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Comment by iambateman

1 hour ago

Maybe we should update our lexicon to "NFT mania" –– far more people lost money in that phenomenon.

At least in the tulip case, they actually had some minor value. You owned a pretty flower. You could also make the case for crypto money, I guess.

Any person with common sense and basic technical understanding could tell you NFTs were an incredibly dumb and useless idea from the very start. All you “own” is an entry on some ledger, which doesn’t inherently give you ownership over anything else.

  • No different than the us dollar, except for the fact that the dollar is backed by armed forces, which is paid by us dollars....

  • Exact same argument for crypto though. It is all just supply demand. BTC has much more demand currently and likely more sustainably. Alt coins are just less popular. It is all just supply vs demand.

  • Using your reasoning a large number of collectible items should be worthless. What really makes an NFT different from a Pokemon card, a Birkin bag, or even an original Monet? My guess is that the seller has to have some sort of authority and established reputation for these kinds of artificially scarce luxury goods to maintain value.

    • > Using your reasoning

      Clearly not, the point being made was that you owned a thing, e.g. a Pokemon card. To own an NFT is to, bafflingly, claim to hold a token of ownership of some asset represented by the NFT - where that representation is indicated by the NFT immutably containing, typically, a thoroughly mutable Google Drive link to a picture. The whole thing was always farcical.

      Again, at least you actually own the Pokemon card at the end of the day.

  • >> All you “own” is an entry on some ledger, which doesn’t inherently give you ownership over anything else.

    No different from bitcoin...

  • I'm not really convinced that people thought there was "anything else", it's just that people thought that the entry on the ledger was going to increase in value, even from some of the stupifying initial values.

    I own several NFTs that are important to me, and they're worth every penny I paid. I never had any illusions that I owned anything other than a historical footnote; I think that this sort of ownership is meaningful and important.

    It's much more realistic to me than "buying a song" from one of the corporate music distributors. "Owning" a song seems to be much more of a misunderstanding of how data works in a digital world than owning an entry in a ledger.