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Nearly two months ago there was this thunderstorm that was so strong and violent that it knocked off the power in my entire neighborhood. I spent the night with no electricity other than the flashlight from my smartphone, which I had to use sparingly since I couldn’t recharge it once the battery ran out. The following morning the power was still out and the power company’s website reported that electricity wouldn’t be restored until the following day at the earliest. Meanwhile I had a pile of dirty laundry and I was running out of clean clothes so I ended up hauling my clothes to the nearest laundromat.
While I was there I found something unexpected. It was a cryptocurrency machine.
It’s a cryptocurrency vending machine trying to entice people to purchase virtual money. People can choose between Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum.
The final screen is a message to vendors and business owners telling them how they could get their own machines to generate some side revenue.
To be honest, I’ve long have had a low opinion of cryptocurrency. The theory is that having currency that is not regulated by any central government is cool and could lead to freedom. The reality is that I’ve seen more examples of cryptocurrency leading to online scams and crashing markets (such as the notorious Mt. Gox and Bitfinex incidents). There is also some alarming links between cryptocurrency and Donald Trump-style fascists here in the United States.
The fact remains that you can’t go into a McDonald’s, order a Big Mac with french fries and a Coke and pay for your meal with Bitcoins or any other cryptocurrencies currently in existence. Nor can you use Ethereum to pay your monthly bills or use Litecoin to buy tickets to the latest hit movie that is currently playing in a movie theater. The inability to use cryptocurrency to purchase goods and services alone limits the usefulness of this alternative virtual currency.
So cryptocurrency is basically used as a glorified slot machine or lottery ticket. You buy it in the hopes that it was go up in value then sell it to the next person who waits until it goes up in value then sell it to another person and so on. There’s a term for this: a pyramid (or Ponzi) scheme.
Most countries, including the U.S., have banned this because it takes advantage of people who are less economic savvy or who came to this investment bubble later in the process so it’s harder to actually make a profit.
On top of it, I found this cryptocurrency ATM in a laundromat. Many people who use laundromats on a regular basis tend to be poor or low income and they can’t afford a basic washing machine (or they may be homeless, which makes owning such a machine impossible). Here are a few tweets that have called out cryptocurrency sellers for trying to entice poor and low income people into this market.
Just shortly before that war broke out in Ukraine I decided to do a longer parody for the first time in a long time. Between TikTok and Clapper I’ve adapted to making videos that are less than three minutes long. In fact I’ve noticed that even among the short videos that I crossposted to YouTube, some of them have gained more viewers on my Sagittarius Dolly YouTube channel than most of my older longer videos.
I decided to do a slightly longer video to see if people are still interested in longer content from me. I decided to make fun of the current craze in cryptocurrency and NFTs by making this parody video. It originally grew from a series of jokes where I told my friend Phil Shapiro that I could exploit him by making NFTs of his image. I decided to take it further by introducing my own cryptocurrency, PhilCoin, and the first forays in to PhilCoin NFTs. Here’s the video I posted on YouTube.
The video’s runtime is just a little over six minutes. I tried promoting it on Facebook and YouTube and I didn’t get many views. I even tried uploading an edited three-minute version on TikTok and Clapper while encouraging people to come to my YouTube channel to see my video in its entirety. Despite my efforts, as of this writing, this video has received a paltry 21 views on YouTube and even my edited versions on TikTok and Clapper didn’t get much attention. I’m starting to think that from now on I should stick mainly to shorter videos since they tend to get more views.
As for my friend Phil Shapiro, who is the face of PhilCoin, you can check him out on Twitter and YouTube.
Last week I wrote about the new trend in NFTs and I made my first video about the topic. Shortly after I wrote that post I made my second video about the topic. Here’s some background.
I had been hearing about NFTs for a while and I even thought about going into that business for myself until I heard about the dark side of that phenomenon (such as stealing art from a variety of websites to sell on places like OpenSea without the knowledge or permission of the original artist), which I wrote about in my previous post.
