5 ms·

what is a digital collectible? what is the value of a collectible? i can’t put my finger on it but feels like a strong bout of collective insanity high on id

what is a digital collectible? what is the value of a collectible? i can’t put my finger on it but feels like a strong bout of collective insanity high on ideas abusing language and metaphor and analogy to the point we no longer understand what is real and unreal

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
I understand your question, but at the end of the day, what is value? Why is a one can of soup more collectible than another physically identical can of soup beyond 'intangible' knowledge of it having been owned by a historical figure? In practical sense, things are worth only as much as someone is willing to pay, and someone is willing to pay 2.5m.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- spijdar 6y ago
  Sure, it's all on a sliding scale, but I think GP's point is the lines are blurring into insanity. At least a can of soup is a tangible object and is more "realizable" to our beings than some information stored on a database in some FAANG datacenter. Depending on your perspective it's all ridiculous or all rational, but at least the can of soup can be interacted with "natively" by our bodies without needing a trillion dollar technology stack to even sense in the first place.
  - Tossrock 6y ago
    "FAANG datacenter" really highlights the absurdity of including Netflix in the acronym - they have no data centers of their own, as they're built entirely on the AWS stack.
  - panarky 6y ago
    One share of GOOG stock is equally intangible. It may give you some theoretical infinitesimal ownership of the company. But since Alphabet doesn't pay dividends, there is zero cash flow. And it doesn't even give you the right to vote. There's no scenario where you can convert your share into physical assets of the company, or claim any portion of the future cash flows of the company. And unlike NFTs, a share of GOOG isn't even rare. There are 330 million others identical to yours. A share of GOOG is just an entry in an electronic ledger, and literally the only thing you can do with it is sell it to someone else. And yet people happily pay $2,100 for one, with no other objective than to resell it to someone else for more.
- perfmode 6y ago
  is value ultimately monetary? is money ultimately of value?
- pizza234 6y ago
  Based on my reading of the "12 million dollars stuffed shark"¹, this has the same mechanics as the market of a piece of contemporary art (I'd go as far as considering that this is, essentially, an art piece). In such markets, pieces are status, which has nothing really to do with matter (in a physical sense). Specifically: - status is sold; Jack Dorsey is famous, and his first tweet is strongly symbolic; - status is acquired/purchased; the buyer has the money for the purchase, and he'll fits the item likely in a sort of private collection. The status interpretation can make more intuitive the nature of the transaction/item, dispelling the insanity interpretation. It needs to be considered also that this can be very conventional speculation; in this sense, it would appear intuitively "not insane", like financial instruments (of course, in another sense, they are fundamentally insane :)). ¹=https://www.amazon.com/Million-Stuffed-Shark-Economics-Contemporary/dp/0230620590 https://www.amazon.com/Million-Stuffed-Shark-Economics-Conte...
- vsareto 6y ago
  I highly doubt Jack is doing this, but it seems like another good vehicle for money laundering. Here's an essentially worthless tweet I set at an unreasonable value as an NFT or whatever. Maybe he's doing a proof-of-concept for something else Twitter is developing (almost infinitely more likely than Jack doing money laundering), but this stuff just seems weird for rich tech people to do. This is like certificates of authenticity for random infomercial products, just on the blockchain.
mpalmer 6y ago
This is the evergreen discussion about the valuation of art, and it doesn't stop art from being highly valued.
mindslight 6y ago
Digital collectible? Like my FLAC collection, no blockchain involved, that I can happily share with friends? NFTs are the new shitcoins, without even a pretense of being generally useful. Digital Beanie Babies will surely be worth something long term, but nowhere near the bubble we're about to see. Then again, Bitcoin itself is the original non-fungible token, lacking the critical ecash proprietary of untraceability. So what do I know.
breckenedge 6y ago
My working assumption is that these digital tokens sell for so much because they are great for estate/inheritance tax evasion. With these digital tokens, you have something that's very liquid, immensely portable, unseizable, and doesn't depreciate like normal cash that you can hand down to your kids. https://newrepublic.com/article/147192/modern-art-serves-rich https://newrepublic.com/article/147192/modern-art-serves-ric...
- WheelsAtLarge 6y ago
  Art collecting has been a way to bypass taxes and launder money. I read an article where it was used for bribes. A person buys an art piece for 1000 bux and then sells it for 2000. Once the transaction is done no one outside the transaction knows it's a bribe. NFTs will make the process easier.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  I expect if Elizabeth Warren gets her way in crushing people who have a lot of wealth in stocks, they'll shift their money to collectibles. I.e. instead of investing in productive things like industry, they'll invest in useless things like art objects.
  - panarky 6y ago
    Your definition of "useless" is different from mine. What's more useless: a) $2.5m sitting in a bank account, vulnerable to taxation, confiscation, legal judgment, gradual inflation, rapid devaluation and bank insolvency, unlikely to increase much in value, where the only thing you can do with it is trade it for something useful. b) $2.5m invested in something rare, that could increase in value, where you can both trade it for something else you want, or appreciate the object itself and enjoy owning it.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      Money in a bank account gets loaned out to others who use it productively. Something rare is just that, something rare. It produces nothing.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Ekaros 6y ago
I think with this it is good idea to look into other "collectible" markets. Many of them have massively increasing valuations. So this is just people trying to get early on some new market... Still, at least with physical things, we know there is limited quantity of quality. Same can't be said about digital products...
WheelsAtLarge 6y ago
The value of collectibles is a supply and demand issue. A piccaso has the extra ordinary value (price) because at least 1 person is willing to pay for it not because picasso was such a great artist. Digital is the same except that you can make millions of exact copies. The token gives it scarcity and by extension value.
fullshark 6y ago
If it impresses people + you can resell it for more than you paid for initially then it's worth buying.
K0SM0S 6y ago
Thing is, "value is in the eye of the beholder". It might be material in a strictly biological setting, or idealistic (subjective) in a post-scarcity environment. We're somewhere in-between with the digital world, the value of the superfluous (e.g. collectibles) is able to rise as material needs are more easily covered (using an ever-smaller fraction of resources). To put it simply to the point of absurdity, if we were a "magical" (in Arthur C. Clarke's word) civilization without any outstanding needs, we could still play some for-profit economic game and spend quadrillions buying autographs, because it wouldn't lessen anything of importance. Conversely, if you're barely eating enough, you won't spend resources on anything else than getting more food, because that would lessen your chances of survival. The degree of perceived insanity, I think, thus entirely depends on who you are as a beholder of value, where you fit in the material ⇾ idealistic spectrum. Pretty sure Africans with $1/day feel this is perfectly stupid, but your average billionaire might find it a funny hobby, like collecting some cards of the digital era. There will be a market for that, I think crypto-manias proved as much. It's all relative to an observer, IMHO.

