Bitcoin was bad enough. Decentralized, digital money! Networked computers with spare CPU cycles (think, SETI@Home project) cranking out something VALUABLE!
A developer named Laszlo Hanyecz was the first person to use Bitcoin for a commercial transaction, on May 22, 2010, when Bitcoin was a little over a year old, he bought two pizzas for 10,000 BTC. The day is now known as "Bitcoin Pizza Day."
Completely unregulated, other people create other forks of cryptocurrency, and use them to PUMP UP the value of Bitcoin itself. Computers in far corners of the universe generate trillions of "Tether" coins, which are then used to buy BTC.
A digital asset, that always goes UP! Numbers go UP! That got everyone's attention.
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Now those two pizzas cost Laszlo 380 million dollars. Cryptocurrencies drain more electricity than the entire country of Argentina.
And just when it seemed things couldn't get any worse, they started selling NON-FUNGIBLE digital assets, like a unique URL pointing to a JPG image online. For 69 Million US Dollars!
the reason why the Hilton clip is so strange is because it makes explicit that we're basically in a world where exchange value is entirely divorced from use value. They're not actually comparing their monkey pictures.
Imagine you walk into a room and two people have a conversation and they're comparing their newly generated ssh keys they've bought for millions and printed out on a piece of paper and they're laughing and having a good time and act normally. You'd think you have walked into a horror movie where your neighbors have been replaced by aliens, or an episode of the twilight zone
This is the inevitable endgame of financialization. People think financial instruments have meaning when the reality is its just a bunch of numbers in databases and fluffy narratives about GDP and growth.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 15.7 ms ] threadA developer named Laszlo Hanyecz was the first person to use Bitcoin for a commercial transaction, on May 22, 2010, when Bitcoin was a little over a year old, he bought two pizzas for 10,000 BTC. The day is now known as "Bitcoin Pizza Day."
Completely unregulated, other people create other forks of cryptocurrency, and use them to PUMP UP the value of Bitcoin itself. Computers in far corners of the universe generate trillions of "Tether" coins, which are then used to buy BTC.
A digital asset, that always goes UP! Numbers go UP! That got everyone's attention.
=== ====
Now those two pizzas cost Laszlo 380 million dollars. Cryptocurrencies drain more electricity than the entire country of Argentina.
And just when it seemed things couldn't get any worse, they started selling NON-FUNGIBLE digital assets, like a unique URL pointing to a JPG image online. For 69 Million US Dollars!
That got everyone's attention, again.
Imagine you walk into a room and two people have a conversation and they're comparing their newly generated ssh keys they've bought for millions and printed out on a piece of paper and they're laughing and having a good time and act normally. You'd think you have walked into a horror movie where your neighbors have been replaced by aliens, or an episode of the twilight zone