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I don't understand why anyone would pay for this, under any circumstances. You're not paying for exlusive access to the tweet, or even ownership in any meaningf

I don't understand why anyone would pay for this, under any circumstances. You're not paying for exlusive access to the tweet, or even ownership in any meaningful context - you get a certificate of authenticity tied to a cryptographic signature. The tweet is still out there in the wild, and it's not like you can delete it or transfer it to your handle or anything like that. I truly, genuinely have no idea who's bidding on this, or what their reasoning is. In fact, I'm not sure I understand the concept of NFTs at all. In the physical world, fine art holds its value because there is exactly one of each painting, and the human hoarding impulse nurtures a sense of reverence towards originality. However, art "sold" via NFT is still accessible and available for anyone to appreciate and download. I don't have to ask for permission from the owner to look at the art, or even go to a specific location (like a gallery for a physical piece). I can just download the art to my computer and stare at it whenever I want. The only argument I've seen for NFTs is that many famous artworks have prints made, that are cheap and available to everyone. The original painting is expensive and owned by a single person, but anyone can have an imitation hanging on their wall. I don't know that I buy the translation of this concept to the digital world, because prints are very obviously not the actual piece (not least because they're printed and not painted). If I download an image or video, or grab a link to @jack's tweet, I have the exact same configuration of bytes that the "owner" has. In the case of a link, I'm staring at the exact same thing the "owner" is, and the fact that it's on a reputable website means I'm not looking at a fake - thus providing the same guarantee as a certificate of authenticity. Hell, there's even a cryptographic element, since the site will use TLS for encryption. Am I missing the paradigm here? Or is this just the method by which crypto millionaires will become crypto penniless?

