Why Supporting NFTs will Effectively End Discord.

I, just like many users, had seen the recent leaked survey asking users their thoughts on NFTs and NFT communities. Now, I know most likely you guys at Discord are doing this because it's the "hip, new thing" and probably don't actually have any clue what these are. Most likely you were told to add it by investors who only see potential dollar signs. However, implementing features related to NFTs will effectively end your business and give you a huge negative reputation.

NFTs are essentially a new form of the "valuable" scams. The seller of the NFT gives money to someone else to buy their NFT, in order to artificially raise the price. However, the blockchain technology has no idea that these buyers are in any way related to the seller, so the proof of transaction looks like random people buying this NFT from an outsider's perspective. The seller then finds a random stranger to try and swindle out of their money, by showing them this NFT with an inflated price tag, and saying "But I'm a nice person, so I'll let you have it for (actual amount of money they want)!". Essentially, they've just scammed a stranger out of thousands for dollars for something that isn't actually valuable at all.

Now, of course supporting scams will already leave a significant mark on Discord's reputation. There is also a large portion of Western population that is heavily against NFTs for various other reasons, such as energy usage, environmental impact, and art theft. This population has already been shown to violently reject services which support NFTs, especially rejecting them monetarily. Most likely if any NFT implementations happen, Discord is going to see a tank in Nitro subscriptions and total users.

If that wasn't bad enough, it's also highly likely that the trend of NFTs is going to die in roughly about 1-3 years, due to the IRS' crackdown on taxes related to them. Specifically, any NFT worth over $10,000 USD is subjected to taxation, meaning these scammers are either going to have to pay a load of money to the IRS, or they'll make significantly less money from their scams; both options leading to people no longer using NFTs for scams and it slowly fading out of existence. Plus, depending on how Discord intended to go about their NFT implementations, I doubt the company would like to be wrapped up in what might end up as multiple federal tax evasion cases.

In essence, implementing features related to NFTs is going to lose Discord a good chunk of its userbase, some permanently, for supporting a short-term fad that is pretty much doomed to the realm of the irrelevancy. Of course, with the actual userbase reduced and a temporary userbase gone, Discord would be left floundering financially and would have to try to build up that good reputation again. At the end of the day, Discord is it's own company that can make it's own decisions, but it must be understood that as users of its service, we also can make our own decisions to not support Discord.