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Collectibles have always been apart of the human social experience. You take ink and you print an image on cardboard; we call these "trading cards", like Pokem

Collectibles have always been apart of the human social experience. You take ink and you print an image on cardboard; we call these "trading cards", like Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, or baseball/basketball/sports cards. A designer releases a limited edition of a new shoe/shirt/backpack, and people line up overnight because they want wear it, collect it, or resell it. NFTs are digital collectible assets, that's all. They help to solve the problem of provenance as records on blockchains are immutable. But the core of their purpose is the same as any cardboard slab with ink on it; it represents some derivative product of a person, moment, or image. You don't get the rights to the athletes image, you don't get the rights to the artist's art, you don't get ownership in the person themself; you get a piece of cardboard. (Some NFTs have interesting royalty schemes, but we'll see how that plays out.) I don't know why people try to see NFTs as some sort of phenomenon deeper than they actually are. Look around, this collecting behavior is nothing new.

PaulHoule 5y ago
Another commenter noted on one of my posts that the art world has been corrupt for a long time. Tom Wolfe, in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Painted_Word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Painted_Word talks about how New York Times Hilton Kramer worked to convince conservative and boring rich collectors who really rather buy Norman Rockwell paintings that it was OK to buy modern art. NFTs are dangerous precisely because they reveal fundamental problems in human nature that have been repeated over and over again and will be later again. The NFT is shocking because it happened so fast, because the amounts of money grew so large, and it did it all without a mediating "art world."
- scottiebarnes 5y ago
  "Dangerous", what is the danger exactly?
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    In terms of astrobiology it is a distraction from getting to the stars. (e.g. but one could say playing video games, virtual worlds, fiction,... do the same) Immediately it is financial bubble and financial bubbles are dangerous. This guy invented modern finance (government bonds) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Law_(economist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Law_(economist) and had his systems blow up spectacularly. When it blew up in France the king, queen and many of their hangers-on lost their heads.

PaulHoule 5y ago

Another commenter noted on one of my posts that the art world has been corrupt for a long time. Tom Wolfe, in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Painted_Word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Painted_Word talks about how New York Times Hilton Kramer worked to convince conservative and boring rich collectors who really rather buy Norman Rockwell paintings that it was OK to buy modern art. NFTs are dangerous precisely because they reveal fundamental problems in human nature that have been repeated over and over again and will be later again. The NFT is shocking because it happened so fast, because the amounts of money grew so large, and it did it all without a mediating "art world."

scottiebarnes 5y ago
"Dangerous", what is the danger exactly?
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  In terms of astrobiology it is a distraction from getting to the stars. (e.g. but one could say playing video games, virtual worlds, fiction,... do the same) Immediately it is financial bubble and financial bubbles are dangerous. This guy invented modern finance (government bonds) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Law_(economist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Law_(economist) and had his systems blow up spectacularly. When it blew up in France the king, queen and many of their hangers-on lost their heads.