Albania with $2 billion in investors’ money. 

Turk authorities have detained 62 people and issued detention warrants for 16 more.

Meanwhile, Özer is claiming that Thodex is the target of a “smear campaign.” He says he was on a jaunt to meet with foreign investors, nothing more.

We’ve seen this film before. It’s called “Crypto exchange operates as a Ponzi scheme.” Last time, the protagonist was Gerald Cotten, the founder of Canada’s QuadrigaCX. And instead of going to meet with “foreign investors,” he went to India and died under suspicious circumstances. 

Now another Turkish crypto exchange—Vebitcoin—has shut down amid accusations of fraud. Turkish authorities have blocked its bank accounts and detained four people. (Reuters)

These stories come at a rotten time for crypto users in Turkey. Starting April 30, the country’s central bank will ban the use of crypto for payments and prevent payment providers from providing fiat onramps to crypto exchanges. (CBRT press release)

Bitcoin promotes green energy!

Bitcoin mining is destroying the planet. Lately, the world’s most popular cryptocurrency is getting a lot of bad press on its massive carbon footprint—like this article in the New Yorker. 

Yet, despite hard evidence to the contrary, people with big bets on bitcoin will stare you right in the face and tell you it ain’t so. Bitcoin is green!

Jack Dorsey’s Square and Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest published a delusional white paper titled “Bitcoin is Key to an Abundant Clean Energy Future.” They want you to believe bitcoin mining encourages the use of wind farms, solar energy, and other such nonsense. (Bloomberg)

ARK has investments in Square and Coinbase shares. And Square invested $50 million in bitcoin last year. Square’s Cash App also lets users buy and sell bitcoin. Dorsey is a bitcoin bro at heart.

Companies who care about the planet, don’t invest in bitcoin.

FT Alphaville countered Dorsey and Wood’s claims in a post titled: “The destructive green fantasy of the bitcoin fanatics.” 

Bitcoin skeptic Kyle Gibson responded with a satirical “Bitcoin Is Green Energy” commercial, where we learn that “solar panels can’t work without bitcoin,” and “this baby penguin’s first word was ‘bitcoin’.” 

Other newsworthy stuff

On April 22, the negative premium of GBTC reached -18.92%, a record low. It’s since rebounded to -10%, according to Ycharts, but the arbitrage opp for big investors is a distant memory.

No doubt many funds who entered the “risk-free” trade are feeling the squeeze. Despite that, Grayscale has added $283 million in assets to GBTC. (The Block)

Tougher AML laws in South Korea are forcing crypto exchanges to shutter. Turns out, several were using shell bank accounts. “…they are having difficulties to get real-name accounts from local banks.” Sounds like the Bitfinex/Tether model. (Korean Herald)

The NFT bubble is bursting. Trading volume on OpenSea is down 22% in the past month. CryptoPunks volume is down 26%, NBA Top Shot is down 61%. (Decrypt)

Edward Snowden can’t make money on books and speeches anymore, so he sold an NFT for $5.4 million. He is donating the funds to the Freedom of the Press Foundation. (He sits on the nonprofit’s board of directors.) (Coindesk)

Artists and celebrities continue to pile into NFTs, because it’s the thing to do. Eminem partnered with Gemini’s Nifty Gateway to launch his first series of NFTs. (Decrypt)

A hacker-artist figured out how to make “crypto-verified” fakes of most art-connected NFTs. It’s called “sleepminting” and he used Beeple’s “Everydays” as a test case. (Artnet) 

Quote from “Black Swan” author Nassim Taleb: “If you want a hedge against inflation, buy a piece of land, grow—I don’t know—olives on it. You’ll have olive oil if the price collapses. With bitcoin, there’s no connection.” (Decrypt) 

The SEC is officially reviewing a bitcoin ETF application from Kryptoin Investment Advisors. It’s one of three bitcoin exchange-traded fund proposals now under review—WisdomTree and VanEck are the other two. (SEC filing notice) (Decrypt)

The overlap between the bitcoin bros and Musk fanboys is strong. Nicholas Weaver wrote up a Twitter thread on why Musk sucks—i.e., his environmental credentials are bullshit; “Go to mars because we are going to destroy the earth” is lunacy; His cars are crap, etc.