I was inspired to make a video about NFTs when I was on Twitter and I saw a discussion about this subject. Someone had retweeted this tweet that an NFT enthusiast known as k_monkey1520 originally posted last October where he wrote, “Please don’t tell my wife I decided to buy an $8,000 lion jpeg instead of that hot tub she wanted. Trust me, she WON’T understand. #ROAR @LazyLionsNFT” and he included a graphic of the lion that he had just blown a huge amount of money on.
All I can say is that I’m glad that I’m not that guy’s wife because I would be extremely pissed off to find out that my husband had gone ahead and blown thousands of dollars on what looks like a glorified lion clip art.
I began to explore Lazy Lions a little further and I saw that they have a concept that’s similar to the Bored Apes Yacht Club. You buy a Lazy Lions NFT in order to join this exclusive club that’s housed on a Discord server. As far as I can tell, they are slightly less popular than the Bored Apes and that’s because the apes have attracted celebrities like Justin Bieber, Eminem, Paris Hilton, and Jimmy Fallon. I have to admit that some of the lion art is a little bit more appealing on an esthetic level than those apes while there are other lion art that looks so hideous that I wouldn’t spend even $1 to acquire it, let alone thousands of dollars. Even with the more visually appealing Lazy Lions I have to admit that I’ve seen better lion art elsewhere.
I saw two of the lions that had multicolored manes with dark pink faces that reminds me of a lion plush that I already own. Her name is JoJo the Rainbow Lion and I bought her from Build-A-Bear Workshop five years ago. (I wrote about her earlier about my attempt to use that lion in a series of short videos that I ended up abandoning because I got very few views.) She has the mane of a male lion yet she has feminine features around the eyes.
I made this silly video where I sarcastically I asked if I could use my photo of Jojo the Rainbow Lion to gain admission into the Lazy Lions NFT club while also including that tweet about the man who risked angering his wife because he paid $8,000 for one of those lions. I uploaded it on to TikTok, Clapper, and YouTube.
Since NFTs are related to cryptocurrency, I also have to mention that last night a few cryptocurrency-related businesses actually took out ads during the Super Bowl. I didn’t watch the game last night because I’m not really into football but I heard all about it online. This Wired story compared cryptocurrency’s presence at this year’s Super Bowl to the 2000 Super Bowl when so many dotcoms took out ads during that game only to have several of them go out of business about a year or two later. Last night someone made a similar point on Twitter by posting one of those 2000 dotcom Super Bowl ads, for E-Trade while writing (in all caps) “SO DID COINBASE JUST RUN A BETTER VERSION OF THE ETRADE SUPERBOWL CHIMP AD FROM THE PEAK OF THE TECH BUBBLE?”
Coinbase’s ad got the most attention because so many people tried to log on to the Coinbase app after seeing it that it literally crashed the app. But those ads only fueled the accusation that both cryptocurrency and NFTs are little more than glorified Ponzi schemes that are bound to collapse at some point in the future. As John Brownlow wrote on Twitter: “PSA that the reason crypto companies are buying superbowl ads is because they need new blood for the Ponzi.”
Then there’s this tweet, which says “One reason I still have trouble believing crypto currency is money is that there aren’t commercials for money.”
And this tweet: “this crypto thing is going to be such a bloodbath. i feel like ‘extremely unstable assets in a free for all market that is 95% scam and grift sold to regular humans as valuable secure investments by celebs on tv’ isn’t a story that has any sort of good end”.
Like I wrote last week, while I haven’t completely ruled out selling my art as NFTs, I don’t plan on doing it anytime soon. That’s because right now I’m seeing a speculative bubble rising around these NFTs and, based on what I’ve seen before, speculative bubbles tend to rise until they reach a point where they can’t go any higher and they burst. People who get in during the early phases of a speculative bubble tend to come out ahead. It’s the people who go into the bubble late in the game who end up being financially hurt.
