6 ms·
This is 100% correct. For those that can’t understand the value of NFTs, it’s the same reason a “squares and circles” modern art piece can be worth millions - i
by seibelj 6y ago
This is 100% correct. For those that can’t understand the value of NFTs, it’s the same reason a “squares and circles” modern art piece can be worth millions - it’s the story of who made it, the collective belief, the rarity... Ultimately it has value because people agree it has value. It’s the same reason the Tom Brady football rookie card sold for millions despite it being nothing more than ink on flimsy cardboard. The actual item itself is secondary to the story it tells.
- hobs 6y agoWe understand them, we just think y'all are stupid for doing that.
- peytn 6y agoAt the very least, these arguments might be more credible if their pushers disclosed their own financial interests in said valuable assets.
- apples_oranges 6y agoHowever that ink on flimsy cardboard is still somewhat unique. The NFT only associates a wallet address with a hash of whatever digital document. It's similar, but not quite. It has value in human imagination, sure, one can convince oneself that's the case. But the token is merely a hash of something that can be obtained very easily in full original quality on the Internet. The flimsy cardboard is not. At least not in the same sense (you could scan it and put a jpg of it online for example). Also the card will stay in this world for a long time if protected from weather and light, I assume, where as the NFT needs to be constantly kept alive by "mining". I agree it's similar, but it's also different. And interesting. At least to me. :) Also value is relative, of course. I mean: One man's collectible is another woman's trash. It probably needs a certain shared set of beliefs/illusions to agree that something like that has value.
- twox2 6y agoThere's a good chance that "mining" will out live some pieces of cardboard. Even if the blockchain du jour becomes a thing o the past, it might live on in some device in an emulator thanks to Moore's Law.
- iamben 6y agoBut sadly the URL the NFT points to will probably be long gone.
- SiempreViernes 6y agoYou do realize that you're comparing a medium that routinely stores information for 350 years versus a field where something saved 10 years ago invariably demands considerable resources to access?
- tshaddox 6y agoI think we might disagree on the extent to which the collectible sports card is valuable because of its unique physical materials, and the extent to which it’s valuable because of “human imagination.” I think the latter is responsible for the overwhelming share of the value of a sports card, and the former is only a historical coincidence that creating rare and difficult to counterfeit items was only practical by fabricating physical items.
- aaroninsf 6y agoI have been looking for a useful formulation, or metaphor, for why the NFT premise feels so [preposterously] wrong to many including myself. Here is one idea, for how we intuit value: As a fraction, in which non-fungibility (~= "authenticity") is the denominator; nominal value (whatever that is, a function of context etc.) is the numerator. In the sports card example, a physical object with a provenance has intrinsic guarantees of uniqueness. Low uniqueness means high intuited value. In the NFT case, a hash has non-intrinsic guarantees. They are provable; they are not perceptible. Uncertain uniqueness means low intuited value. It's not that it's not provably unique; it's that if we don't perceive it, no one cares. Perceptible and provable for us monkeys is a serious and real difference. That's the general idea. The edges are full of corners, for sure, e.g. a counterfeit or reproduction can be exacting enough to create a new game for us to play (I am reminded of the rabbit hole of reproduction collectible watches...)... the quest of authenticity has a fractal quality in the case of mass-produced but limited goods (what edition number? What pressing? The one with the misaligned cyan?)... ...but in the 80% case, I think it's simply, we monkeys like objects; ideas remain a hard sell. My own belief is this is so deeply baked into the relationship between our world modeling that it will not be overcome through culture. A lemma might be, non-fungibility is less important than materiality. Authenticity for fungible goods, like gold, is persistent, in part because they are fungible. It's their material (perceptible provability) that reassures us. I believe this is rooted in intuitions about the scale and durability of consensus on value containers, which appears until recently to have been in the long view winner-take-all, in the case of things without pragmatic use-value.
- tshaddox 6y ago
- throwawaysea 6y ago> Ultimately it has value because people agree it has value. This feels like a pyramid scheme. What makes it different?
- gmuslera 6y agoThe old object-observer duality. Where is the value in this case? It is in the observer, not in the object. It goes in a different layer. The problem there is that culture, social conventions, shared fictions and so on can be manipulated/twisted/adapted to some agenda or interest, and that includes what we feel valuable or not, without minding of what is really behind (like with bitcoins and similar). Once we took this route, all kinds of mirages can appear. And they can vanish into thin air as fast as they appeared.
- politician 6y agoTulip Mania
- notyourday 6y ago> This feels like a pyramid scheme. It is. My Google-fu is failing me but there was a famous art dealer in the early part of the 20th century who promised that he would buy back the pieces he sold at least for the price the buyer originally paid less some minuscule percentage if the buyer could not sell the pieces to someone else. It made paints he sold significantly go up in price. He died. Buyers tried to get his estate to pay for the paintings and failed.
