itch.io

You are overdramatic. 

Leaf and Itch are free to do whatever they want. But it is beneath both him and the company to parrot easily refutable nonsense.

Hey Leaf. I have been working in the blockchain space for five years and my brother showed me your tweet about NFTs. Was debating how to contact you and figured this is the best venue. Hope you have an open mind for someone you know personally. 

Here is the tweet:

A few have asked about our stance on NFTs: NFTs are a scam. If you think they are legitimately useful for anything other than the exploitation of creators, financial scams, and the destruction of the planet the we ask that please reevaluate your life choices. Peace 

NFTs are a scam

No they aren't. NFT is a more like a framework that allows individuals to create usages of digital ownership. It is true that there are many instances that are scammy and many that are probably outright cheats, but that isn't a problem with NFTs, that is a problem with people and charlatans.  Don't phones have legitimacy even though we are flooded with scam calls?

exploitation of creators

How are creators being exploited? Many creators are directly using NFTs as an alternative mechanism to sell their goods. 

financial scams

Yes, just like many new technologies, people will find ways to take advantage of the system or people to better themselves in a zero-sum game mentality. I think the state of NFTs is similar to the launch of the Apple App Store and the flood of 'novelty' applications.  There are plenty of examples that are absolutely not scams. My personal favorite is GodsUnchained. A trading card game that uses NFTs to supply the players with full digital ownership. 

There are two problems here:

1) There is a severe scalability issue with some blockchains that are preventing ease of implementation with NFTs. Projects like GodsUnchained that I mentioned before have to use secondary layers to reduce or outright remove the gas fees just to make it viable. This will be fixed in the coming years

2) It is difficult for NFTs to be fully legitimized when individuals form a lynch mob and protest when companies try to integrate or when companies like yours bans their usage for inaccurate reasons.

destruction of the planet

In this case, I assume you are specifically talking about Ethereum, the blockchain that has more NFTs running through it than any other.  It is true that the current energy usage is pretty drastic. But what you may not know is that the individuals associated with Ethereum have been well aware of this problem and have been working on it for years. 

The reason why blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum are so computationally expensive to create blocks is due to the Proof of Work consensus mechanism.  This mechanism is like a race track where the distance of the track increases as more runners join, each runner (miner) is a separate lane (though many pool together their resources),  and the area of the race track is the total energy consumed. What is worse is only the runner who wins gets any financial benefit, every other runner is at a net loss for that specific race.

Later this year, between June-September assuming no technical issues arise, Ethereum will be removing Proof of Work entirely and switching it to Proof of Stake. With Proof of Stake, instead of having this race track of energy consumption, it can be simplified to a complex Math.random call. Obviously it is more complicated than that, but the net result is the energy consumption of the Ethereum blockchain will reduce by 99.95%. It will be equivalent to taking the Leaning Tower of Pisa and turning it into a screw. 

we ask that please reevaluate your life choices

No comment besides how arrogant this is.