How do I know all this? I’ve seen it all happen before. In 2014 a Tokyo based Bitcoin exchange crashed so bad that it ultimately went out of business. In 2008 there was the housing bubble that crashed so hard that there are ramifications that still last to this very day. In the late 1990s there was the dotcom bubble that crashed so badly that it set back the ongoing development of the Internet. And then there was the 1990s fad in Tickle Me Elmo, Beanie Babies, and Furby where people overpaid so much for toys that they couldn’t flip them any further. And before that there were people willing to pay hundreds of dollars to obtain one Cabbage Patch Kids doll in the 1980s.
If I were to go further back before I was born, I could talk about the speculation on Wall Street that led directly to the 1930s Great Depression. Or I could go way back in time to the Netherlands in the 1630s when people were willing to fork over their entire life savings in order to obtain one tulip bulb.
My immediate plan regarding selling my art as NFTs is to not get involved with them at all as long as this bubble continues. The fact that one is required to use Ethereum to do all transactions doesn’t help because that cryptocurrency is so volatile that I would be expected to pay at least the equivalent of US$100 for gas fees (which is what the NFT world calls their listing fees) to list at least one NFT for sale.
I will revisit the issue once that bubble bursts but right now it’s a hard NO for me.
If I decide to get into NFTs in the future, I will definitely write a post about it in this very blog as well as on my public Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts. In the meantime, if you ever happen find any of my art pieces, photographs, or videos being sold as NFTs on sites like OpenSea or Rarible and you don’t see a post in this blog or on any of my social media accounts saying that I have officially gotten into NFT sales, do NOT buy or bid on it because they are definitely unauthorized bootlegs.
I’m going to end this post by listing a few videos that you can watch if you want to learn more about this issue. Here are a couple of videos from Cracked.com’s YouTube channel that are both hilarious yet very factual. One is about cryptocurrency, which is an important issue to know about since the various NFT servers use it exclusively (especially Ethereum) instead of U.S. dollars or other currencies that are used by countries in real life.
Here’s the other Cracked.com video, which is about NFTs.
There’s another video which talks about the one thing that I noticed about most NFTs. The majority of the art that people spend tons of money on is either so ugly or so mediocre that it’s ultimately forgettable.
If you wish to dive even deeper into cryptocurrency and NFTs and you have some free time on your hands, there is this documentary that’s up on YouTube called Line Goes Up—The Problem With NFTs. This video went viral recently despite having a two-hour-and-eighteen-minute runtime and it has attracted its share of critiques and controversy. This documentary thoroughly traces the NFT craze to the 2008 economic meltdown, which led to the creation of one of the first cryptocurrencies known as Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s sluggishness as a cryptocurrency (including using huge amounts of electricity) led to the creation of a more nimble cryptocurrency known as Ethereum, which, in turn, led to the creation of NFTs. It lays out evidence that NFTs are little more than a series of unregulated Ponzi schemes that actively encourages investments into cryptocurrency (because it serves as the basis for all financial NFT-related transactions) with those on the losing end having no recourse for any kind of justice. It is also a scathing indictment of the attitudes of the cryptobros who are actively pushing both Ethereum and NFTs as a new way of getting rich quickly.
Late last year I was on TikTok when I saw a video appear in my For You page. It was from a guy who was hyping about a way that artists can finally be paid for their creative work. It’s something called Non-Fungible Tokens or NFT for short. The idea is that artists would take their digital art, convert their work into NFTs, upload them on a site like OpenSea (which is the most popular NFT sales site), have people bid on your work, and you’ll earn a decent amount of money. As time went on I began to see more and more of these TikTok videos talking about how artists can earn a living by selling their art as NFTs.
On the surface it sounds easy and it may finally provide an opportunity for artists to earn a livable income from their creative work. There are even tutorials talking about how easy the whole process is. But if you delve more into it, you’d find out that NFTs seem far more convoluted than a typical sale on eBay or Etsy. For those of you who are unfamiliar with NFTs, here’s a straightforward explanation on The Verge along with a fuller explanation on Wikipedia. I found this hilarious description on Twitter that shows how convoluted the whole NFT marketplace really is. Cracked.com also has an explainer parody video that describes NFTs in a hilarious—yet true—way.