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago

I understand your question, but at the end of the day, what is value? Why is a one can of soup more collectible than another physically identical can of soup beyond 'intangible' knowledge of it having been owned by a historical figure? In practical sense, things are worth only as much as someone is willing to pay, and someone is willing to pay 2.5m.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
spijdar 6y ago
Sure, it's all on a sliding scale, but I think GP's point is the lines are blurring into insanity. At least a can of soup is a tangible object and is more "realizable" to our beings than some information stored on a database in some FAANG datacenter. Depending on your perspective it's all ridiculous or all rational, but at least the can of soup can be interacted with "natively" by our bodies without needing a trillion dollar technology stack to even sense in the first place.
- Tossrock 6y ago
  "FAANG datacenter" really highlights the absurdity of including Netflix in the acronym - they have no data centers of their own, as they're built entirely on the AWS stack.
- panarky 6y ago
  One share of GOOG stock is equally intangible. It may give you some theoretical infinitesimal ownership of the company. But since Alphabet doesn't pay dividends, there is zero cash flow. And it doesn't even give you the right to vote. There's no scenario where you can convert your share into physical assets of the company, or claim any portion of the future cash flows of the company. And unlike NFTs, a share of GOOG isn't even rare. There are 330 million others identical to yours. A share of GOOG is just an entry in an electronic ledger, and literally the only thing you can do with it is sell it to someone else. And yet people happily pay $2,100 for one, with no other objective than to resell it to someone else for more.
perfmode 6y ago
is value ultimately monetary? is money ultimately of value?
pizza234 6y ago
Based on my reading of the "12 million dollars stuffed shark"¹, this has the same mechanics as the market of a piece of contemporary art (I'd go as far as considering that this is, essentially, an art piece). In such markets, pieces are status, which has nothing really to do with matter (in a physical sense). Specifically: - status is sold; Jack Dorsey is famous, and his first tweet is strongly symbolic; - status is acquired/purchased; the buyer has the money for the purchase, and he'll fits the item likely in a sort of private collection. The status interpretation can make more intuitive the nature of the transaction/item, dispelling the insanity interpretation. It needs to be considered also that this can be very conventional speculation; in this sense, it would appear intuitively "not insane", like financial instruments (of course, in another sense, they are fundamentally insane :)). ¹=https://www.amazon.com/Million-Stuffed-Shark-Economics-Contemporary/dp/0230620590 https://www.amazon.com/Million-Stuffed-Shark-Economics-Conte...
vsareto 6y ago
I highly doubt Jack is doing this, but it seems like another good vehicle for money laundering. Here's an essentially worthless tweet I set at an unreasonable value as an NFT or whatever. Maybe he's doing a proof-of-concept for something else Twitter is developing (almost infinitely more likely than Jack doing money laundering), but this stuff just seems weird for rich tech people to do. This is like certificates of authenticity for random infomercial products, just on the blockchain.

