5 ms·

Are CryptoPunks truly worth hundreds of thousands of dollars?

16 points by ethwatch 5y ago

nkrisc 5y ago
What right does owning any NFT confer upon the owner, apart from the right to sell it to someone else? Is there any other distinction between the owner and a non-owner apart from that?
- fidesomnes 5y ago
  a free IQ test.
- ethwatch 5y ago
  None. You buy a collectible because you like it (hopefully), and you are “safekeeping” for the next buyer. The original owners of the Mona Lisa don’t really matter.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    The current owner of the Mona Lisa matters, though. Which gives it a big leg up over NFTs.
    - Normille 5y ago
      DISCLAIMER: I'm a graphic artist / cartoonist, who has dabbled in posting a few NFTs on OpenSea and sold absolutely nothing, even when I've pitched pieces at the equivalent of £10 or £20. So my comments are most likely flavoured with a healthy pinch of 'begrudgery'. What I can't understand about the NFTs that seem hugely popular [Crypto Punks being a fine example] is that: A: There is often little or no artistic talent involved in making them. I mean Crypto Punks are just sub- 1980s Sinclair Spectrum level pixel art B: The collections are huge [10.000 for Crypto Punks, I've read]. So where's the exclusivity in owning one? C: Such huge collections cannot be hand-made so are obviously churned out by some automated computer process. So where does the feeling you own a piece of 'art' created by an 'artist' come in? Yet Crypto Punks and their ilk sell in massive numbers for insane amounts of [albeit virtual] money. Whilst actual real artwork, produced individually [as opposed to being spat out by an automated script] by real talented artists [and yes, I do modestly include myself in that number!] garner nor interest whatsoever.
  - grey-area 5y ago
    People value the Mona Lisa over time because it is beautiful, many people want to see it, and therefore it has use-value. Pet rocks like this have zero interest or beauty, still less the digital receipt attached to them by an NFT: https://twitter.com/etherrockprice/status/1431641800431714313 https://twitter.com/etherrockprice/status/143164180043171431... They'll be remembered as an interesting footnote to the everything bubble that we're now seeing due to massive production of USD and other currencies. As the currencies devalue, asset prices (and later consumer prices and wage prices) rise in concert and all sorts of scams proliferate as people try to cash in - I'd count most NFTs as part of those scams - scam artists painting the tape and purchasing nominally worthless items at inflated prices, in the hope of drawing in other suckers who want to get rich quick and selling the worthless assets to them. I don't think they have long term value, the concept is not useful because there is no jurisdiction and no enforcement, NFTs and the digital art associated have far more in common with tulip bulbs or beanie babies than works of art, and as with beanie babies, they'll crash when other assets associated with them crash, but not before a mania which has everyone questioning whether they truly are worth what people say they are worth, and not before a lot of people lose an awful lot of money. https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2015/03/02/beanie-baby-bubble https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2015/03/02/beanie-baby-bubbl...
  - EamonnMR 5y ago
    If it wasn't owned by a king and then a national museum and (for a while) a theif it's unlikely that it would be famous now.
  - nkrisc 5y ago
    I don’t mean original owners, but current owner versus non-owners. The current owner of the Mina Lisa, or any physical work of art essentially has exclusive viewing privileges if they like. They can choose to hide it away. They can hold it. They could even destroy it if yet wanted to. You can’t do any of those things with a NFT, so I was wondering if there was actually anything to distinguish an owner from a non-owner apart from classification as “owner” and the right to sell it.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  None.
- haasted 5y ago
  Yeah, I was wondering the same. As an example, can the guy who purchased Jack Dorsey's first tweet[0] delete it from Twitter if he decides to? [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56492358 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56492358
- davidgerard 5y ago
  Typically none whatsoever.
black6 5y ago
No.
user-the-name 5y ago
No.
gjvc 5y ago
Short answer: No. Long answer: Hell no.
davidgerard 5y ago
The longer "no" answer is: no, there's effectively no secondary market. NFT trading is a small number of suckers, lured in by much larger amounts of (a) money laundering - there's a lot of dirty ETH out there that's been turned into a slightly smaller amount of clean ETH by running it through a few sockpuppet NFT-trading accounts (b) wash trading. (I have a purported chat log from the creators of Cryptopunks claiming they wash-traded the cryptopunks to make it look like there was a secondary market. It came from a source I think highly of, but I can't claim to have authenticated the chat log as a smoking gun admission of wash trading.)
rvz 5y ago
If Betteridge's law of headlines says No. Then I say No. So... No.
oefrha 5y ago
IMO charities should get into the game of minting these pointless NFTs; unlike producing luxury watches, minting NFTs of random pixel art requires virtually no skills other than marketing, which celebrities may be able to help with. There are clearly a lot of people with way too much money lying around, why not take a slice of it to at least feed some of the hundreds of millions of people who are still starving.
kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
CryptoPunks are just an individual art group of Pog designers that don't issue Pogs, so it's Pogs minus the plastic waste of Pogs plus the energy waste of the ETH blockchain. Is it really that valuable? Kinda. There are a lot of rich people with rich kids that have no idea how money works, and will throw anything at a new fad. The real winners here are the creators of CryptoPunks and other NFTs, though. The value will only be high with a great marketing campaign, so their profit would be what they manage to sell them for minus the marketing costs of elevating themselves over other NFT Pog makers.
Zealotux 5y ago
The volumes of money being exchanged on NFT platforms – hundreds of millions of dollars per weeks – are making me kind of dizzy. Quality doesn't seem to have much influence on how well a collection does, to me it all seems like a giant scheme where a few individuals manipulates the market, or maybe just a group of billionaires having fun? I truly don't understand this whole thing, who are these people? How can hype alone move such massive amounts of money? I guess it's very similar to how stock market has worked for decades.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  It's not necessarily being genuinely exchanged. If you're willing to eat a few transaction fees, you can buy a NFT from yourself repeatedly at escalating amounts and make it look like it's super popular.

