The retailers made money in the beanie baby craze maybe. Are people who are buying these things actually reselling them? That seems insane when there is an almost infinite supply of new ones… im not in this stupid game but my impression was that the only people making money are people creating the NFTs. Not the suckers buying them…
The Beanie Babies manufacturer introduced artificial scarcity of certain items into the mix. Like trading card companies with their rare cards and the Franklin Mint with its “limited editions”, they’re preying on the obsessive collector’s mentality and creating a very active and long-lived aftermarket in the process. The NFTs are attempting to replicate that.
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But again, are people actually re-selling NFTs? They don’t even seem scarce enough to do that. I suppose if you had a rare beanie baby, and someone really wanted that specific one, someone might theoretically pay more than retail price for it. But is anyone gonna buy Jimmy Fallon’s custom picked “ape” when they. Could just pick out another ape or whatever randomly generated gif that someone is making new NFTs of? The individual NFTs may be one of a kind, but there’s a bazillion others out there.
My point is it would seem the only way these would be “investments” is if you could resell the one you bought for a higher price.
Again, I’m not engaging in this insanity, so maybe people are reselling them?
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It’s early days for NFTs. As I said, they’re trying to replicate the Beanie Baby model. Whether they can succeed is another matter.
There is some basis for their hope. For example, my nephew just sold a digital weapon skin from some online FPS game he used to play seven years ago for a couple of hundred dollars. That’s not too far off from the projected use cases for NFTs, which aren’t the digital items themselves but certificates of authenticity/ownership for said items.
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sounds like in that situation, the thing sold has a real world value - like Im guessing armor in a game would improve gameplay. Like how if you buy an mp3 of a band, you get to listen to and enjoy it. I feel like that’s the only way things have tangible value in the long run. If they have intrinsic value. i can look at a painting or even (shudder) a sealed video game in a plastic case) and enjoy that experience of holding, viewing it. Does anyone even enjoy looking at these stupid apes? And even if they did you can do that without buying it. Heck even those star naming rights come with a certificate you can frame. Money is an intangible object (especially in the digital era) but it has value because it can be traded for goods and services. You can technically buy some stuff wit bitcoin even. But what good are these NFTs…
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Nah, it was literally a cosmetic skin for a digital rifle. That’s it. But he put it up on some marketplace and it was sold within the day.
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And don’t forget, the late (unlamented except to people who lost their money) bitcoin exchange MtGox was named that because initially it specialized in trading Magic: The Gathering cards, another example of artificial scarcity.
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