Dan Olson in his now-viral video “The Line Must Go Up.” Credit: Dan Olson/YoutubeYouTuber Dan Olson has gone viral for a video essay where he offers a wide-ranging analysis–and takedown–of cryptocurrency and NFTs, entitled “Line Goes Up.”
Olson had long been established on YouTube for creating analytical but accessible videos on a number of different topics and cultural phenomenons like 50 Shades of Grey and Detective Pikachu. Olson had amassed a following of over half a million followers by the time he released “Line Goes Up.”
The 2-hour long video, which Olson had been working on for nearly a year, spread across the internet like wildfire since its release on January 21, 2002, which eerily coincided with a huge crash in the crypto market.
Olson’s video, which deftly explains the rise of cryptocurrencies and the successive rise of Non-fungible Tokens, has stoked a larger conversation surrounding what people call “the Problem with NFTs,” which Olson more sharply states as “NFTs are a poverty trap.”
Olson explains that people feel motivated by “deflationary incentives” to buy cryptocurrency, telling Vice that people believe “you’ve got to get in now, because down the road, it’s going to be harder and worse to get in because whatever you get later is going to be, by definition, worth substantially less,” Olson explained that this deflationary aspect is intimately linked to the finite nature of cryptocurrencies, which valorize scarcity, and thus, hoarding.