The IRS knows you’re out there. It’s launched “Operation Hidden Treasure” to find taxpayers with unreported income from bitcoin transactions. (Accounting Today)

Stablecoins are reminiscent of the dollar substitutes that triggered the 2008 crisis. Déjà vu? (New Money Review)

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Posted on by Amy Castor 2

WTF is an NFT? Here’s a rundown of the basics

NFTs are all over the news lately.

Recently, I was having drinks with a friend, who knows zip about crypto, and out of the blue, she started asking me about “non-fungible tokens.” 

The next day, a musician friend posted an amateurish drawing of a guitar on Facebook, proudly announcing, “This will soon be available as an NFT.”

If initial coin offerings were the crypto grift of 2017 and decentralized finance (aka “DeFi”) was the grift of 2020, then “nifties” are the grift of 2021, and they do just what crypto grifters need them to do: lure more dumb money into crypto.

How do they do this? By convincing artists that by “tokenizing” their digital art, they can prove ownership and make oodles of money for their work. They just need to buy crypto first, and then sway their friends into believing that crypto and NFTs are the wave of the future. Also, by convincing investors that NFTs are the hottest new thing.

If you are trying to get up to speed on this nonsense, you’ll find answers to your most basic questions below.

What’s an NFT?

NFT stands for non-fungible token. Fungible means interchangeable. It’s the idea that one asset can be swapped out for another and nothing is lost.

Bitcoin and ether, the two most popular cryptocurrencies, are examples of fungible tokens. One bitcoin works like every other bitcoin; likewise with ether.

A non-fungible token is different because only one ever exists. Each NFT contains unique data, so NFTs are not interchangeable with each other. They are not divisible either, whereas fungible tokens are.

This is a wonderful play on bitcoiners’ idea of scarcity. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin—and there will only be one NFT! Scarcity clearly means something is valuable. Grab it while you can.

Most of the ICO tokens in the 2017 crypto bubble ran on Ethereum and were based on the ERC-20 token standard, so exchanges and wallets would know how to integrate them. NFTs on Ethereum also have their own standard: ERC-721. 

Other blockchains, like Tron, Binance Chain, EOS, and Polkadot, support NFTs but Ethereum is by far the most popular and widely used.

Because NFTs are unique, they are hyped as “collectibles,” rare one-of-a-kinds that will only go up in value over time. 

What are you actually buying?

An NFT is only a pointer to something else on the web. It could be an image, a music or video file, or even a tweet. The object itself does not live on the blockchain.

In fact, the server holding the object could go away or it could change what is displayed at that location—and then your NFT would point to nothing or something totally different, like a rug.

Really, an NFT is simply proof that an object exists.

It doesn’t convey copyright, or for that matter, any legal rights at all. If anything, it is akin to a “certificate of authenticity,” which says this is where this thing is located. Unless you have a contract that specifically spells out you own the rights to this object, you literally just bought the pointer.

In addition to a slew of hitherto unknown auction houses where NFTs are sold, big-name auction houses are getting in on the game. Sotheby’s recently announced it will be selling its first-ever NFT on behalf of digital artist Pak in April.

And last week, Christie’s auctioned an NFT of Beeple’s “Everyday: The First 5000 days” for $69.3 million in ETH. Christie’s even made the unusual decision of accepting its premium in magic beans.

In its conditions of sale, Christie’s carefully points out that NFTs carry no rights:

“You acknowledge that ownership of an NFT carries no rights, express or implied, other than property rights for the lot (specifically, digital artwork tokenized by the NFT). You understand and accept that NFTs are issued by third parties, and not by Christie’s itself.”

Even if you own an NFT, that doesn’t mean you can restrict other people from seeing the object it points to. 

Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s billionaire CEO, is selling an NFT to his first tweet. The bidding is now up to $2.5 million. But you don’t need an NFT to see the tweet. (It’s worth mentioning that Dorsey is a big fan of crypto. His company Square invested $50 million into bitcoin last year, so it’s no wonder that he is shilling NFTs.)

When you buy an NFT, what you are buying is the private key to a crypto-token. The value is mainly speculative. You will only get for it what someone else is willing to pay—if you can find a buyer, and there is no guarantee that you will, when the time comes to cash out.

The problem is that people’s perceptions of what they are buying when it comes to NFTs don’t always mesh with the legal realities. And marketplaces involved in these sales are not always transparent about what they are selling. In fact, the more questions you ask about the real underlying value of an NFT, the vaguer the responses become.

