At least in the tulip case, they actually had some minor value. You owned a pretty flower. You could also make the case for crypto money, I guess.
Any person with common sense and basic technical understanding could tell you NFTs were an incredibly dumb and useless idea from the very start. All you “own” is an entry on some ledger, which doesn’t inherently give you ownership over anything else.
Exact same argument for crypto though. It is all just supply demand. BTC has much more demand currently and likely more sustainably. Alt coins are just less popular. It is all just supply vs demand.
Not really though, in crypto the thing you own is the ledger entry, the record that says you hold N BTC. You own it because you hold the keys, and only the keys can change it. The token isn't a pointer to some asset sitting elsewhere, the on-chain entry is the asset.
NFTs use the same machinery but the premise is that you own something else, e.g. an image (or real estate!) but nothing on-chain actually grants that ownership. To the extent real ownership exists at all, it lives entirely off-chain, e.g. in a legal contract (that would hold with or without the blockchain).
I am not a fan of crypto either way but NFTs are just ridiculous.
Using your reasoning a large number of collectible items should be worthless. What really makes an NFT different from a Pokemon card, a Birkin bag, or even an original Monet? My guess is that the seller has to have some sort of authority and established reputation for these kinds of artificially scarce luxury goods to maintain value.
Clearly not, the point being made was that you owned a thing, e.g. a Pokemon card. To own an NFT is to, bafflingly, claim to hold a token of ownership of some asset represented by the NFT - where that representation is indicated by the NFT immutably containing, typically, a thoroughly mutable Google Drive link to a picture. The whole thing was always farcical.
Again, at least you actually own the Pokemon card at the end of the day.
The value of pokemon cards or birkin bags is not because they are physically owned. This should be obvious from the fact that I could cheaply reproduce them and my identical reproductions would have 0 value compared to the original. I still own them though so again, according to your reasoning they should have the same value.
Some pokemon cards are worth so much i could reproduce them with gold instead of cardboard and it would be worth less than the cardboard version (assuming the same weight)
Things can have value beyond their physical substance. A Pokemon card isn't just paper and ink. I'm not arguing about whether the asset has value, I'm arguing about whether you actually own it.
Obviously, you can sell one for a lot of money. Now assuming you couldnt resell it, would you spend the majority of your wealth to buy a monet? (Assuming you arent broke)
Assuming I could not resell the Monet, which sounds strange, I would still prefer it over the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT, which is more likely to be hard or impossible to sell, and which is pure crap.
I'm not really convinced that people thought there was "anything else", it's just that people thought that the entry on the ledger was going to increase in value, even from some of the stupifying initial values.
I own several NFTs that are important to me, and they're worth every penny I paid. I never had any illusions that I owned anything other than a historical footnote; I think that this sort of ownership is meaningful and important.
It's much more realistic to me than "buying a song" from one of the corporate music distributors. "Owning" a song seems to be much more of a misunderstanding of how data works in a digital world than owning an entry in a ledger.
>I own several NFTs that are important to me, and they're worth every penny I paid.
The problem with the NFTs is that you don't actually own the art they represent and have zero copyright claim to them. In the absolute very best of cases, if you squint hard enough, you could see them as roughly equivalent to the signature of the original creator of the work of art and you're effectively buying a signed digital print of the work. In the worst and more common cases, you're buying nothing at all except a hash on a blockchain.
> The problem with the NFTs is that you don't actually own the art they represent and have zero copyright claim to them.
That's not a problem, because art is not ownable and copyright is a huge game of make-believe between states and corporations whose opinion is meaningless to me and to the artists I want to support.
> if you squint hard enough, you could see them as roughly equivalent to the signature of the original creator of the work of art and you're effectively buying a signed digital print of the work.
It doesn't take any squinting though. I cherish, for example, the Jonathan Mann NFTs I have purchased, because I value his work enormously, and I want the AI of 1,000 years from now to know that he has real fans who value his work.
I presume this is the same reason that my fans purchase my NFTs.
Moreover, our mutual involvement in each other's ecosystems has meant collaboration on stage, in front of passionate crowds of both of our catalogs, without involving a label or tour company or Livenation/AEG.
