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NFTs are stupid. As soon as this craze is over, they'll be illiquid and absolutely worthless.

noobermin 6y ago
Careful there, how many degrees removed is it from other cryptocurrencies? If people follow this logic it will lead some people to be mad.
- lottin 6y ago
  Cryptocoins are equally useless in practice, but at least they try to serve a purpose. NFTs make no attempt to serve a purpose. It's truly bizarre.
runeks 6y ago
They are already illiquid. So they will only become worthless.
Animats 6y ago
They may hang on for years, or decades. You can still trade Beanie Babies and Cabbage Patch dolls on eBay. Three Stooges collectable plates from the Franklin Mint[1] don't seem to be selling well, though. Lack of liquidity is implicit in non-fungible tokens. You have to find a buyer who wants the exact item you have. That may be hard. It may require paying for advertising, which means the return can go negative. With a uniform commodity, there's a market with prices. Non-fungible markets don't crash, they stall. You can't sell, but that's not visible on marketplaces, especially if they're designed to hide listings that are not moving. (This is common in real estate; un-saleable property is taken off the market, then re-listed, so it doesn't show as "for sale for 72 weeks".) What we're probably going to see are markets with huge numbers of items that are not selling, but have high asking prices. This will create the illusion of value, because someone will add up the asking prices and claim that's a "market cap". The illusion of volume and liquidity can be created with wash trades. There are getting to be a quite a number of blockchain based virtual worlds, where you can pay way too much for virtual land. Few people actually log into those virtual worlds and spend time there; they just trade land. "The metagame is the game", some analyst wrote of Decentraland. (Which, despite its name, is totally centralized. You can't run a Decentraland server yourself.) I used to go to art openings in SF, and sometimes we'd look at some bad piece and ask "will this be around in 10 years or will it have been tossed out?" Years later, I suspect most of it went to a Dumpster long ago. [1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/Franklin-Mint-The-Three-Stooges-Decorative-Plate-Lot-8/114699073301 https://www.ebay.com/itm/Franklin-Mint-The-Three-Stooges-Dec...
prepend 6y ago
Comically, when this is all over society will probably be geared around one of these, but hard to predict which one. In 500 years, we are just as likely to be using cryptopunks as the base of our exchanges as whuffie. Of course, this is no reason to try to buy any for that purpose. It will probably be something silly like the first in game item that works across games and platforms or something. Having a red hat that will work across all games and be unique forever, now that’s worth something.

Careful there, how many degrees removed is it from other cryptocurrencies? If people follow this logic it will lead some people to be mad.

lottin 6y ago
Cryptocoins are equally useless in practice, but at least they try to serve a purpose. NFTs make no attempt to serve a purpose. It's truly bizarre.

runeks 6y ago

They are already illiquid. So they will only become worthless.

Animats 6y ago

They may hang on for years, or decades. You can still trade Beanie Babies and Cabbage Patch dolls on eBay. Three Stooges collectable plates from the Franklin Mint[1] don't seem to be selling well, though. Lack of liquidity is implicit in non-fungible tokens. You have to find a buyer who wants the exact item you have. That may be hard. It may require paying for advertising, which means the return can go negative. With a uniform commodity, there's a market with prices. Non-fungible markets don't crash, they stall. You can't sell, but that's not visible on marketplaces, especially if they're designed to hide listings that are not moving. (This is common in real estate; un-saleable property is taken off the market, then re-listed, so it doesn't show as "for sale for 72 weeks".) What we're probably going to see are markets with huge numbers of items that are not selling, but have high asking prices. This will create the illusion of value, because someone will add up the asking prices and claim that's a "market cap". The illusion of volume and liquidity can be created with wash trades. There are getting to be a quite a number of blockchain based virtual worlds, where you can pay way too much for virtual land. Few people actually log into those virtual worlds and spend time there; they just trade land. "The metagame is the game", some analyst wrote of Decentraland. (Which, despite its name, is totally centralized. You can't run a Decentraland server yourself.) I used to go to art openings in SF, and sometimes we'd look at some bad piece and ask "will this be around in 10 years or will it have been tossed out?" Years later, I suspect most of it went to a Dumpster long ago. [1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/Franklin-Mint-The-Three-Stooges-Decorative-Plate-Lot-8/114699073301 https://www.ebay.com/itm/Franklin-Mint-The-Three-Stooges-Dec...

prepend 6y ago

Comically, when this is all over society will probably be geared around one of these, but hard to predict which one. In 500 years, we are just as likely to be using cryptopunks as the base of our exchanges as whuffie. Of course, this is no reason to try to buy any for that purpose. It will probably be something silly like the first in game item that works across games and platforms or something. Having a red hat that will work across all games and be unique forever, now that’s worth something.