Monkey see Monkey do. BAYC is broken, but no one seems to care.

It was a throwaway line in passing;

"Can you poke around at the reserveApes bit of the BAYC contract & see what you think it does?"

It shouldn't have ruined my faith so completely in the current state of the NFT space. After all, it's a couple of lines of code.

Surely if there was a critical issue that meant the biggest NFT collection in the world, worth several billion USD,?had a fundamental flaw everyone would be talking about it.?

Especially if others did the same things, had similar flaws.

Here's my post breaking it down a bit more;

Link

Turns out the answer is "no".?

Maybe everyone knows but they are happy to look the other way as long as they make a profit.?

Maybe (almost) no one knows and, despite the "code is law" approach that was always heralded as the key to crypto, no one wants to know.?

But the truth is, not only do multiple projects (Bored Ape Yacht Club & Doodles at the top of the list) have this sort of bug, virtually no one in the space cares, even when you tell them.

A single person at Yuga Labs can mint as many new Apes as they want, at any time, and change the associated metadata.?10,000 apes can become an infinite number of, well, anything.

I know what the holders are thinking, despite them all staying quiet on the subject.

"But they wouldn't do that.?

But, "but they won't" really means they can. When this much money is involved, and the numbers keep going up, at some point they might.?

"The Times 03 Jan 2009

Chancellor on Brink of Second Bailout for Banks"

I remember the months leading up to that, the queues on TV of people unable to get their money out of banks, and the worry on my parents' faces as they talked about it.

My own fears, at almost 30 years old, that this sort of global level economic balls-up had been allowed to happen and what this meant for my future.

The banking system that we had grown up with, that we had drilled into us was key to our survival, the safe secure option to plan for our futures, was collapsing in on itself.?

But it all seemed to settle down and, frankly, everyone was so glad no one really questioned it much. Things seemed back to normal.

Then I remember some years later reading about Ethereum, having heard about bitcoin earlier but not quite "getting it". ?

Decentralised computing.

I was working in IT and something just clicked.?

This was major.?

This could change the way we manage and own everything.?

So I threw myself into the space, spent years what I could about bitcoin, blockchains, the technology and how it worked. Eventually, I started working in it.?

But digital trustless censorship-resistant ownership of assets was always the big one for me.?

Bitcoin was digital money, a replacement for fiat systems. But that seemed too big a target to take down and bitcoin was running alongside it happily.?A nice two-layer system, one for those who wanted money they owned, and one for those who were happy to trust banking.

What about ownership of everything else??

I remember buying a house, the process taking months, and thinking how easy it would be if all these records, all these bits of paper were somehow stored on-chain.??

Then the owner could just sell it to me, transfer the ownership, and for the mortgage, the bank could just look everything up in seconds.?

I remember doing talks about the potential of blockchain, banking the unbanked, helping refugees displaced from their homes, proving their documents, their experiences, their very identity.

Providing proof of ownership of assets that no government, no matter how corrupt, could remove.

Instead, collectively, we decided to go a different way.

The only focus became the dollar price and we were flooded with ICO's, & scams, and celebrity endorsements.?

Eventually, as every fiat system does, in 2018 it collapsed.?

Kind of.?

Everything that was focussed on the value of the end product in fiat did anyway. Bitcoin kept going strong, 1 BTC = 1 BTC just as it did before, during and after.

The herd was thinned, most people in it for a quick fiat win left, and things ticked along nicely.

Then we invented NFT's and the potential was, and still is, incredible.?

Trustless, censorship-resistant,?proof of ownership of anything we want.?

Cryptokitties, Cryptokaiju, these all seemed like proof of concepts that would change the way we viewed ownership.?Cheap novelties we could buy, almost as a souvenir for what was to come next.

But that was 3 years ago.?

Instead of a revolution, the same thing started to happen, slowly then building speed, and the situation with BAYC and others is a symptom of this.?

