7 years ago I made a t-shirt with a QR code that linked to its “original” on the blockchain and wore it to a decentralized tech conference.

Oh, and I fucking hate NFTs.

2015 was the final year of OG decentralization. Bitcoin tumbled around $300, graphics cards were sold at MSRP and electricity mostly went towards useful inventions such as light bulbs and washing machines. When “crypto” was 1995-Hackers-speak for “cryptography”, there wasn’t all that much to be mad about.

Unfortunately, people figured out how to make money with it.

NFTs are a scam and everyone* in the business knows it

Almost everyone in programming who got into tech before “the blockchain” fully understands how NFTs work: They don’t. There might be interesting technology here and there, but almost nothing useful has been invented since 2009 when the Bitcoin Genesis Block was mined.

To see it all pass into mainstream is infuriating and dangerous.

2022 is the year NFTs will become irrelevant

Just as quickly as they rose to fame. Unfortunately for us, someone is going to come up with a replacement, slap a catchy name on it and we’ll do this all over again. Just as people are always going to be desperate for money, the ones taking advantage will already have a plan.

It’s a bummer because the technology can be very useful:

The Forgotten Lore of Decentralization

• Peer to peer file sharing has been immensely popular since Napster

• Distributed content-addressed storage to minimize egress & computation

• Merkle DAGs are incredible data structures, not just for ownership ledgers

You probably haven’t heard of these because they don’t exist to make money.

Still feeling fuzzy? Consider Deep Learning instead!

It’s got just as much bullshit: Years away from fully self-driving cars, decades away from Artificial General Intelligence. But we’ve almost perfected voice recognition, text-to-speech, image classification and endless Netflix recommendations and even started solving protein folding.

We really never talk about the stuff that’s working.