Originally published at: Colbert spoofs the NFT art market with heist movie trailer | Boing Boing
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My laptop’s “Pictures” folder holds hundreds of NFT artworks. You can have the whole folder for only twenty-two billion dollars. You can get in on the ground floor of the Pip’s Photos trend if you move fast. DON’T BE LEFT OUT! You snooze, you lose.
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If only this trailer could have included Mozzie…
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< looks at post time stamp >
Last night? I thought Colbert was a weeknight show?
I’m so tired.
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Ape NFTs remind me of Weeping Gorilla:
Funny thing is Weeping Gorilla isn’t an NFT; most NFT art just isn’t interesting enough to “right-click”.
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as insane as all of this is crypto as whole is constantly advancing into the mainstream. I started researching and buying modest amounts in 2013 and everyone thought I was batshit crazy now many of the same people are buying nfts I’m dumbfounded and don’t think it will end well and i think nfts overall are a scam and fraud well but who the f#$% knows how far it will go? any how here’s an interesting tidbit on warren buffet from February Years after calling Bitcoin ‘rat poison,’ Warren Buffett just invested $1 billion in a crypto-friendly bank | Fortune
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The difference in Buffet’s case, I think, is like investing in selling the gold rush panners tools or food versus investing in a panning operation yourself. He still might think it’s rat poison, but it’s clear plenty of people are buying that poison, maybe?
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Does an NFT have any utility? I mean beyond selling it onto the next mark.
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To start, there’s no inherent utility to most “collections.” My 5 year old Toyota is more useful than a vintage Ferrari. Google can show me better pictures and more current stats for my favorite baseball players than any baseball card. I’m not sure that having a Picasso on the wall would tie the room together better than my $20 wall sticker of a colorful elephant (and my $200 TV on the other wall is way more useful than either the Picasso or the sticker). But I can still understand how people (especially those with lots of disposable income) might want to own vintage Ferraris and Mickey Mantle rookie cards and Picassos for their aesthetic and/or historical value.
NFTs seem to be much the same thing, and the main utility of the NFT itself is that it creates artificial scarcity for digital artifacts that (unlike the Ferrari, baseball card, or Picasso) are otherwise trivially easy to perfectly duplicate.
But it also seems that the main utility of NFTs outside of creating artificial scarcity is that it’s a not-terrible way to track membership in a club. Some of the biggest NFT projects (e.g., Bored Ape Yacht Club) literally sell themselves as clubs, with proof of NFT ownership being a ticket to entry to in-person events.
All of that said, I remain incredibly skeptical of NFTs generally. The slight transparency advantages that blockhain tech offers over traditional databases seem vastly outweighed by the environmental externalities, performance deficiencies, and dispute resolution issues inherent to blockchain. The Bored Ape Yacht Club could just as easily host a publicly query-able centralized database that tracks ape ownership rather than punting the task to the blockchain.
Most NFT don’t even do that. Most of them, the NFT is a pointer to an artifact someplace else. Someplace that’s both easy to duplicate and easy for it to disappear entirely. Either of which makes the NFT pointer sort of useless.
This may be the only use I’ve heard of that makes any sense at all. Where the actual NFT itself is validated as a ticket. Sure, it’s no more useful than any other ticket, but at least it is verifiable about which wallet it belongs to and it cannot belong to two at the same time. Assuming someone can prove they own the wallet. If nothing else, it solves the problem of the ticket checking group needing to maintain a ticketing system. At a huge cost to everyone else, but eh getting someone else to pay your costs is always the game.
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The thing Colbert skit did not hit: how many NFTs are really Ponzi and/or pump-and-dump schemes. The NFT creator(s) always gets in at the ground level and is always the first to sell, at the height of its value.
Also: that all these NFTs are never bought/sold with actual money, but crypto.
Kind of on topic because this has to be a spoof, right?
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