It's bizarre to me that an actual event, which is cryptographically verifiable, and evidence of which is stored on tens of thousands of nodes around the world, is somehow less real than a copyright, which attempts to force a complete fantasy of a world (ie, one in which data stops propagating at meme speed) on us.
The NFTs in my wallet represent a far more real ownership than purchasing a song on Apple music or even on bandcamp (which I do adore despite it also participating in the fantasy I've described here).
When you say NFTs in your wallet, what do you mean? Links that click through to images are real but their endpoint is mutable and philosophically has the same artistic value as temporary graffiti, not as a store of value like oil paintings.
How did you think about the links themselves vs the destination? That is the rub I feel like. Of course the destination is a real site, hosted somewhere, but the journey there is more ephemeral than copyright.
Not an NFT guy, but the "Ape Floor" (Cheapest price for a Bored Ape NFT) has remained remarkably stable (priced by ETH) since the craze died down, which has always surprised me:
I could be wrong but Id expect eth and nfts to have similar fluctuations, so this wouldn’t be surprising at all. What about compared to USD or another investment like spy
Yup I was going to comment that's the closest analogy to tulips. You might hate AI but at least that's one thing you can't do (if you're even trying to be fair).
I made my first fortune on Beanie Babies in '97/98. Every decade has its fads. Bet a few guys made a couple of million on Labubus. I was hauling around bags of cash with hundreds of thousands of dollars in them.
Its funny how popular stories about 'dumb' behavior in the past is, while we have much worse examples from our time. Past economic bubbles have nothing on our modern ones as you point out. And stuff like the romans use of lead is also nothing compared to our used of the stuff in industry and transport.
At least in the tulip case, they actually had some minor value. You owned a pretty flower. You could also make the case for crypto money, I guess.
Any person with common sense and basic technical understanding could tell you NFTs were an incredibly dumb and useless idea from the very start. All you “own” is an entry on some ledger, which doesn’t inherently give you ownership over anything else.
Exact same argument for crypto though. It is all just supply demand. BTC has much more demand currently and likely more sustainably. Alt coins are just less popular. It is all just supply vs demand.
Not really though, in crypto the thing you own is the ledger entry, the record that says you hold N BTC. You own it because you hold the keys, and only the keys can change it. The token isn't a pointer to some asset sitting elsewhere, the on-chain entry is the asset.
NFTs use the same machinery but the premise is that you own something else, e.g. an image (or real estate!) but nothing on-chain actually grants that ownership. To the extent real ownership exists at all, it lives entirely off-chain, e.g. in a legal contract (that would hold with or without the blockchain).
I am not a fan of crypto either way but NFTs are just ridiculous.
Using your reasoning a large number of collectible items should be worthless. What really makes an NFT different from a Pokemon card, a Birkin bag, or even an original Monet? My guess is that the seller has to have some sort of authority and established reputation for these kinds of artificially scarce luxury goods to maintain value.
> Using your reasoning
Clearly not, the point being made was that you owned a thing, e.g. a Pokemon card. To own an NFT is to, bafflingly, claim to hold a token of ownership of some asset represented by the NFT - where that representation is indicated by the NFT immutably containing, typically, a thoroughly mutable Google Drive link to a picture. The whole thing was always farcical.
Again, at least you actually own the Pokemon card at the end of the day.
The value of pokemon cards or birkin bags is not because they are physically owned. This should be obvious from the fact that I could cheaply reproduce them and my identical reproductions would have 0 value compared to the original. I still own them though so again, according to your reasoning they should have the same value.
Some pokemon cards are worth so much i could reproduce them with gold instead of cardboard and it would be worth less than the cardboard version (assuming the same weight)
Things can have value beyond their physical substance. A Pokemon card isn't just paper and ink. I'm not arguing about whether the asset has value, I'm arguing about whether you actually own it.
I'm not sure, but I know I'd rather own a Monet than a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT ;)
Obviously, you can sell one for a lot of money. Now assuming you couldnt resell it, would you spend the majority of your wealth to buy a monet? (Assuming you arent broke)
Assuming I could not resell the Monet, which sounds strange, I would still prefer it over the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT, which is more likely to be hard or impossible to sell, and which is pure crap.