Tenoke 6y ago
It's just akin to a recognized by the owner and others deed of ownership over an asset. And this gets bought by the same people that might buy an autograph or memorabilia that would be about equally useless without the story around it and others valuing it too.
dannyw 6y ago
Advantages of NFTs: • Auctionable and sellable on the blockchain without any AML or KYC • Creates a paper trail that posits as a legitimate way to have accumulated wealth to the taxman and government • Round-trip costs of <2% as compared to traditional money laundering systems which can be an order of magnitude more expensive. • Plausible denialability as art. Basically, NFTs are a great way to launder money. Launders will likely also do some unrelated party transactions to counter anomaly detection, so even if you don't want to launder money, buying NFTs can give you the ability to capture some money laundering premium. You may find this description morally wrong, but don't doubt the ability for NFTs to grow in value. Money laundering is big money.
- azinman2 6y ago
  But how does any of that refute the idea of a tweet being sold with an NFT? How do you own someone else’s tweet? And what’s the real value here?
  - vntok 6y ago
    It is a bit like owning a protected building, for example a French castle. You "own" it in the sense there's an immutable paper trail that proves you and you alone are the owner. However, the castle being protected as a national monument, you cannot bulldoze it or even change it in any way by law AND you are obliged by law to open it to the public. Basically you are buying bragging rights.
    - lottin 6y ago
      Imaginary rights.
      - ebcode 6y ago
        All rights are imaginary.
    - azinman2 6y ago
      But at least the same system that creates constrains also grants you explicit ownership, the castle can’t be duplicated, and it’s value is tangible. Here, Twitter isn’t selling the NFT — it’s a pledge of value from Dorsey on something that’s completely unrelated. For something that there isn’t one of… every person who views the tweet is looking at their own identical copy. This all feels very strange to me, probably because it is so intangible AND Twitter is still broadcasting the message just the same AND Twitter already has a concept of ownership which isn’t being honored here.
vasco 6y ago
As newer generations are increasingly living their lives in a digital world, is it that surprising that people will want to display wealth by acquiring native digital assets? If you had to predict what the youth of the year 2200 will be into, various forms of collectible digital tokens seems super reasonable. The problem is knowing which ones.
esperent 6y ago
> art holds its value because there is exactly one of each painting, and the human hoarding impulse nurtures a sense of reverence towards originality. A huge amount of art holds value because someone needed to launder money. NFTs merely provide a simpler way for people to do that.
- drannex 6y ago
  That is the clearest explanation I have heard so far. Lots to think about there.
- akudha 6y ago
  How does one launder money through art? Don’t you have to still show where the money came from (and pay taxes etc) in the first place?
  - sgt 6y ago
    You can buy art from upcoming artists for next to nothing and 10 years later inflate the price as much as you want, citing market value.
  - nmfisher 6y ago
    I assume it looks like this: - get a business that operates mostly on anonymous/untraceable cash (laundromat) - put drug money through it and pay taxes - business use "clean" money to buy a piece of art for $1 million from a corporation owned by the criminal boss (that was bought for $1k). Voila, clean money in the hands of the head honcho. Pure speculation on my part, though.
  - DanBC 6y ago
    Here are two links with lots of information: https://www.riskscreen.com/kyc360/news/art-in-the-frame-for-money-laundering/ https://www.riskscreen.com/kyc360/news/art-in-the-frame-for-... https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2019/09/the-art-of-money-laundering-and-washing-illicit-cash-mashberg.htm https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2019/09/the-art-o... > But in late 2017, US prosecutors say, Green fell in with the owners of a Mauritius-based investment company, Beaufort Securities, that engaged in fraud, stock manipulation, and money laundering. For Beaufort’s owners, duping investors into buying worthless securities was the easy part. The hard part was making the ill-gotten profit appear legitimate to regulators. Beaufort had done so in the past by depositing money under false names in offshore banks, then slipping it into the global banking system little by little. The company had also used the time-tested trick of buying real estate and quickly selling it off, often at a loss, to convert illegal proceeds into assets that could be accounted for as the fruit of a property deal. > Now, money launderers like Beaufort were searching for less obvious ways to scrub their cash, and Matthew Green knew how to trade in multimillion-dollar works of art. Approached in late 2017 by the Beaufort conspirators—one of whom was in fact an undercover US federal agent who had infiltrated Beaufort—Green allegedly said he would accept £6.7 million (about $9 million at the time) in what he knew to be the yield of securities fraud in exchange for a 1965 Picasso, Personnages. Green would draw up phony ownership papers saying the work had been sold, all the while keeping the Picasso stored away. Down the road he would pretend to buy it back from his coconspirators at a lower price, keeping 5 to 10 percent of the laundered cash for himself. > “Art is a very attractive vehicle to launder money,” says Peter D. Hardy, a former US prosecutor who now advises corporations and industries on compliance with anti-money-laundering requirements. “It can be hidden or smuggled, transactions often are private, and prices can be subjective and manipulated—and extremely high.”
chishaku 6y ago
Completely aside from NFTs and any details of this specific asset, cash needs a return and will follow the prospect of it anywhere. We’re in an everything bubble and the recent investment/attention boom for NFTs is not surprising.
dageshi 6y ago
The paradigm shift is that this is an agreed method of determining who has the right to sell a digital asset via an internet native method. You can look at the same bytes all you want, but you can't sell them, the owner of the NFT can, the same way you can look at a painting in a museum, but you don't own it and can't sell it. Before there were walled gardens of this. Skins in something like CSGO being a good example, you could have a very valuable skin in CSGO but valve determines whether you own it or not and have the right to sell it. With NFT there's no central authority that says you have the right to sell something, you just do... I honestly think this is a pretty powerful thing, I'm interested to see where it goes.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  Agreed upon by whom? I don't agree to it. I think I own the first tweet. I'm willing to sell it to you though - for only 10 dollars! It seems worse than the "I'll sell you the Brooklyn Bridge" scam, because, at least in that case, you're trying to buy something valuable. Here, you're trying to pay for the rights for some people to say you own something? Madness.
  - adnzzzzZ 6y ago
