(2021-06-09) Ford Crypto Isn't About Money, It's About Fandom

Paul Ford: Crypto Isn’t About Money. It’s About Fandom. Thanks to NFTs, half of my friends now hate the other half

with crypto, you can skip straight to the marketplace and the products will follow. (They don’t really—“decentralized applications” aren’t very interesting, but everyone says they’ll be good soon.)

As we all know by now, an NFT is a non-fungible token, a cryptographically signed receipt of ownership for a digital thingy. It works because some people choose to believe that digital thingies can have value

There are NFTs available on Hic Et Nunc, which uses the ecologically sound Tez cryptocurrency.

A lot of what people are fighting over is the way that NFTs work. They don’t actually contain the artwork, like an email attachment might. They just point to it.

My friends are fighting over it in the same way they used to fight about books, movies, and indie bands—i.e., as if it is the most important thing in the world. Crypto to me feels like a variant of fan culture. (subculture)

I’m the cofounder of a company. Every week I watch spreadsheets with accounts receivable, chat EBITDA, establish lines of credit, manage hiring plans against cash reserves... it all boils down to costs and revenue. I thought that coming into this world from far, far outside, with a healthy reserve of irony, I might one day have something wise and funny to say about money. But the thing about capitalism is, it’s about money. I want so badly for it to be more complicated. But it’s not. If you want to understand capitalism, just think of it as money’s fandom.