Nyan Cat on the Blockchain
foundation.app
foundation.app
However, paying $600K for a blockchain meme is also the ideal way to manufacture the illusion of demand for blockchain memes. If you're part of a business that wants to make money by selling memes on the blockchain, seeding the frenzy with a very public $600K purchase of an iconic meme is a great way to get the party started.
If you want to take it to the next level, you could re-list the Nyan Cat NFT and then re-buy it from yourself using a second wallet that isn't obviously linked to the first. Now the "price" of Nyan Cat looks like it has gone up, as recorded publicly in the Blockchain, even though nothing changed hands. A well capitalized individual could continue re-selling Nyan cat to themselves from different wallets at increasingly high values to create the illusion of a bidding war: "Nyan Cat value rises 10x in a week!" This creates demand from others who want in on the action.
I guarantee NFT sellers will be using this sale to lend credibility to their ventures. Plenty of people will rush to "buy" other memes with expectations of flipping them to someone else.
Expensive meme, cheap advertising.
pretty sure this would be securities fraud
Cryptocurrencies are a dream come true for perpetrators of fraud like this. Buyer beware.
Once the real-estate title business adopted NFT's DeFi mortgages would become obvious.
Today if you restructure your mortgage you actually have to file paperwork with the county clerk. County courthouses are the gatekeeper to residential liens. The County/District clerk could use a key to sign liens, etc...
I'm wondering if it would be possible to do something similar to accomplish what you are talking about - advantage being that no laws need to be modified to make it possible. The LLC acts as a thin proxy layer between the US legal system and the NFT that assigns ownership. Essentially there could be a legal service that would allow wrapping and unwrapping of these properties, and once they are wrapped, DeFi mortgages would become possible, split ownership, transfer of ownership within DeFi, etc. I could imagine a whole ecosystem developing around this that people could buy and sell houses inside of.
If I buy fractional ownership of your rental LLC via traditional means, it's not hard to get those well-understand contracts enforced by courts. Not necessarily cheap depending on your lawyer, but it's well understood.
If I instead buy fractional ownership via some sort of crypto transaction from another country and suddenly the payments stop, it becomes difficult to work with a foreign legal system to understand essentially computer code.
Worse yet, what do you do if someone loses the private keys to their crypto tokens? Or they're stolen? Does the new holder simply get to collect the rent from that point forward? Does a hacker get to own the house because the owner's account was compromised?
All of what I'm discussing has real world precedent, the only difference would be using DApps for simplicity, security, transparency, and thrift.
Ever wondered what a notary was for?
This alters a lot of assumptions and behavior about the market. Efficient up to the second price history of one NFT and a basket of other NFTs is always available. Removes the need for appraisals and the discretion of lenders. Liquidity pools and dynamic rates are just available.
Obvious rebuttal: "But what if the market dries up and everyone is overlevered and lenders can't liquidate the NFTs"
Okay. No different than any other art and property market. For anyone passing by, don't create a fictional higher standard just because you don't want to respect the existence of this market.
Presumably the lenders are aware of the high risk of wash trading in these securities.
If someone takes an NFT and "buys" it from themselves with 100% of their crypto cash, they are now "worth" 2X: They have their original cash, and an NFT that was last priced at 100% of their original cash.
So compared to owning a physical painting, an advantage here is I can do fancy financial maneuvers with it more easily? And a disadvantage is that I don't actually get to own a painting.
What happens when there's a competing blockchain that also claims to represent digital ownership of this artwork? A physical painting is either in your possession or it isn't, but "owning" Nyan Cat is only valuable so long as people want Nyan Cat AND agree that the chain it's on is a valuable way to represent ownership.
> Why would I need an appraisal of a painting I bought at an old fashioned auction? Doesn't everyone know its market price at that moment?
Because of the structure of that market, the purchasers are not seeking liquidity at the time of purchase. The available lenders are not there as soon as a purchase occurred, and are lending to the universe of fine art not just yours, so the price history is not available. Between private sales, theft, duplicates, inheritances and liquidations, the appraisals are necessary to prove provenance and price history. If you had a banking relationship with the banker right there with you at the auction, you may be able to get liquidity for your purchase very quickly in the matter of a few business days. Such "privilege" is not necessary in the NFT market, making it faster and more efficient.