16 points by ethwatch 5y ago

What right does owning any NFT confer upon the owner, apart from the right to sell it to someone else? Is there any other distinction between the owner and a non-owner apart from that?

fidesomnes 5y ago
a free IQ test.
ethwatch 5y ago
None. You buy a collectible because you like it (hopefully), and you are “safekeeping” for the next buyer. The original owners of the Mona Lisa don’t really matter.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  The current owner of the Mona Lisa matters, though. Which gives it a big leg up over NFTs.
  - Normille 5y ago
    DISCLAIMER: I'm a graphic artist / cartoonist, who has dabbled in posting a few NFTs on OpenSea and sold absolutely nothing, even when I've pitched pieces at the equivalent of £10 or £20. So my comments are most likely flavoured with a healthy pinch of 'begrudgery'. What I can't understand about the NFTs that seem hugely popular [Crypto Punks being a fine example] is that: A: There is often little or no artistic talent involved in making them. I mean Crypto Punks are just sub- 1980s Sinclair Spectrum level pixel art B: The collections are huge [10.000 for Crypto Punks, I've read]. So where's the exclusivity in owning one? C: Such huge collections cannot be hand-made so are obviously churned out by some automated computer process. So where does the feeling you own a piece of 'art' created by an 'artist' come in? Yet Crypto Punks and their ilk sell in massive numbers for insane amounts of [albeit virtual] money. Whilst actual real artwork, produced individually [as opposed to being spat out by an automated script] by real talented artists [and yes, I do modestly include myself in that number!] garner nor interest whatsoever.
- grey-area 5y ago
  People value the Mona Lisa over time because it is beautiful, many people want to see it, and therefore it has use-value. Pet rocks like this have zero interest or beauty, still less the digital receipt attached to them by an NFT: https://twitter.com/etherrockprice/status/1431641800431714313 https://twitter.com/etherrockprice/status/143164180043171431... They'll be remembered as an interesting footnote to the everything bubble that we're now seeing due to massive production of USD and other currencies. As the currencies devalue, asset prices (and later consumer prices and wage prices) rise in concert and all sorts of scams proliferate as people try to cash in - I'd count most NFTs as part of those scams - scam artists painting the tape and purchasing nominally worthless items at inflated prices, in the hope of drawing in other suckers who want to get rich quick and selling the worthless assets to them. I don't think they have long term value, the concept is not useful because there is no jurisdiction and no enforcement, NFTs and the digital art associated have far more in common with tulip bulbs or beanie babies than works of art, and as with beanie babies, they'll crash when other assets associated with them crash, but not before a mania which has everyone questioning whether they truly are worth what people say they are worth, and not before a lot of people lose an awful lot of money. https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2015/03/02/beanie-baby-bubble https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2015/03/02/beanie-baby-bubbl...
- EamonnMR 5y ago
  If it wasn't owned by a king and then a national museum and (for a while) a theif it's unlikely that it would be famous now.
- nkrisc 5y ago
  I don’t mean original owners, but current owner versus non-owners. The current owner of the Mina Lisa, or any physical work of art essentially has exclusive viewing privileges if they like. They can choose to hide it away. They can hold it. They could even destroy it if yet wanted to. You can’t do any of those things with a NFT, so I was wondering if there was actually anything to distinguish an owner from a non-owner apart from classification as “owner” and the right to sell it.
user-the-name 5y ago
None.
haasted 5y ago
Yeah, I was wondering the same. As an example, can the guy who purchased Jack Dorsey's first tweet[0] delete it from Twitter if he decides to? [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56492358 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56492358
davidgerard 5y ago
Typically none whatsoever.

