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A NFT is not a collectible, it's a pure vehicle for financial speculation. The object being collected no longer exists in any meaningful sense.

ineedasername 5y ago
> The object being collected no longer exists in any meaningful sense. Depends on whether or not you set the thing on fire. But in the case of a tweet, that's rather difficult. Of course the literal original tweet might long ago have hit the bit bucket, scrubbed off an old original server that was dumpstered long ago, and now even the "real" one that showed on twitter was still just a copy. Not that an NFT with an abstract pointer to the dumpstered server would be any more meaningful.
riyadparvez 5y ago
The only valid use for NFT I can think of is a pure vehicle for financial speculation. It's better people do wild speculation on NFTs than housing market.
- rurp 5y ago
  NFTs aren't even the best option for pure financial speculation, stocks are much better. At least there the money being gambled can be put towards something productive. Plus it's much better for the gambler. Random stocks don't routinely lose 99.999% of their value in a matter of months.
- eric_cc 5y ago
  There is functional value to NFT’s. Think beyond JPEG NFT’s. If you’re a software engineer, consider building a decentralized system with unique instances of a model. Unique tokens make a lot of sense to me and certainly there is utility to them. I agree that JPEG NFT’s are ridiculous though.
georgeecollins 5y ago
Not to disagree, but the question of what a thing is independent of the meaning we attach to it is worth thinking about. There was this interesting passage in this book about the art world, "The $12m Stuffed Shark"-- which I recommend btw-- that went sort of like this: A famous conceptual artist died. People going through his apartment found things in his closet that were maybe lost works, maybe junk he collected. It's funny to think about but the difference of interpretation amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars. One of the things you learn from that book is that if a famous art collector pays a lot of money for something found in that closet it will continue to be valuable and maybe end up in museum. If they don't, it's trash and never meant to be a work of art.

ineedasername 5y ago

> The object being collected no longer exists in any meaningful sense. Depends on whether or not you set the thing on fire. But in the case of a tweet, that's rather difficult. Of course the literal original tweet might long ago have hit the bit bucket, scrubbed off an old original server that was dumpstered long ago, and now even the "real" one that showed on twitter was still just a copy. Not that an NFT with an abstract pointer to the dumpstered server would be any more meaningful.

riyadparvez 5y ago

The only valid use for NFT I can think of is a pure vehicle for financial speculation. It's better people do wild speculation on NFTs than housing market.

rurp 5y ago
NFTs aren't even the best option for pure financial speculation, stocks are much better. At least there the money being gambled can be put towards something productive. Plus it's much better for the gambler. Random stocks don't routinely lose 99.999% of their value in a matter of months.
eric_cc 5y ago
There is functional value to NFT’s. Think beyond JPEG NFT’s. If you’re a software engineer, consider building a decentralized system with unique instances of a model. Unique tokens make a lot of sense to me and certainly there is utility to them. I agree that JPEG NFT’s are ridiculous though.

georgeecollins 5y ago

Not to disagree, but the question of what a thing is independent of the meaning we attach to it is worth thinking about. There was this interesting passage in this book about the art world, "The $12m Stuffed Shark"-- which I recommend btw-- that went sort of like this: A famous conceptual artist died. People going through his apartment found things in his closet that were maybe lost works, maybe junk he collected. It's funny to think about but the difference of interpretation amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars. One of the things you learn from that book is that if a famous art collector pays a lot of money for something found in that closet it will continue to be valuable and maybe end up in museum. If they don't, it's trash and never meant to be a work of art.