Why cryptocurrencies and NFTs are criticized

In his video, Olson claims that blockchain technology is “poorly designed or deliberately confusing to make it difficult to understand and thus more acceptable” in the eyes of the public. According to Olson, there is no need to use blockchains at all, as the traditional financial system supposedly does a fine job of it.

Olson’s critique of NFT and crypto

Already this argument can be argued with. Firstly, international transfers via traditional banks are very slow and expensive when compared to the same Bitcoin. On top of that, such transactions lack the main thing – decentralisation. Recall that a bank can simply block an account or a transfer at will, meaning that a person does not actually own their money.

Furthermore, the author of the video states that NFTs have no real value. The fact that some of them are sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars is considered absurd by Olson. However, regardless of the blocker’s opinion on unique tokens, the field experienced an unprecedented haip last year. More than 28.6 million wallets made some $25 billion worth of transactions with NFT across ten different blockchains.

By comparison, only around 545,000 cryptocurrency wallets traded NFT tokens in 2020. Which means the growth of the sphere has been incredible.

Video author Dan Olson

Olson believes that the whole economy around NFT is essentially a group of people convincing others of the value of digital objects. He sees this as potentially dangerous, not just for those people who are “overpaying” for tokens, but for the world as a whole. Still, as he goes more and more into the metaverse, groups of concerned individuals could limit digital content with NFT.

The video also challenges the value of images that are associated with tokens. According to Olson, there is no value in them; in fact, images and tokens have nothing to do with anything, as the former can be copied anyway. He’s also sceptical of developers creating NFT collections.

We think this argument is irrelevant and wrong. NFT-tokens are a proof of full ownership of a digital object. Therefore, there is no point in copying images, because the person who did it will not own the original image.

NFT tokens

Here is a clip in the original in which the author shares his point of view.

As the author of the clip points out, there is a culture of “poisonous positivity” in the NFT community, where those who try to criticise or leave constructive feedback on a project are shamed and silenced. Criticism of NFT projects – justified or not – is labelled as attempts to cause panic and immediately dismissed by cryptocurrency enthusiasts.

We believe that this trait of behaviour is peculiar to people in general, not crypto users. Still, shareholders of a particular company are unlikely to tolerate criticism of it online and will surely respond to such statements.

The author of the video also complains about the number of bots spamming crypto on Twitter and Discord. Here’s his rejoinder.

I didn’t feel the need to respond to anything because the reality of the cryptocurrency ecosystem speaks for itself.

While fraud and spam is a serious problem, Web3 cannot solve it in its current state. Many of the fraudulent NFT schemes and spam messages Olson is talking about are actually spreading on Web2 platforms like the already mentioned Discord and Twitter. That said, OpenSea, which combines elements of Web2 and Web3, has also had its share of problems recently, with the platform often being unavailable and rendered offline.


We believe that this criticism cannot be taken seriously because of some of the author's arguments. If the creator of the video thinks that "NFT-tokens are meaningless because the picture attached to them can simply be saved", then he clearly does not understand the benefits of blockchain, cryptography and decentralisation. In addition, there is no point in criticising the field of digital assets for the presence of speculation in this market either, as this feature is common to many financial sectors. In the end, we tend to think that NFT will continue to evolve and that these videos are just a reminder of the newness and innovativeness of the digital asset niche.


What do you think of NFT? Share your opinion in our Millionaire Crypto Chat. We’ll discuss other important developments there as well.