I’ll admit that I was initially intrigued by the idea because I thought it would be cool to finally make a living at doing something that I really love to do while being able to set my own hours. Yet I decided not to jump on the bandwagon immediately because I’m very leery about spending huge amounts of money on something that is so incredibly new that I’m still trying to learn about it. I don’t want to lose large amounts of money right now, especially since I don’t have a steady job at the moment and I’m still working on getting my IT certificate. I want to educate myself first before I make any kind of forays into NFTs.
Another reason why I’m leery is that there are some unsavory aspects about NFTs that I’ve learned and I don’t know if I want to associate myself with something that could potentially be so unsavory. First, there’s the charge that many people who buy NFTs are wealthy people who are using NFT sales as some kind of a money laundering operation.
Then there is the controversy surrounding the environmental impact of NFTs due mainly to the fact that one frequently has to use the cryptocurrency Ethereum to purchase an NFT. Ethereum uses a lot of energy to mint. That’s something to really consider since there is a climate change crisis that is currently going on in the world. On top of it there are accusations (as spelled out in this long Twitter thread) that cryptocurrency is encouraging cult behavior among its advocates and it has attracted a throng of people who are Libertarian and far right-wing along with cases of cryptocurrency being used in illegal human and drug trafficking.
In addition, there are accusations that people are going on to sites like DeviantArt, downloading the art hosted on that site, minting them into NFTs, and selling them on OpenSea without knowledge or permission of the original artist. As an artist myself, I find that accusation to be the most alarming because I would be extremely pissed if someone did that to me.
Last week I found that it’s not only individual artists whose work are being ripped off by NFT speculators. I saw a series of duck-themed NFTs on Twitter where I noticed that these ducks bore a very strong resemblance to Howard the Duck. As someone who’ve done past reviews of the comic book series (I’ll admit that, even though I have more comic books that I could review, I haven’t gotten around to doing more of them lately because I’ve been busy doing other things like trying to get my IT certificate), I knew that these guys have just ripped off Marvel Comics, whose parent company, Disney, has a reputation for going to great lengths to protect its intellectual property. I even made a video of the comparisons between these NFTs and Howard the Duck that I uploaded on to TikTok, Clapper, and YouTube.
Despite the controversy more people are jumping into the NFT craze. In fact a group of people decided to create a series of NFTs known as the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Unlike other NFTs where you buy one and enjoy it in the privacy of your own home, with the Bored Ape Yacht Club, just purchasing one of those NFTs will gain you admission to an exclusive club that’s housed on a Discord server where you can hang out online with other Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT owners.
However the Bored Ape Yacht Club has its own controversy (besides the fact that you have to cough up thousands of dollars in order to purchase one of their NFTs). There are accusations that the Bored Ape Yacht Club has white power/Nazi affiliations although that racist affiliation is in dispute.
Celebrities are jumping into NFTs, especially the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Paris Hilton recently went on Jimmy Fallon’s late night talk show where the two of them talked about their ownership of two of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs while Hilton spoke about the upcoming debut of her own NFT collection. Eminem spent $425,000 for a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT. Eminem got a bargain compared to Justin Bieber, who spent $1.3 million for a Bored Ape NFT of his very own.
Some are even selling their own NFTs. One example is Julian Lennon, who is selling NFT images of clothing and guitars that his late father, John Lennon, once owned. Anyone who bids on—let’s say—a guitar is bidding only on an image of that guitar that’s accompanied by an audio of Julian narrating his own memories of when his father had that guitar. (You can see a preview of what it would be like on this Instagram post.) The winning bidder will not receive the actual guitar at all. Last year rapper Bhad Bhabie sold NFTs based on the phrase (“Cash me outside, how bow dah?”) that she originally uttered when she was a guest on The Dr. Phil Show and it later turned into memes and it ultimately catapulted her to stardom. Chris Crocker did something similar last year when they decided to sell the video they did that became an Internet classic, LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!!!, as an NFT with the proceeds from that sale going towards Chris Crocker’s gender transition surgery and care for their aging grandmother. (Chris Crocker now goes by the name Cara Cunningham.)