    By the market. If someone has item A that's worth 10 million dollars and you have that same item A but it was only sold for 10 dollars then the first item A, despite being the same as yours, is more valuable, and therefore people and eventually apps will deal with it rather than with yours. In general items sold by their original authors will be more valuable (and you can already see evidence of this being wrong or right on the network), so this seems like a fine way of going about it.
    - notahacker 6y ago
      > If someone has item A that's worth 10 million dollars and you have that same item A but it was only sold for 10 dollars then the first item A, despite being the same as yours, is more valuable, and therefore people and eventually apps will deal with it rather than with yours. That's not "the market", that's sunk cost fallacy. If I buy a painting in a jumble sale for £5 and a reputable auctioneer confirms it's a genuine Picasso original, collectors will be willing to pay millions for it. If I spend £1m on a print or a painting by my sister, the auctioneer will still tell me none of their collectors are interested.
xmprt 6y ago
NFTs seem like the next big scam just like many ICOs were last time in 2017. The money laundering argument makes sense to me however I still don't get how it isn't a ponzi scheme because the laundering is predicated on the value of the NFT only ever going up. With art there is at least some intrinsic value that could be argued but with an NFT there is none for the reasons you laid out.
baby 6y ago
I know people who buy that stuff, and it's either: * because they have a lot of coins, and they don't care what they're spending it on. For example, cryptokitties were fun * they think they can make money out of that, because there's some hype * they are promoting their own NFT platform with fake purchases
- dorkwood 6y ago
  Another group is artists who have already made some money selling NFTs and now feel the need to support other artists.
preommr 6y ago
I don't understand the confusion. People have been selling weird stuff for years. There are services that let you "name a star" with a fancy but meaningless certificate. Even with fine art, there many paintings that have value because of historical and absurd cultural reasons that border on being a scam. People have always tried to sell stuff, and there always ~~fools~~ people that will buy them. The rules get crazier when it involves things at that exist at extreme ends. Like that app that was 10k that just had a spinning diamond to prove you had money to waste. Twitter is a big service, dorsey is a relatively famous name, idk, weird stuff happens.
- godelzilla 6y ago
  We've been indoctrinated our whole lives to believe that "property" is somehow fair, rational, real, etc. Plenty of room for cognitive dissonance here.
quickthrower2 6y ago
My guess is it a mix of speculation and showing off. You might buy it to boast about it like the tres commas art piece in the Silicon Valley sitcom (remember it’ll be someone rich buying it) or buy it to sell to someone else in future, a greater fool so to speak.
guerrilla 6y ago
I wonder if people imagine using the legal system to enforce their ownership in a similar way to IP enforcement by issuing takedown notices and stuff like that. I don't thimk anyone woyld buy that right now but maybe that's what people a hoping for.
enko123 6y ago
Marketing/ETH pumping like the bitcoin pizza story. NFTs will be nearly useless unless they become integrated with real systems; legal system, ticking systems, royalty payment systems, DRM systems (this token allows you to download to such-and-such MP3) Buying NFTs for huge sums might move the needle on such projects.
- suikadayo 6y ago
  This is still 1997 for NFTs - there will likely be more to come in the next decade
loceng 6y ago
I'd buy it as a troll - however others who are heavily financially incentivized in trying to get Bitcoin's value manipulated up higher and higher, are incentivized to spend a small fortune to make it appear like Bitcoin (an MLM-Ponzi scheme) has a use case for tracking ownership. Their problem for adoption desires however is we don't have a problem with tracking ownership - and if our societal systems of real trust networks is so compromised that we start having problems with tracking ownership, along with enforcement, then that society is in far more trouble than worrying about who owns what - and a blockchain isn't going to help them.
ganstyles 6y ago
Largely NFTs are an astroturfing job similar to crypto coins and things of that nature. Look at HN and search for NFTs. You'll see that there are a handful of articles years ago, but the vast, vast majority of articles/stories posted on NFTs in the last two weeks. Same on clubhouse, nothing that I recall on NFTs for a year, now at any given time there's a plethora of rooms with scare tactics titles like "Get in on NFTs now or the future will leave you behind" or "Become a millionaire with NFTs." Not saying there's not some use for them, but this pattern is a huge red flag that there's a pump and dump style thing going on behind the scenes. ICOs and other cryptocurrency shared and share the same pattern.
- qqii 6y ago
  That can easy be explained by their adoption by the rich and famous. Art NFTs were only made by niche artists until recently. Now that they're somewhat mainstream yet not well understood by the public I would be more suprised if people weren't preaching it as the best thing since sliced bread.
015a 6y ago
Additionally, not only are you not getting exclusive access to the tweet, not only is it not ownership in any meaningful context, but this "ownership" that this site is selling isn't even officially ran by Twitter (though, Jack selling a tweet on there may be christening enough for some people). I could spin up an ethereum NFT to compete with this service, and do the exact same thing. Now, tweets are being sold on two different blockchains. It doesn't have the Official Stamp of Approval that something like NBA TopShot has. If this were ran by Twitter, or at least had Twitter's backing, I'd understand the valuations a bit more. But, the website is the simplest, most thousand-line bootstrap-templated thing I've ever seen have so much money flow through it.
nickysielicki 6y ago
You're not missing anything. We're in the middle of an everything bubble and very dumb people are speculating on very dumb stuff. It's a casino.
kelnos 6y ago
I personally thing it's incredibly pointless, but when I was a kid I also thought collecting baseball cards was incredibly pointless. (Granted, baseball cards didn't cost $2M back then.) People believe doing things like that gives them a piece of history. Some do it because they think it will become more valuable and fetch a higher price later. I don't get it, but I don't begrudge people spending their money on whatever they want. Given that Dorsey is already rich, I'd hope that he'd donate the proceeds to charity, which would at least make all this worthwhile and productive.
dogma1138 6y ago
A big part of spending a lot of money on certain things is the signaling of hey look at how much money I got. Many luxury things aren’t useful, they are either a good way to store wealth in a manner that is less susceptible to certain market disruptions and even the reach of governments this is where gold and art come in or it’s a way to show everyone that you have so much money that you can afford to buy toilet paper made out of the fiber of some engineered pigmy pine trees grown in low earth orbit. This one is maybe a little bit of both, because as long as there are plenty of people willing to spend money to achieve the latter this one also falls into the former.

