It's a lot less insane than jumping out of an airplane and letting it crash for virality- but it's still in the same vein of vanity. Look at me, I'm doing something crazy.
There may have not really been much prosecution for this historically but... also rarely is a crime so carefully and meticulously documented, and we happen to have an executive branch currently obsessed with patriotic symbology and aggressive responses to petty crime... this may been a uniquely bad time to do this.
The last time I played with NFTs it was about $50 USD just in processing fees to mint the token; not sure if that has changed since then. So it's not necessarily the case that the author is making a bunch of money off of this project; they might actually be just passing along costs.
Author here. Gas costs have actually come down a lot over the past few years. It only costs me a few dollars to run the transaction. It's more that scheduling, setting up, conducting, and tearing down each burn session is a huge pain in the ass. So if I can burn 10 bills an hour, then I'd clear maybe $450 an hour after gas, which doesn't feel crazy for providing boutique financial services.
I like this sort of performance art where someone becomes the thing they’re satirizing to point out its absurdities. It reminds me of when Stephen Colbert setup a super PAC to expose how corrupt it could be.
Issuing stablecoin legally requires collateral reserves to be held. When there is a bank run on the issued stablecoin, that's when this matters. Without the collateral, the value of the stablecoin risks dipping to zero. Faith alone isn't always sufficient.
