Getting Beyond the Good-Bad NFT Debate

To the latter, NFTs represent all that’s wrong with late-stage capitalism: rampant greed, an incentive to fraud, wanton disregard for the environment.

Both are wrong. The boosters wear rose-colored glasses. Many elements of the Web 3 vision must be in place before it will evolve in the wider interests of humanity. Without those solutions, we’ll end up with a system that temporarily delivers extravagant profits to a few early opportunists.

And the critics? They have a static view of technology. As with many flawed attacks on crypto, they assume the current snapshot of the industry’s development – of Ethereum’s high transaction costs and limited scalability, for example – is permanent. This betrays an ignorance of how innovation occurs within open-source systems and assumes that thousands of motivated developers haven’t already recognized the same elephant in the room and started maneuvering it out the door.

Read more