Tenoke 6y ago

It's just akin to a recognized by the owner and others deed of ownership over an asset. And this gets bought by the same people that might buy an autograph or memorabilia that would be about equally useless without the story around it and others valuing it too.

dannyw 6y ago

Advantages of NFTs: • Auctionable and sellable on the blockchain without any AML or KYC • Creates a paper trail that posits as a legitimate way to have accumulated wealth to the taxman and government • Round-trip costs of <2% as compared to traditional money laundering systems which can be an order of magnitude more expensive. • Plausible denialability as art. Basically, NFTs are a great way to launder money. Launders will likely also do some unrelated party transactions to counter anomaly detection, so even if you don't want to launder money, buying NFTs can give you the ability to capture some money laundering premium. You may find this description morally wrong, but don't doubt the ability for NFTs to grow in value. Money laundering is big money.

azinman2 6y ago
But how does any of that refute the idea of a tweet being sold with an NFT? How do you own someone else’s tweet? And what’s the real value here?
- vntok 6y ago
  It is a bit like owning a protected building, for example a French castle. You "own" it in the sense there's an immutable paper trail that proves you and you alone are the owner. However, the castle being protected as a national monument, you cannot bulldoze it or even change it in any way by law AND you are obliged by law to open it to the public. Basically you are buying bragging rights.
  - lottin 6y ago
    Imaginary rights.
    - ebcode 6y ago
      All rights are imaginary.
  - azinman2 6y ago
    But at least the same system that creates constrains also grants you explicit ownership, the castle can’t be duplicated, and it’s value is tangible. Here, Twitter isn’t selling the NFT — it’s a pledge of value from Dorsey on something that’s completely unrelated. For something that there isn’t one of… every person who views the tweet is looking at their own identical copy. This all feels very strange to me, probably because it is so intangible AND Twitter is still broadcasting the message just the same AND Twitter already has a concept of ownership which isn’t being honored here.

vasco 6y ago

As newer generations are increasingly living their lives in a digital world, is it that surprising that people will want to display wealth by acquiring native digital assets? If you had to predict what the youth of the year 2200 will be into, various forms of collectible digital tokens seems super reasonable. The problem is knowing which ones.

esperent 6y ago

> art holds its value because there is exactly one of each painting, and the human hoarding impulse nurtures a sense of reverence towards originality. A huge amount of art holds value because someone needed to launder money. NFTs merely provide a simpler way for people to do that.