As for me, I haven’t completely ruled out doing an NFT but I’m still being extremely cautious about it because I have a feeling that—with all these celebrities jumping in, the climate impact controversy, and the illegal money laundering controversy surrounding NFTs in general—the whole market is heading in a bubble now. The downside of a bubble is that bubbles tend to burst and anyone who doesn’t cash out before the bubble burst tend to lose a lot of money. I’ve seen it happen before with the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble where the bubble continued to rise until it suddenly burst and many people were negatively impacted by it on the financial level. I don’t want something like that to happen to me, which is why I’m still sitting on the fence. If I decide to do an NFT I will definitely write about it in this blog.
On the other hand, I could just ignore the whole NFT fad and just mint random .jpegs on the parody site Super Fungible Token.
I’ve been well aware of all kinds of scams going as far back as the notorious Nigerian Prince email scams of the 1990s. Last year I encountered a variation of the Nigerian Prince scam when I attempted to apply for a job that I found through Moonlighting.com. I wrote an article about that experience for LinkedIn Pulse in an effort to warn others about scammers lurking on the various gig economy platforms.
Late last year someone from Boho Queen Jewelry contacted me via Instagram saying that he/she liked my Instagram account so much that I was invited to be that company’s brand ambassador on Instagram. I came close to accepting that offer but I decided to do a quick Google search on Boho Queen Jewelry first, where I learned about its shady business dealings. I turned that offer down and wrote a blog post about it instead.
A few months ago I encountered something similar on Instagram where a publication known as 1340 Art Magazine wanted me to submit my work. When I did so, I received an email saying that I was among the finalists that have been selected to be featured in the next issue of its quarterly publication but I had to pay money in order for the editors to consider my work. Once again I did a quick Google search, saw some alarming things about 1340 Art Magazine, and I decided to turn down that opportunity. I ended up writing a blog post about it instead.
Last week I got a notice on Twitter saying that someone known as BriyanMalissa had started to follow me. I decided to follow her back, which is supposed to be the customary thing on social media. I made the dumb mistake of not seeing her profile first before hitting the “Follow” button. Had I done so, I would never have followed back in the first place, I would have avoided all this drama to come, and this post would not exist.
Here’s a brief background. There’s such a thing as cryptocurrency. The earliest cryptocurrency invented was bitcoin. (There are others known as litecoin, ethereal, stellar, ripple, etc.) Cryptocurrency is supposed to be an alternative to real-life currencies like the dollar, pound, rubles, yen, etc. and it is supposed to be free from interference from any government agency in the world. Proponents frequently come up with this utopian idea of people getting together doing their buying and selling in cryptocurrency totally free from any kind of government interference. Sounds blissful, right?
Wrong. Most businesses don’t accept cryptocurrency and no stores will let you pay for their inventory with cryptocurrency. So far, based on what I’ve seen, it looks like people are simply speculating on cryptocurrency in the hopes of getting a huge payout quickly. It’s not unlike the Beanie Babies craze of the 1990s or the tulip mania that swept through Europe back in the 1600s except that cryptocurrency only exists on computers and there is no real-life counterpart that you can hold in your hands.
Four years ago there was the notorious Mt. Gox incident where bitcoin speculation had sank that bitcoin exchange (which was originally founded as a trading site for fans of the card game Magic The Gathering). People lost a huge amount of money as a result. More recently another cryptocurrency trading platform, Bitfinex, was hacked, which resulted in losing a lot of cryptocurrency. Worse, Bitfinex said that it had serious difficulties with its banking relationships.
I’ve just heard too many negative things about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to decide against dealing with them. The fact that people like billionaire Wall Street investor Warren Buffett and the Motley Fool website have also advised people to steer clear of bitcoin and its ilk haven’t done anything to change my mind.