black6 5y ago

No.

user-the-name 5y ago

No.

gjvc 5y ago

Short answer: No. Long answer: Hell no.

davidgerard 5y ago

The longer "no" answer is: no, there's effectively no secondary market. NFT trading is a small number of suckers, lured in by much larger amounts of (a) money laundering - there's a lot of dirty ETH out there that's been turned into a slightly smaller amount of clean ETH by running it through a few sockpuppet NFT-trading accounts (b) wash trading. (I have a purported chat log from the creators of Cryptopunks claiming they wash-traded the cryptopunks to make it look like there was a secondary market. It came from a source I think highly of, but I can't claim to have authenticated the chat log as a smoking gun admission of wash trading.)

rvz 5y ago

If Betteridge's law of headlines says No. Then I say No. So... No.

oefrha 5y ago

IMO charities should get into the game of minting these pointless NFTs; unlike producing luxury watches, minting NFTs of random pixel art requires virtually no skills other than marketing, which celebrities may be able to help with. There are clearly a lot of people with way too much money lying around, why not take a slice of it to at least feed some of the hundreds of millions of people who are still starving.

kafkaIncarnate 5y ago

CryptoPunks are just an individual art group of Pog designers that don't issue Pogs, so it's Pogs minus the plastic waste of Pogs plus the energy waste of the ETH blockchain. Is it really that valuable? Kinda. There are a lot of rich people with rich kids that have no idea how money works, and will throw anything at a new fad. The real winners here are the creators of CryptoPunks and other NFTs, though. The value will only be high with a great marketing campaign, so their profit would be what they manage to sell them for minus the marketing costs of elevating themselves over other NFT Pog makers.

Zealotux 5y ago

The volumes of money being exchanged on NFT platforms – hundreds of millions of dollars per weeks – are making me kind of dizzy. Quality doesn't seem to have much influence on how well a collection does, to me it all seems like a giant scheme where a few individuals manipulates the market, or maybe just a group of billionaires having fun? I truly don't understand this whole thing, who are these people? How can hype alone move such massive amounts of money? I guess it's very similar to how stock market has worked for decades.

ceejayoz 5y ago
It's not necessarily being genuinely exchanged. If you're willing to eat a few transaction fees, you can buy a NFT from yourself repeatedly at escalating amounts and make it look like it's super popular.