For the past year, as NFTs have breached spectacular and speculative heights, we’ve seen a growing amount of skepticism. The most recent wave was touched off by a 138-minute video essay by Canadian media critic Dan Olson that condemned NFTs and other blockchain-based technologies as fundamentally broken and unworkable. In just over a week, it’s garnered more than 3 million views on YouTube. Regardless of your perspective on the video, it’s hard to deny that there’s a lot of bullshit percolating around NFTs. Even hardcore Bitcoiners agree. And despite what the loudest NFT boosters insist, the beatings have continued and morale has not improved.
Any way you cut it, the NFT ecosystem as it stands is a disaster. Read More
Daily Archives: February 4, 2022
Don’t forget Microsoft
Despite its scale, Microsoft is one of the most overlooked companies in tech.
- It is not a beloved consumer brand like Apple, Facebook, Amazon, or Google.
- It was not a venture capital success story: Microsoft was too profitable to raise real VC money, so the founders owned 70% at IPO.
- It is the oldest of FAMGA, hidden away in a different state.
This piece undertakes a daunting set of tasks: 1) understand what Microsoft is, 2) chart a path for its global domination, and 3) apply learnings from the company to the startup ecosystem. Read More
#big7
How one company took over the NFT trade
On a cold day in January, NFTs started disappearing. Major services like MetaMask and Twitter were suddenly unable to display images associated with newly uploaded tokens, even though the users had clear records of ownership. Something in the distributed, decentralized technology stack had gone terribly wrong.
The problem was the NFT marketplace OpenSea, which was suffering a database outage. The outage brought down OpenSea’s image-loading API, jamming up any service that relied on it to upload tokens. In a scene full of militant decentralizers, a single company had found its way to the center of nearly every product. Reporting on the chaos, Vice spotted one user who had photoshopped the company’s logo to read “ClosedSea.” Read More
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