How to create an NFT

If you are an artist who wants to create an NFT to auction, first you want to download a digital wallet that supports the ERC-721 token standard, such as MetaMask, Trust Wallet, or Coinbase Wallet, and put a little ETH in it to pay for “gas.” Plan on spending $50 to $100 worth of ETH to cover the costs of creating your token. 

After that, there are plenty of sites, including OpenSea, Mintbase, and Rarible, that will take your money and step you through the process of “minting” your NFT.

Connect your wallet to one of those sites. Write up a description of your artwork, upload your image, and voila, you’ve created your first NFT.  

Unfortunately, many struggling artists find their NFTs simply languish on these auction sites, and they’ve sunk $100 into nothing when they could have gone out and bought groceries instead.

A short history of NFTs

Where did NFTs spring from? Although the technology for NFTs has been around almost as long as bitcoin, NFTs hit the mainstream in 2017 with CryptoKitties, a game that allowed people to buy and “breed” limited-edition virtual cats with crypto. CryptoKitties was the first NFT to use the ERC-721 standard.

Last summer, game developers got into NFTs in a big way. NFTs enabled gamers to win in-game items (e.g., a digital shield, a digital sword, or digital skins), transfer their assets from one game to another, and then sell their in-game NFTs in blockchain marketplaces—sometimes for impressive sums.

Soon after, NFTs found their way into the art world, hyped by celebrities who weren’t always up to speed on crypto. Lindsay Lohan minted her own token on Rarible, based on an image of her face.

Hours after she put her NFT up for sale, she tweeted, “Bitcoin is the future, happening now,” even though her NFT lived on Ethereum. Lohan sold the image for over $17,000. It was quickly resold for $57,000.

Here are some NFTs making the news in the last two months:

Keep in mind, most of these NFTs don’t sell for real money, they sell for ETH, and the trick is then converting your ETH into fiat, so you can spend it in the real world.  

What are the risks?

NFTs open the door to fraud and general funny business. This is because 1) money is involved, usually in the form of crypto; and 2) regulators haven’t caught up with grift. 

Crypto bros promote NFTs as the ultimate stamp of authenticity, yet for many artists, the NFT market has done the opposite: it’s opened the door for swindlers. Here’s what can happen:

You can create an NFT of someone else’s work. There are no protections in place to ensure that an NFT you are buying was created by the actual artist. Digital artists, ranging from 3D renderers to pixel painters, have all discovered their art on online marketplaces. 

There are literally dozens of bots on Twitter that will allow you to create an NFT of a tweet simply by tagging it, and Twitter has thus far made no moves to block these accounts.

The problem got so bad that Corbin Rainolt, who designs detailed paleo art, had take down all of his dinosaurs and repost them with watermarks. 

“I tried to block all NFT accounts but it seems I can’t block everyone of these accs,” he said on Twitter.

Illustrator Chris Moschler doesn’t get the buzz around NFTs.

“Art theft has never been this aggressive and rampant ever before,” he tweeted, after blocking dozens of Twitter accounts trying to mint NFTs based on his tweets. “I cannot understand how this is still being called a revolutionary movement in the art world.”

It is also possible to create an NFT of a piece of work on one auction site, and then create NFTs on the same piece of work on a plethora of other auction sites. What’s to stop you?

Some NFT marketplaces do better due diligence than others, but they take a cut of anything sold and can easily wash their hands of it afterward.  

Your NFTs can also be stolen. Not your keys, not your crypto, as the saying goes, and when you leave your NFT on an auction site, they have control of the keys.

Recently, several Nifty Gateway customers reported a hacker breaking into their accounts and stealing their NFTs. Some of the victims also said their credit cards on file were used to purchase additional NFTs, which were then transferred to a hacker’s account. (Nifty said those users did not have 2FA turned on.)

Also, NFTs open up big-time opportunities for money laundering. Art is an attractive vehicle to launder money, to begin with. Transactions are often private, and valuations of art can vary widely for unexplained reasons. Art prices can also be extremely high, so there is no reason not to expect that NFTs will be used for the same purpose.

Right now, the NFT bubble is a big one. Crypto grifters promote NFTs because it’s a new avenue to bring fiat money into the world of crypto and to pump up their bags. The problem is, all bubbles eventually pop, and when this one does, retailers will be left holding the bag. 

Feature image: Beeple’s artwork from “Everydays: The First 5000 days.” Courtesy, Christie’s

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Posted on by Amy Castor 2