The tech became another way to raise money quickly by using the term NFT, just as everyone had by doing ICO's & throwing the term "blockchain" around in 2017.?

Instead of taking and building towards that trustless model, we took the bits that made us money and focussed on those.?The fact "DeFi" is such a big area for growth at the minute (despite the regular huge issues), where virtually everyone uses custodial solutions in the hope of huge profit, is proof of that.

We sacrificed "strong", "secure" and "censorship-resistant" for "fast", "easy" and "cheap".?

Now here we are.

An NFT ecosystem with lots of fiat money flowing in but, for most people, no way to easily remove it.?

Where projects can be spun up in minutes and sold to a community desperate to flip them for profit.

Where the biggest projects fail to adhere to even the basics of limited supply they claim.?

Where celebrities jump in to push prices even higher, because, well apparently we should listen to them.?

I'm disappointed.

Disappointed in everyone for missing such a big opportunity, while creating such a fragile ecosystem.

But also disappointed in me for playing along, even though I knew what would happen.?

That's the lure of fiat.

It's so integral to our day to day lives, our educations, our upbringings, that we can't resist its siren song.?

"If I had more money I could..."

Show pretty much anyone a quick, easy way to make money, to make their lives better, then they will jump at it.?They've been trained to their entire lives.

And that's what is happening now.?

The overwhelming use case for NFTs at the minute is "I will buy it because someone else might pay me more for it later".?

That and "I'll buy it so I can show off how rich I am/what community I'm part of."

I don't blame anyone, not even myself,?for that.?

It's human nature, to want more and to show off what we have. Envy and the desire to create it in others.?

Plus, as we live in a fiat world and having money makes everything about life a bit (well, often a lot) easier, I can't blame pretty much anyone for wanting more.

Hell, I've helped enough projects make huge amounts of money and will no doubt continue to do so for the foreseeable future because that's what most of our lives are about, and people pay me well to do it.

But I do regret what is coming.?

This NFT ecosystem we find ourselves in is inherently fragile and is built around the goals of fiat currency systems that have been falling apart for decades.?

It might be a bang, or it might be a whimper.?

There might be a single trigger we can point to with hindsight and say "that's what did it" or there might just be too many things building up, creating death by a thousand cuts.?

But a fall is coming, just as it did with crypto in 2018.

Pseudo-blockchain projects spun up to create pseudo-NFT projects will disappear, as will a lot of NFT projects.?

Well, they will still be there, just no one will want them.?

I also regret is how many genuine projects, looking at the future through the lens of individual choice vs censorship, are taken down with it.?

Maybe projects that don't raise millions in a 10-minute drop, or have huge reserves to see them through an NFT winter.?

There are good projects out there, some hidden, some more public.

I hope they survive it.

But, that doesn't mean the technology has failed and I have no doubt NFTs are still key in our digital future.

The question is, how long will it take the entire space to recover, for us to get past this and go through that painful process of rebuilding public trust?

Maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe our future is filled with bitcoin citadels on one side, and Bored Ape citadels on the other, both filled with benevolent overlords.

But if I'm not, and you've ignored the first rule of crypto, and now NFTs;

"Don't invest what you can't afford to lose",?

be careful.

Someone is always left holding the bags, I've got a few from 2017 myself, and you don't want it to be you.

So, dear reader, you've made it this far into my cathartic exercise (or ramblings depending on your outlook).

Now you have a choice, as crypto is always about choice.

History may not repeat, but it sure as hell rhymes, and I've heard this tune and these lyrics before, several times.? I've even strummed along and hummed a few bars.

But, ignore or take heed, it makes no difference to me.?

I've done my own risk assessments, made my choices, and have several more to make.?

It's up to you what you decide.

But, one final thing.?

Your choices, your consequences.?

The two, for better or worse, go hand in hand and in crypto you don't get to blame someone else.?

Good luck,

Dan?

PS nothing in here is financial advice! Well, except "be careful".