drannex 6y ago
That is the clearest explanation I have heard so far. Lots to think about there.
akudha 6y ago
How does one launder money through art? Don’t you have to still show where the money came from (and pay taxes etc) in the first place?
- sgt 6y ago
  You can buy art from upcoming artists for next to nothing and 10 years later inflate the price as much as you want, citing market value.
- nmfisher 6y ago
  I assume it looks like this: - get a business that operates mostly on anonymous/untraceable cash (laundromat) - put drug money through it and pay taxes - business use "clean" money to buy a piece of art for $1 million from a corporation owned by the criminal boss (that was bought for $1k). Voila, clean money in the hands of the head honcho. Pure speculation on my part, though.
- DanBC 6y ago
  Here are two links with lots of information: https://www.riskscreen.com/kyc360/news/art-in-the-frame-for-money-laundering/ https://www.riskscreen.com/kyc360/news/art-in-the-frame-for-... https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2019/09/the-art-of-money-laundering-and-washing-illicit-cash-mashberg.htm https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2019/09/the-art-o... > But in late 2017, US prosecutors say, Green fell in with the owners of a Mauritius-based investment company, Beaufort Securities, that engaged in fraud, stock manipulation, and money laundering. For Beaufort’s owners, duping investors into buying worthless securities was the easy part. The hard part was making the ill-gotten profit appear legitimate to regulators. Beaufort had done so in the past by depositing money under false names in offshore banks, then slipping it into the global banking system little by little. The company had also used the time-tested trick of buying real estate and quickly selling it off, often at a loss, to convert illegal proceeds into assets that could be accounted for as the fruit of a property deal. > Now, money launderers like Beaufort were searching for less obvious ways to scrub their cash, and Matthew Green knew how to trade in multimillion-dollar works of art. Approached in late 2017 by the Beaufort conspirators—one of whom was in fact an undercover US federal agent who had infiltrated Beaufort—Green allegedly said he would accept £6.7 million (about $9 million at the time) in what he knew to be the yield of securities fraud in exchange for a 1965 Picasso, Personnages. Green would draw up phony ownership papers saying the work had been sold, all the while keeping the Picasso stored away. Down the road he would pretend to buy it back from his coconspirators at a lower price, keeping 5 to 10 percent of the laundered cash for himself. > “Art is a very attractive vehicle to launder money,” says Peter D. Hardy, a former US prosecutor who now advises corporations and industries on compliance with anti-money-laundering requirements. “It can be hidden or smuggled, transactions often are private, and prices can be subjective and manipulated—and extremely high.”

chishaku 6y ago

Completely aside from NFTs and any details of this specific asset, cash needs a return and will follow the prospect of it anywhere. We’re in an everything bubble and the recent investment/attention boom for NFTs is not surprising.

dageshi 6y ago

The paradigm shift is that this is an agreed method of determining who has the right to sell a digital asset via an internet native method. You can look at the same bytes all you want, but you can't sell them, the owner of the NFT can, the same way you can look at a painting in a museum, but you don't own it and can't sell it. Before there were walled gardens of this. Skins in something like CSGO being a good example, you could have a very valuable skin in CSGO but valve determines whether you own it or not and have the right to sell it. With NFT there's no central authority that says you have the right to sell something, you just do... I honestly think this is a pretty powerful thing, I'm interested to see where it goes.

ALittleLight 6y ago
Agreed upon by whom? I don't agree to it. I think I own the first tweet. I'm willing to sell it to you though - for only 10 dollars! It seems worse than the "I'll sell you the Brooklyn Bridge" scam, because, at least in that case, you're trying to buy something valuable. Here, you're trying to pay for the rights for some people to say you own something? Madness.
- adnzzzzZ 6y ago
  By the market. If someone has item A that's worth 10 million dollars and you have that same item A but it was only sold for 10 dollars then the first item A, despite being the same as yours, is more valuable, and therefore people and eventually apps will deal with it rather than with yours. In general items sold by their original authors will be more valuable (and you can already see evidence of this being wrong or right on the network), so this seems like a fine way of going about it.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    > If someone has item A that's worth 10 million dollars and you have that same item A but it was only sold for 10 dollars then the first item A, despite being the same as yours, is more valuable, and therefore people and eventually apps will deal with it rather than with yours. That's not "the market", that's sunk cost fallacy. If I buy a painting in a jumble sale for £5 and a reputable auctioneer confirms it's a genuine Picasso original, collectors will be willing to pay millions for it. If I spend £1m on a print or a painting by my sister, the auctioneer will still tell me none of their collectors are interested.

xmprt 6y ago

NFTs seem like the next big scam just like many ICOs were last time in 2017. The money laundering argument makes sense to me however I still don't get how it isn't a ponzi scheme because the laundering is predicated on the value of the NFT only ever going up. With art there is at least some intrinsic value that could be argued but with an NFT there is none for the reasons you laid out.

baby 6y ago

I know people who buy that stuff, and it's either: * because they have a lot of coins, and they don't care what they're spending it on. For example, cryptokitties were fun * they think they can make money out of that, because there's some hype * they are promoting their own NFT platform with fake purchases

dorkwood 6y ago
Another group is artists who have already made some money selling NFTs and now feel the need to support other artists.

preommr 6y ago

I don't understand the confusion. People have been selling weird stuff for years. There are services that let you "name a star" with a fancy but meaningless certificate. Even with fine art, there many paintings that have value because of historical and absurd cultural reasons that border on being a scam. People have always tried to sell stuff, and there always ~~fools~~ people that will buy them. The rules get crazier when it involves things at that exist at extreme ends. Like that app that was 10k that just had a spinning diamond to prove you had money to waste. Twitter is a big service, dorsey is a relatively famous name, idk, weird stuff happens.