mpalmer 6y ago

This is the evergreen discussion about the valuation of art, and it doesn't stop art from being highly valued.

mindslight 6y ago

Digital collectible? Like my FLAC collection, no blockchain involved, that I can happily share with friends? NFTs are the new shitcoins, without even a pretense of being generally useful. Digital Beanie Babies will surely be worth something long term, but nowhere near the bubble we're about to see. Then again, Bitcoin itself is the original non-fungible token, lacking the critical ecash proprietary of untraceability. So what do I know.

breckenedge 6y ago

My working assumption is that these digital tokens sell for so much because they are great for estate/inheritance tax evasion. With these digital tokens, you have something that's very liquid, immensely portable, unseizable, and doesn't depreciate like normal cash that you can hand down to your kids. https://newrepublic.com/article/147192/modern-art-serves-rich https://newrepublic.com/article/147192/modern-art-serves-ric...

WheelsAtLarge 6y ago
Art collecting has been a way to bypass taxes and launder money. I read an article where it was used for bribes. A person buys an art piece for 1000 bux and then sells it for 2000. Once the transaction is done no one outside the transaction knows it's a bribe. NFTs will make the process easier.
WalterBright 6y ago
I expect if Elizabeth Warren gets her way in crushing people who have a lot of wealth in stocks, they'll shift their money to collectibles. I.e. instead of investing in productive things like industry, they'll invest in useless things like art objects.
- panarky 6y ago
  Your definition of "useless" is different from mine. What's more useless: a) $2.5m sitting in a bank account, vulnerable to taxation, confiscation, legal judgment, gradual inflation, rapid devaluation and bank insolvency, unlikely to increase much in value, where the only thing you can do with it is trade it for something useful. b) $2.5m invested in something rare, that could increase in value, where you can both trade it for something else you want, or appreciate the object itself and enjoy owning it.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    Money in a bank account gets loaned out to others who use it productively. Something rare is just that, something rare. It produces nothing.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Ekaros 6y ago

I think with this it is good idea to look into other "collectible" markets. Many of them have massively increasing valuations. So this is just people trying to get early on some new market... Still, at least with physical things, we know there is limited quantity of quality. Same can't be said about digital products...

WheelsAtLarge 6y ago

The value of collectibles is a supply and demand issue. A piccaso has the extra ordinary value (price) because at least 1 person is willing to pay for it not because picasso was such a great artist. Digital is the same except that you can make millions of exact copies. The token gives it scarcity and by extension value.

fullshark 6y ago

If it impresses people + you can resell it for more than you paid for initially then it's worth buying.

K0SM0S 6y ago

Thing is, "value is in the eye of the beholder". It might be material in a strictly biological setting, or idealistic (subjective) in a post-scarcity environment. We're somewhere in-between with the digital world, the value of the superfluous (e.g. collectibles) is able to rise as material needs are more easily covered (using an ever-smaller fraction of resources). To put it simply to the point of absurdity, if we were a "magical" (in Arthur C. Clarke's word) civilization without any outstanding needs, we could still play some for-profit economic game and spend quadrillions buying autographs, because it wouldn't lessen anything of importance. Conversely, if you're barely eating enough, you won't spend resources on anything else than getting more food, because that would lessen your chances of survival. The degree of perceived insanity, I think, thus entirely depends on who you are as a beholder of value, where you fit in the material ⇾ idealistic spectrum. Pretty sure Africans with $1/day feel this is perfectly stupid, but your average billionaire might find it a funny hobby, like collecting some cards of the digital era. There will be a market for that, I think crypto-manias proved as much. It's all relative to an observer, IMHO.