People are paying serious money for the digital equivalent of collectible baseball cards. For example Jack Dorsey recently decided to try to auction the rights to:
Ownership appears to mean you get to assert your ownership over this derived asset (the NFT), and sell the NFT at a later date, but no rights over the original asset (e.g. you cannot choose to delete or edit the tweet after buying it).
Another example recently are Digital Artworks sold as NFTs - the NFT does not stop copying that collection of bits, or enforce copyright, it means you claim rights to be owner of the first set of bits with that pattern. Even if other people have copies of Nyan Cat, you have the first.
But many are skeptical about the costs and utility of NFTs on blockchains
Is this a sign of irrational exuberance at the peak of a bubble or a new asset class emerging?
I think there is a lot of speculation. Imo art is very difficult to value. Now lots of people are speculating on (mostly) unknown artists at arbitrary values
What interests me about this though is that they’re not buying a tangible thing or exclusive rights to some information, they’re buying some sort of claim to that thing which does not in itself confer any rights but is more like a receipt to say I bought the original tweet from Jack or the original Nyan Cat gif. I’m not sure I quite understand what they’re buying to be honest, because these things are publicly available, and free to consume, so they’re not buying the right to control consumption of the artwork as the private buyer of a painting might.
It does seem to me to be yet another sign of too much money chasing risky returns, though perhaps the best analogy is to sports fans buying things like an ordinary baseball, just like most other baseballs except it was used in the world series.
How about the author of the tweet? Does s/he retain the right to delete or edit the tweet s/he sold? If the author edits the tweet after selling it, would it be the same tweet or a different study like with the sunflowers, hence re-sellable?
This is too complicated for my rural simpleton neurons…
I like the concept. Even though you can get prints of artwork some people still want to buy the original thing. I also like the idea that you could have VR galleries.
I think owning unique skins in games or outfits artists wore in a digital concert could catch on
I just think atm a lot of this ‘artwork’ will end up worthless.
It’s a 25 minute video but it’s the best explainer of this utter nonsense that I’ve seen
This is the artist that sold some NFT collection of work at auction (Christies) for $69million - that happened AFTER this video and he’d only made a couple of million at the time of this. He is very talented, pumping out an artwork every single day - https://www.instagram.com/beeple_crap/ - but NFTs are absolute nonsense.
Will do I admire the people who make money out of any scheme but I can’t get my head around owning something you can watch on the internet like that basketball shot in the news the other day. I think expensive art is mental but at least you own the real copy but people paying for the original but not a solid thing is beyond me
Although NFT’s are quite ‘faddy’ at the moment… my thoughts on them surround the use of patent applications and ideas you can truly pin-point as your own…
Might be interesting, might not be… Time will tell.
I reckon dogecoin (a literal meme coin) going hyperbolic & NFT’s getting any attention at all is signalling the crypto bubble is soon to pop. The current buying is crypto is due to FOMO from missing BTC.