godelzilla 6y ago
We've been indoctrinated our whole lives to believe that "property" is somehow fair, rational, real, etc. Plenty of room for cognitive dissonance here.

quickthrower2 6y ago

My guess is it a mix of speculation and showing off. You might buy it to boast about it like the tres commas art piece in the Silicon Valley sitcom (remember it’ll be someone rich buying it) or buy it to sell to someone else in future, a greater fool so to speak.

guerrilla 6y ago

I wonder if people imagine using the legal system to enforce their ownership in a similar way to IP enforcement by issuing takedown notices and stuff like that. I don't thimk anyone woyld buy that right now but maybe that's what people a hoping for.

enko123 6y ago

Marketing/ETH pumping like the bitcoin pizza story. NFTs will be nearly useless unless they become integrated with real systems; legal system, ticking systems, royalty payment systems, DRM systems (this token allows you to download to such-and-such MP3) Buying NFTs for huge sums might move the needle on such projects.

suikadayo 6y ago
This is still 1997 for NFTs - there will likely be more to come in the next decade

loceng 6y ago

I'd buy it as a troll - however others who are heavily financially incentivized in trying to get Bitcoin's value manipulated up higher and higher, are incentivized to spend a small fortune to make it appear like Bitcoin (an MLM-Ponzi scheme) has a use case for tracking ownership. Their problem for adoption desires however is we don't have a problem with tracking ownership - and if our societal systems of real trust networks is so compromised that we start having problems with tracking ownership, along with enforcement, then that society is in far more trouble than worrying about who owns what - and a blockchain isn't going to help them.

ganstyles 6y ago

Largely NFTs are an astroturfing job similar to crypto coins and things of that nature. Look at HN and search for NFTs. You'll see that there are a handful of articles years ago, but the vast, vast majority of articles/stories posted on NFTs in the last two weeks. Same on clubhouse, nothing that I recall on NFTs for a year, now at any given time there's a plethora of rooms with scare tactics titles like "Get in on NFTs now or the future will leave you behind" or "Become a millionaire with NFTs." Not saying there's not some use for them, but this pattern is a huge red flag that there's a pump and dump style thing going on behind the scenes. ICOs and other cryptocurrency shared and share the same pattern.

qqii 6y ago
That can easy be explained by their adoption by the rich and famous. Art NFTs were only made by niche artists until recently. Now that they're somewhat mainstream yet not well understood by the public I would be more suprised if people weren't preaching it as the best thing since sliced bread.

015a 6y ago

Additionally, not only are you not getting exclusive access to the tweet, not only is it not ownership in any meaningful context, but this "ownership" that this site is selling isn't even officially ran by Twitter (though, Jack selling a tweet on there may be christening enough for some people). I could spin up an ethereum NFT to compete with this service, and do the exact same thing. Now, tweets are being sold on two different blockchains. It doesn't have the Official Stamp of Approval that something like NBA TopShot has. If this were ran by Twitter, or at least had Twitter's backing, I'd understand the valuations a bit more. But, the website is the simplest, most thousand-line bootstrap-templated thing I've ever seen have so much money flow through it.

nickysielicki 6y ago

You're not missing anything. We're in the middle of an everything bubble and very dumb people are speculating on very dumb stuff. It's a casino.

kelnos 6y ago

I personally thing it's incredibly pointless, but when I was a kid I also thought collecting baseball cards was incredibly pointless. (Granted, baseball cards didn't cost $2M back then.) People believe doing things like that gives them a piece of history. Some do it because they think it will become more valuable and fetch a higher price later. I don't get it, but I don't begrudge people spending their money on whatever they want. Given that Dorsey is already rich, I'd hope that he'd donate the proceeds to charity, which would at least make all this worthwhile and productive.

dogma1138 6y ago

A big part of spending a lot of money on certain things is the signaling of hey look at how much money I got. Many luxury things aren’t useful, they are either a good way to store wealth in a manner that is less susceptible to certain market disruptions and even the reach of governments this is where gold and art come in or it’s a way to show everyone that you have so much money that you can afford to buy toilet paper made out of the fiber of some engineered pigmy pine trees grown in low earth orbit. This one is maybe a little bit of both, because as long as there are plenty of people willing to spend money to achieve the latter this one also falls into the former.