Yeah, nah. This video, despite the “even handed” framing, just comes off as an NFT booster, ultimately. Framing it like, “NFTs are like… the internet” is some real bullshit, there. Sure, in the sense that people threw money at something they didn’t understand, but that’s true of many things that otherwise have nothing in common.
The whole idea that this is good for artists? Every day I see artists on Twitter talking about how they found other people using their work as the basis for NFTs. And not just a couple instances, but hundreds of NFTs for each artist. Every. Day. The idea that the artist will get money on each resale falls apart if the artist never got compensated in the first place, and requires the marketplaces to all be set up that way, which they aren’t. Even the “best” marketplaces are full of stolen content, and some are explicitly premised around the idea that the seller doesn’t own the content they’re minting NFTs off of (e.g. multiple sites based on tweets - not that person’s tweets, but random tweets).
There’s apparently a huge problem with NFT owners selling their NFTs to… themselves as a means of inflating the price. That’s actually the majority of the activity on some marketplaces. Which makes sense as they got started as a way of inflating the value of Ethereum. Because neither NFTs nor their marketplaces are regulated, they’re consistently full of the kinds of activities that would outright illegal in any other context - and that’s when they’re working the way they’re “supposed to.”
The short description: it’s bullshit. It’s not even really new, as when MMOs took off, people were trying to make it (usually under different names, because “metaverse” is the dystopian fiction version), but all failed, because it’s bullshit. Part of the reason it’s bullshit is because it’s essentially the web, but with virtual spaces, so it needs a level of standardization, of ubiquity, to work at all. Facebook thinks they can do it because they’re effectively the internet for a lot of the world’s population, so have the scale, but that’s only one of many problems with it.
Game companies are jumping on this, as they already have the “virtual spaces” down, but they’re just selling the things they used to sell in their game real-money marketplaces, while pretending it will have value outside that game. (It doesn’t. It logically can’t.) As soon as those games get shut down (as they inevitably are), all the associated NFTs will be worthless, which will have an… interesting impact on the marketplaces.
Yeah, exactly, no one has anything like the monopoly that lets de Beers do its thing. There’s nothing remotely like scarcity at any point. The same image/content could be minted into NFTs infinite times - there’s nothing to stop it from happening.
I mean, the video can point at NFTs sold by auction houses all it wants, where you can kind of pretend “authenticity” means something and NFTs can function as Veblen goods, but most NFTs aren’t being sold that way - they’re just people selling NFTs based on random shit they don’t have any connection to (much less ownership of).
