Do yourself a favour and actually watch this.
a real deep dive into this stuff.
https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g
I watched like the first 20 or 30 minutes of it when it was originally posted. On one hand credit should be given where it's due. It looks like he actually did some research. But the way he builds up his argument is... bad. It's basically like:
- The 2008 financial crash was bad and build on derivative products where the underlying asset was thinner than what it was marketed as. Sure I agree
- Bitcoin was created as a trustless monetary system to eliminate that corrupt banking system. Yep
- A lot of rich people have flooded into crypto and own most of it. Sure and it sucks but that's always how real life works
- Bitcoin's consensus mechanism has inherent flaws. Sure but anything does
- And VISA can settle a transaction in seconds whereas Bitcoin takes hours. Not really technically true but okay... (ignores L2 networks or some of the nuance in how settlements/wire payments work)
- So now that we know Bitcoin sucks let's talk about Ethereum. Um sure okay....
- Ethereum wanted to be a virtual machine in the cloud but it sucks and is slow and expensive. Well okay sure but Ethereum isn't even a decade old. Computers and the internet were useless to the average person in the beginning
I scrolled around various other portions of his video and I can see the outline of how his argument keeps building on bad assumptions until the whole thing is a Jenga tower one turn from collapsing. There's a segment where he talks about how ugly NFT art is. While I can't claim to be the biggest fan of NFT aesthetics as a whole, it's obviously a modern version of punk art, which is designed to be not traditionally aesthetically pleasing. The things he talks about in terms of privacy/centralization I think are very legitimate, but then these are questions of technological improvement. Build more privacy protections into the chain like Monero and zCash do. Look for more advanced chains to put programs on (ETH has multiple competitors with different approaches to this.)
(And, by the way, this is why harsh crypto regulations are so dangerous. Bitcoin and Ethereum will be grandfathered into any regulation scheme because so many rich people own them. But if developing new crypto technologies is difficult due to regulation, then it's harder to get to the technologies that fix these issues).
I also see a decent amount of time spent on rugs in this video. Rugs are not some thing unique to crypto. Scams are a part of all aspects of life, especially when something is new. I was around for the earlier days of the internet. Viruses were everywhere.
NFTs are like art collecting or trading cards. People pay to own pieces with social cachet, aesthetic appeal, and some kind of rarity. I don't see how anyone necessarily has to lose in order to do that.