<story><title>NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites</title><url>https://every.to/napkin-math/nft-projects-are-just-mlms-for-tech-elites</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>highfrequency</author><text>Surely the baseball card’s value does not come from the fact that you can hold a piece of cardboard in your hand.&lt;p&gt;Whether the data representation is a piece of cardboard or a JSON string replicated on 10,000 Ethereum nodes or a tulip or a Venmo balance is arbitrary; it just matters whether a lot of humans are looking at the same thing. And for the time being, a lot of humans are looking at crypto ledgers!</text></item><item><author>WA</author><text>NFTs are not like baseball cards.&lt;p&gt;NFTs are a JSON string on a proprietary entity that point to the image of a baseball card. The image can be viewed by everyone. The bragging rights of owning a JSON string depend heavily on whether or not the proprietary entity will become the dominant player in the &lt;i&gt;I own a JSON string&lt;/i&gt;-world.&lt;p&gt;This also has zero to do with blockchains. The proprietary entity could&amp;#x27;ve used any database they wanted.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s all a ridiculous scam, but have fun trading JSON strings.</text></item><item><author>highfrequency</author><text>There’s a lot of confusion here about why NFTs are valuable if the buyer doesn’t get to own the image copyright. This should not feel mysterious - NFTs are just like baseball cards.&lt;p&gt;If you buy a Barry Bonds baseball card for $1,000, you don’t own the artistic rights to the image on the card. All you own is the card itself, which has negligible manufacturing cost. It would be trivial for any card company to produce a million functionally equivalent Barry Bonds cards.&lt;p&gt;When you buy a Barry Bonds baseball card, you hope that the card company won’t dump a million more on the market. You also hope that if another baseball card company springs up and prints their own Barry Bonds cards, people won’t be &lt;i&gt;as interested&lt;/i&gt; in that brand of cards. Attention and scarcity drive value; the nuance is that other speculators must care about scarcity along the same dimension that you possess it (in this case: the brand of the baseball card company and the year the card was made). There are a hundred tokens functionally equivalent to Bitcoin, but none approach Bitcoin’s value - purely because Bitcoin sustains more consumer and media attention. This position is fairly stable because attention has strong positive feedback loops.&lt;p&gt;There has always been interest in speculative collectibles. A purely digital collectible solves a lot of practical problems related to exchange: you don’t have to wait a week to receive the item in the mail, you don’t have to worry about its condition because it does not degrade with time or use, there is minimal counterparty risk due to online escrow contracts, and counterfeits are harder to fake (along the relevant dimension of scarcity, which is the origin address).&lt;p&gt;People have been speculating on collectibles for thousands of years. Crypto just makes it easier to trade them back and forth.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jameshart</author><text>&amp;gt; Surely the baseball card’s value does not come from the fact that you can hold a piece of cardboard in your hand.&lt;p&gt;Oh but surely it does.&lt;p&gt;Cardboard is fragile, and degrades if not looked after. Over time, the average condition of cardboard cards will deteriorate. So, if you own a baseball card in good condition, and can look after it better than the average, over time you will end up with one of an increasingly rare class of pieces of cardboard - an old baseball card that is in good condition.&lt;p&gt;It’s not hard to imagine that in the distant future there will still be people who place value on the history of baseball who are interested in owning, for example, a collection of mint original baseball cards dating to the original era of each player, for every hall of famer who ever played for the Giants.&lt;p&gt;So the speculative value of any baseball card includes some expected value estimate based on the possibility that it might, someday, be the last of its kind, and some millionaire needs to buy it to complete a collection.&lt;p&gt;Can you really tell a similar story to yourself for why the expected future value of any NFT isn’t zero?</text></comment>
<story><title>NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites</title><url>https://every.to/napkin-math/nft-projects-are-just-mlms-for-tech-elites</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>highfrequency</author><text>Surely the baseball card’s value does not come from the fact that you can hold a piece of cardboard in your hand.&lt;p&gt;Whether the data representation is a piece of cardboard or a JSON string replicated on 10,000 Ethereum nodes or a tulip or a Venmo balance is arbitrary; it just matters whether a lot of humans are looking at the same thing. And for the time being, a lot of humans are looking at crypto ledgers!</text></item><item><author>WA</author><text>NFTs are not like baseball cards.&lt;p&gt;NFTs are a JSON string on a proprietary entity that point to the image of a baseball card. The image can be viewed by everyone. The bragging rights of owning a JSON string depend heavily on whether or not the proprietary entity will become the dominant player in the &lt;i&gt;I own a JSON string&lt;/i&gt;-world.&lt;p&gt;This also has zero to do with blockchains. The proprietary entity could&amp;#x27;ve used any database they wanted.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s all a ridiculous scam, but have fun trading JSON strings.</text></item><item><author>highfrequency</author><text>There’s a lot of confusion here about why NFTs are valuable if the buyer doesn’t get to own the image copyright. This should not feel mysterious - NFTs are just like baseball cards.&lt;p&gt;If you buy a Barry Bonds baseball card for $1,000, you don’t own the artistic rights to the image on the card. All you own is the card itself, which has negligible manufacturing cost. It would be trivial for any card company to produce a million functionally equivalent Barry Bonds cards.&lt;p&gt;When you buy a Barry Bonds baseball card, you hope that the card company won’t dump a million more on the market. You also hope that if another baseball card company springs up and prints their own Barry Bonds cards, people won’t be &lt;i&gt;as interested&lt;/i&gt; in that brand of cards. Attention and scarcity drive value; the nuance is that other speculators must care about scarcity along the same dimension that you possess it (in this case: the brand of the baseball card company and the year the card was made). There are a hundred tokens functionally equivalent to Bitcoin, but none approach Bitcoin’s value - purely because Bitcoin sustains more consumer and media attention. This position is fairly stable because attention has strong positive feedback loops.&lt;p&gt;There has always been interest in speculative collectibles. A purely digital collectible solves a lot of practical problems related to exchange: you don’t have to wait a week to receive the item in the mail, you don’t have to worry about its condition because it does not degrade with time or use, there is minimal counterparty risk due to online escrow contracts, and counterfeits are harder to fake (along the relevant dimension of scarcity, which is the origin address).&lt;p&gt;People have been speculating on collectibles for thousands of years. Crypto just makes it easier to trade them back and forth.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Grustaf</author><text>&amp;gt; Surely the baseball card’s value does not come from the fact that you can hold a piece of cardboard in your hand.&lt;p&gt;That is definitely part of it. We are physical beings, you can&amp;#x27;t pretend like physical existence is irrelevant.</text></comment>