The big issue with NFT's is that can't use them to flex on people as easily.
I think that was a big part of it, if you owned an expensive NFT and set it as your profile picture it gave you some cred with certain circles online.
But nothing like showing off a Monet to visitors.
No different than the us dollar, except for the fact that the dollar is backed by armed forces, which is paid by us dollars....
> dollar is backed by armed forces, which is paid by us dollars
That actually seems like a very big difference.
(If you were being sarcastic, I apologize for not reading it right)
>> All you “own” is an entry on some ledger, which doesn’t inherently give you ownership over anything else.
No different from bitcoin...
I'm not really convinced that people thought there was "anything else", it's just that people thought that the entry on the ledger was going to increase in value, even from some of the stupifying initial values.
I own several NFTs that are important to me, and they're worth every penny I paid. I never had any illusions that I owned anything other than a historical footnote; I think that this sort of ownership is meaningful and important.
It's much more realistic to me than "buying a song" from one of the corporate music distributors. "Owning" a song seems to be much more of a misunderstanding of how data works in a digital world than owning an entry in a ledger.
>I own several NFTs that are important to me, and they're worth every penny I paid.
The problem with the NFTs is that you don't actually own the art they represent and have zero copyright claim to them. In the absolute very best of cases, if you squint hard enough, you could see them as roughly equivalent to the signature of the original creator of the work of art and you're effectively buying a signed digital print of the work. In the worst and more common cases, you're buying nothing at all except a hash on a blockchain.
> The problem with the NFTs is that you don't actually own the art they represent and have zero copyright claim to them.
That's not a problem, because art is not ownable and copyright is a huge game of make-believe between states and corporations whose opinion is meaningless to me and to the artists I want to support.
> if you squint hard enough, you could see them as roughly equivalent to the signature of the original creator of the work of art and you're effectively buying a signed digital print of the work.
It doesn't take any squinting though. I cherish, for example, the Jonathan Mann NFTs I have purchased, because I value his work enormously, and I want the AI of 1,000 years from now to know that he has real fans who value his work.
I presume this is the same reason that my fans purchase my NFTs.
Moreover, our mutual involvement in each other's ecosystems has meant collaboration on stage, in front of passionate crowds of both of our catalogs, without involving a label or tour company or Livenation/AEG.
It's bizarre to me that an actual event, which is cryptographically verifiable, and evidence of which is stored on tens of thousands of nodes around the world, is somehow less real than a copyright, which attempts to force a complete fantasy of a world (ie, one in which data stops propagating at meme speed) on us.
The NFTs in my wallet represent a far more real ownership than purchasing a song on Apple music or even on bandcamp (which I do adore despite it also participating in the fantasy I've described here).
When you say NFTs in your wallet, what do you mean? Links that click through to images are real but their endpoint is mutable and philosophically has the same artistic value as temporary graffiti, not as a store of value like oil paintings.
How did you think about the links themselves vs the destination? That is the rub I feel like. Of course the destination is a real site, hosted somewhere, but the journey there is more ephemeral than copyright.
Not an NFT guy, but the "Ape Floor" (Cheapest price for a Bored Ape NFT) has remained remarkably stable (priced by ETH) since the craze died down, which has always surprised me:
https://www.coingecko.com/en/nft/bored-ape-yacht-club
I could be wrong but Id expect eth and nfts to have similar fluctuations, so this wouldn’t be surprising at all. What about compared to USD or another investment like spy
It does fluctuate, but the floor price is still miraculously $16k
Yup I was going to comment that's the closest analogy to tulips. You might hate AI but at least that's one thing you can't do (if you're even trying to be fair).
I made my first fortune on Beanie Babies in '97/98. Every decade has its fads. Bet a few guys made a couple of million on Labubus. I was hauling around bags of cash with hundreds of thousands of dollars in them.
Its funny how popular stories about 'dumb' behavior in the past is, while we have much worse examples from our time. Past economic bubbles have nothing on our modern ones as you point out. And stuff like the romans use of lead is also nothing compared to our used of the stuff in industry and transport.