So I foolishly decided to follow back BriyanMalissa since she followed me without first checking her profile or the tweets she has sent out. I also didn’t notice the inconsistency in how she spells her name before I decided to follow back.
Does she spell her surname “Brayan” or “Briyan”? Does she usually refer to herself as Malissa Brayan (with the first name and surname like in most Western countries) or Brayan Malissa (with the surname then first name like how people refer to themselves in Romania and many Asian countries)? (Or does she spell her name Malissa Briyan or Briyan Malissa?) The profile photo shows a picture of a pleasant looking businesswoman but I have no way of knowing if that is really her photograph or if she swiped some innocent woman’s picture from the Internet to use as her profile picture. For the purposes of this post I’m going to assume that my potential scammer is female although I have no way of knowing whether she is really a woman or if this person is really a man who is pretending to be a woman online.
Anyway, on the day before Thanksgiving she reached out to me in private via Messages. I wasn’t on Twitter much during that time because I was busy with other things. I decided to respond to her the day after Thanksgiving making light talk about eating too much turkey.
She then introduces herself to me, says that she’s in New York City and she immediately starts to ask me for my name and where I live.
She uses “form” when it should be “from”. But there was something off about her English that seems reminiscent of all of those other online scams I’ve encountered. Even her writing style seems suspect. I swear these scammers must have some kind of an alternative stylebook to Strunk and White’s Element of Style where it says “Here is how you phrase your introduction to your potential victim…” (LOL!) because these scam messages tend to read the same after a while. I’m getting pretty good at being able to tell a potential scammer from a genuine person. Her next question to me confirmed this. Usually you don’t ask what someone does for a living when you are just introducing yourself to a total stranger on social media. I decided to start playing with Lisa’s head. I responded to her question about my profession by making myself out to be this very poor and desperate person who’s on the verge of being homeless very soon. I also pretended to assume that she’s a recruiter and I asked if she wanted to see my resume.
She soon responded with her non-grammatical English and she got to the reason why she decided to send me personal messages out of the blue on Twitter.
She’s trying to get me to buy bitcoins from her. I looked on her Twitter profile and I saw that her profile consists of nothing more than retweets of other people’s pro-bitcoin tweets. She hasn’t written anything like an original tweet in her own words about anything. (Say what you will about President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed but at least he composes his own tweets.)
At this point I became so totally annoyed with her and her personal messages that I decided to end this raising of her expectations that she will financially fleece me and move on to the next phase where I totally shut her down and frustrate her. Using anti-bitcoin links from Warren Buffett and the Motley Fool, I went in for the kill.
Then I decided to twist the virtual knife in her back further by going full Grammar Nazi on her for her use of non-grammatical English in order to gain my confidence.
In the process I also called out her inconsistency in spelling her own name.
Okay so I made up that part about my mother telling me to never deal with someone who doesn’t know how to spell his/her own name. (Although she really used to tell me that if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.)
For the piece de resistance, I decided to frustrate her further by blocking her on Twitter so she can’t respond to what I sent to her via private message.
I’ll admit that I could have also ignored her then blocked her. But I’ve grown so impatient with these scammers trying to waste my time with their attempts to butter me up so they can rip me off that I just couldn’t resist giving one of them a taste of her own medicine. Just as Lisa tried to waste my time with her friendly overtures in an effort to take what little money I have currently left in my bank account, I decided to waste her time by raising her hopes that I’ll become her next victim then suddenly dash them in a cruel way. I’m not sorry for doing that. She’s a scammer and she’s scum. She deserves what I did to her.
All this went down two days ago. I’m sure that she has since moved on to her next potential victim while continuing to retweet other people’s tweets instead of writing her own original tweets.
UPDATE (November 28, 2018): Just a few hours after this post went live, I found out that Twitter has suspended that account. Good job, Twitter! At least that’s one less online scummy scammer who preys on unsuspecting people.
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