I worked at cryptovoxels for a few months late last year. I quit because I couldn't live with myself after looking into cryptocurrencies. I went into it skeptical, but with an open mind. We put into my contract that my contract would end after 1 year if Etherium hadn't moved from proof of work to proof of stake. At the time, Ben said that would happen in a few months. Now that I've read more I don't think it will ever happen.
Ben Nolan, the founder of cryptovoxels just tweeted this and it's spurred me to respond.
I love all the people that tell me to get fucked because we're in the crypto / NFT space.
- We're into user sovereignty
- We hate speculation
- We offset all our carbon and use low carbon chains
- We've been shipping a metaverse since 2018
But whatever, fuck blockchain.
Let's dig into these a bit.
But before we do, first we have to understand a little about what cryptovoxels is, and how it works.
- People buy parcels of virtual land (a parcel is technically 3d space, not a 2d plot of land) using the Etherium cryptocurrency.
- The current owner of the land is able to build whatever they want on their piece of the land.
- The basics of building are the same as minecraft, you place blocks (voxels, a 3d pixel) on your land to create a space you want.
- Generally speaking, access to land is free to everyone. Just building is restricted to the owner.
So what are you actually buying when you buy a cryptovoxels parcel? It's an NFT, but not a shitty ape jpeg. Shitty ape jpeg NFTs only put a link to the jpeg on the blockchain. Cryptovoxels NFTs put the coordinates of your parcel on the blockchain. If we go look at a random cryptovoxels parcel, we can see this:
Function: mint(address _to, uint256 _tokenId, int16 x1, int16 y1, int16 z1, int16 x2, int16 y2, int16 z2, uint256 _price)
Which is showing what goes into "minting" the NFT. x1, y1, z1, x2, y2, z2 are numbers that represent the location of the parcel in the cryptovoxels world.
Ok, so, sovereignty:
- It's true that the owner of the NFT is free to sell or transfer this token to whoever. They are the sovereign owner of the token and cryptovoxels can't interfere in that process.
- BUT, what is built on that land is 100% controlled by cryptovoxels. All that data lives in the cryptovoxels database.
One reason why is that it would be earth shatteringly expensive to put the data for a build on the blockchain. If we go back to that random parcel, we can see it cost cryptovoxels $US50 just to put those handful of numbers on the blockchain. Imagine tracking the state of that entire 3d space over time as it gets edited by its owners. Lol.
Another reason is that cryptovoxels wants to be able to moderate what's put in a parcel. Builders can decorate their parcels with images and NFTs (the shitty ape kind) and being able to remove objectionable stuff is a necessity. This is a good reason, and a responsible thing to do in my opinion. And probably a legal requirement because cryptovoxels is hosting this stuff on the web.
But be clear, if Ben decides to sell to Zuckerberg (something he's constantly wrestling with himself about doing) and Meta decides to gut the thing because it competes with them, all the content of the world is gone and your sovereignly owned parcel NFT will be left pointing at empty space.
To be fair, Ben did mention wanting to put the content of the world on ipfs eventually. And maybe that will happen.
Anyway, being "into" sovereignty is nice and all but it feels like a bit of a dog-whistle while the truth is much closer to a facebook style of things where the content itself is controlled and owned by the business.
While I believe that Ben abstractly believes this... fucking LOL.
Ben directly benefits in multiple different ways from speculation and created a business model that harnesses speculation and fomo.
First of all, how much does it cost to buy a parcel from cryptovoxels you might ask? That example one above went for ~$USD2500. But, it depends! It depends because cryptovoxels doesn't sell parcels for a fixed price, they auction them! Cryptovoxels could commit to always selling a certain volume of world at a fixed price, but that would destroy half the speculative value of a parcel. Why would you hurry to buy a parcel now if you knew that it would be the same price next year? An auction means you will look at the price of parcels historically, see they're constantly rising and therefore worth bidding against others to get in now. To the moon!
If a parcel is later sold on from one owner to another, cryptovoxels also gets a percentage of that sale (if it's sold on opensea.) The more people that buy and sell parcels, the more money cryptovoxels makes. THE reason people are buying and selling parcels of virtual land is because of fucking speculation.
This isn't a small amount of money either. Sometimes it's more money than the primary sales.
This isn't private information, you can go look it up because it's all public info. At time of writing the last 90 days has seen ~3500 Eth ($USD 10 Million) in transfers of cryptovoxels parcels on opensea.
A huge part of cryptovoxels' success came when Ben added a feature to allow builders to add NFT images to their parcel. Cryptovoxels got big, in part, because NFTs got big. NFTs are PURE speculative evil.
Reading between the lines of his tweet, I think he hates people who speculate on parcels in cryptovoxels that don't ever build anything. This creates a dead, empty world. Fair enough. But it's a problem that comes from the underlying business model and his choice to build on top of cryptocurrencies.
It's hard to truly hate a thing when it's making you shit tons of money.
This is twitter, space is limited, but this might be a fairer statement:
We offset all our carbon [from using Etherium] and use low carbon chains for other things in the game like usernames and wearables.
A lot has already been written about the ecological disaster of crypto. Here's some of my favourite facts:
Sure, those are about Bitcoin, not Etherium but Eth is already using 60% of the energy Bitcoin uses
I just don't think carbon offsets washes your hands on this one. Partly because calculating the offsets is pretty hard. How do you capture all the externalities? Do they capture the e-waste too?
Offsets are only part of the story when you really look into it. Even green energy production isn't totally green. Whole countries are having energy crises causing citizens to go cold because crypto miners are using all the power. There's just a litany of negative "externalties."
I do genuinely care about Ben and my friends who work at cryptovoxels. They're fallible humans, just like me.
Ben especially is a sensitive person (so am I) and this criticism will probably hurt. I'm kind of sorry about that. And I kind of want it to sting a bit too. Ben is exceedingly generous to the people that work there but that can't outweigh the wider harm that crypto is doing to society.
Something that I struggled with was that at least cryptovoxels is a thing. There's something there. It's not some fucking rug pull. There's real work being done on real problems by well intentioned people. But it lends credibility to crypto because it's (arguably) an ok use-case of some of the tech.
I was spending a lot of time reading about crypto by skeptics like @smdiehl and the internal conflict was keeping me up at night. I quit a little before the amazing foldable ideas video about nfts came out. But when it did, I felt so fucking vindicated. I thought I was going insane because the people I was working with didn't seem to be seeing the same problems in crypto I was seeing.
So this isn't a "get fucked" to Ben. But is 100% a "get fucked" to crypto and NFTs.
Ben, especially, is prone to fucking people over. Ask him about it, see if you get a letter from a lawyer.
This "land" that they are buying is 100% dependent on cryptovoxels still existing at some point in the future. Which, unlike real land, it won't. The only question is whether it's ten days or ten years and when it happens a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money.