- kryptiskt 6y agoA Swedish gallery called Timeless pulled that scam recently, they sold art in galleries in Sweden and Poland (and Miami and Dubai) with the promise buy it back N months later with a yearly appreciation of at least 20% (I see here that Polish customers were promised 36%).
- SilverRed 6y agoNothing. NFTs are literally nothing more than a scam. People are running mental gymnastics trying to delude themselves in to believing that having a cryptographically signed json packet pointing to a dead url will be worth a fortune in the future.
- zabzonk 6y agoThere is a difference between a physical object (painting, sculpture, trading card, slice of bread) which cannot with our current technology be exactly reproduced, and a digital thing, which can be.
- darkerside 6y agoYou can reproduce a trading card such that it's indistinguishable to just about every human on the planet.
- zabzonk 6y agoBut not to someone using a few simple scientific tools, such as, say, a microscope.
- darkerside 6y agoYou don't need a microscope to distinguish NFTs
- speedyapoc 6y agoI've struggled wrapping my ahead around whether this line of thinking has merit or not. I'd argue that everything you listed can be reproduced, almost identically. But there's no value in doing so since it is not the original or was never authorized by the creator. Why does this change all of a sudden once we go digital? Is it because it's so much easier to reproduce something that originates digitally?
- peytn 6y agoIt’s not just “going digital”—the creative act isn’t there. It’s just financialization. The act of taking an artwork to an auction house isn’t something that’ll hold value.
- speedyapoc 6y agoI agree, but I think that's just a short term effect of people trying to cash in on the hype. Suppose I'm an artist that releases a limited digital run of an album and that NFTs are used to attribute ownership of the digital release. Would this have more, equal, or less value than an artist doing the same thing but with a physical limited run album release? The actual music content can be pirated and made available just the same, whether or not it was physical or digital. The cost of the physical goods themselves is negligible. However, I feel like many people argue that the digital release via NFTs would be worth less because all you have to show for your ownership is a digital token, and not some sort of limited release physical item.
- the_local_host 6y agoIs there anything (other than lawsuits) preventing issuers from "printing NFTs" and diluting the value of those already sold? It seems like a blockchain-based technology that only works when backed by the threat of lawsuits combines the worst aspects of the art market and the cryptocurrency market.
- darkerside 6y agoMany modern art pieces could really be recreated. What's the difference you are trying to draw?
- the_local_host 6y agoDigital art can be recreated easily, which is probably one reason why few people have been paying money for it. Physical art, which people have historically paid for, is much more difficult to credibly reproduce than NFTs. Edited to add: Moreover if the argument in favor of NFTs is that they're not worse than what preceded them, then what's the point of introducing them? If the same problems in the traditional art market (especially for digital works) are recapitulated with NFTs, I don't see the point.
- tshaddox 6y agoYou can create copies of digital art easily, of course. But you can’t create a copy of a particular NFT (assuming the blockchain software works as intended). For most of these famous digital art NFTs, the digital work itself is widely distributed online. But of course there’s only one of each NFT.
- christiansakai 6y agoOnly when the actual piece of digital art imprinted itself on the blockchain and can be viewed with any non-closed source viewer for free, then yes. Until that happens, NFT is useless apart from supply chain/authorship identification
- LegitShady 6y agoI call this the MLM approach. The more people you can scam, the more you use the size of your scam to pretend you're legitimate, while being a scam. "Look how many people paid money for this/look how much money was paid for this, it must be worth that money! The actual efficacy of any product sold is secondary to the amount of money I've been paid" I understand the 'tom brady rookie card' argument but it falls apart in the digital world. A digital image of Tom Brady as a rookie is worth nothing. A print of that digital image is worth less than cost of printing it. The value of the card is that its official merchandise of limited run with no way to create 'new' old cards. Stop pretending NFTs are physical items, stop pretending they can't be infinitely reproduced.
- macksd 6y ago>> For those that can’t understand the value of NFTs ... >> it has value because people agree it has value Yeah but let's be clear it's often just because 2 people say they agree it has value, and for all we know they're often laundering money. I can look at a motorcycle and understand why it has value to someone even though I wouldn't buy one myself even for a penny. I'm afraid I'm unable to do the same with NFTs and cans of feces from an artist.
- greenshackle2 6y agoAn important fact to remember about art valuation is that art can be bought and sold anonymously through private dealers who are not subject to anti money laundering regulations. The trick is to buy some art at a reasonable price, store it in a dark warehouse for a couple of years, then anonymously buy it from yourself at an exorbitant price through shell companies with dirty money.