> So compared to owning a physical painting, an advantage here is I can do fancy financial maneuvers with it more easily?
Royalties to the original artist are accomplished more easily. There are a lot of NFTs coded to pay X% to the original artist upon transfer and other use cases. This is a world's apart better for artists and shifts the incentives of that whole market, and so the "market of artists" is immediately choosing that because its a new century with better options. They are also people more aligned to "support living artists", so the market is forming rapidly as artists get liquid. There are also a lot of other creative people that have been doing other things with their life, that are finding it economically viable to be a creative now.
They all inherit the same financial infrastructure.
> What happens when there's a competing blockchain that also claims to represent digital ownership of this artwork?
The earlier date proves earlier original existence. Consensus can also be managed by the market and the issuer as a fallback. And then of course the courts are a further fallback. The existing art world relies on issuers to not dilute their market and trust of it (if they say its a limited edition, we have to trust that well after the artist is dead). This on-chain world provides efficiencies that don't have to be a cure all, but will function as such most of the time any way.
If this was a movie, I'd be like "this guy doesn't get how the internet works."
Notice there isn't much transaction history. We can speculate on what that might mean.
There are already so many... call them information games, ranging from ego puffery to outright cons, that I'm surprised bitcoin hadn't infected it already.
Should anyone wish to trade their fungible tokens for my nonfugible, but very pretty, buckets of bits, please hit me up.
I think it's the the same with these NFT art tokens. They are not particularly useful as a thing to own, but if enough people believe they're worth something, then I guess they're worth something.
Of course, that's also true of all world currencies.
You can do neither with BTC.
World currencies regularly collapse. What people fear might happen to BTC has already happened to the Zimbabwean dollar, the Argentine peso, and many others. It even happened to the denarius during the crisis of the third century. Even with stable currencies, there is plenty of risk to be had in FOREX trading. So... saying that BTC is a lot like every other fiat currency is not so much a complement as it is a neutral observation.
USD, Euro, Yen, etc. are all far more useful as a medium of exchange than BTC. I would argue that their primary usage is just that - a medium of exchange.
Until you can buy most useful things easily with BTC it is not like fiat.
Lastly, if BTC or any other crypto was to grow to the extent that most people were willing to accept it in exchange for goods or services, I believe that governments would be incentivized to shut it down.
Can?!
He probably wouldn't give me change, so my effective exchange rate for Euro->USD would be something like 20x reality, but you gotta pay for convenience.
To be clear: I'm not advocating for unchecked inflation or runaway spending. I think the current US inflation rate is too high and excessive stimulus spending is ill-advised. However, investors have been investing their cash in assets and investments to avoid inflation long before Bitcoin was invented.
The narrative is "HODL" for a reason, not because everyone wants to use it as a currency.
What can you actually do with Nyan cat other than just sell it on to the next person. I can enjoy the image and I don't even own it.
NFTs are neat, don't get me wrong, but to have any value or use, they require an element of trust behind it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token
(Today I learned.)
The art/payment/ownership is all on Ethereum. They claim to be completely noncustodial https://foundation.app/terms
A Picasso is like a savings account. You can hold one for decades and it will preserve value relative to inflation so long as people still value them the same.
Another way to think about rare art, is that it is a game. It's a game of trying to predict (or promote) which art will stick long term in some collective consciousness. The Mona Lisa is valuable because literally everyone in the western world knows it. Nyan cat is a modern example. It's a piece of art that is locked into the consciousness of at least tens of millions of younger people who are now starting to have money. If a piece of popular art exists in a form that is ownable and verifyably original, then it will trade for tons of money.
While true, reproductions of the Mona Lisa would be far less valuable, even if they were indistinguishable.
We value the original.
We value the thing that represents that initial spark of something brand new in the world that latched itself in our collective consciousness. We value that because everyone else values it. It gives people a sense of awe to learn that you own an ORIGINAL Picasso. It's a display of wealth and power, but also tickles something deep and almost spiritual in the human mind.
I wouldn't be surprised if we learn to treat original NFTs the same way for digital art. Maybe first we need good ways of displaying our ownership of them.
(Also, how does anyone know whether or not this is the true original artist?)
Also there are a lot of crypto-millionaires that believe this is the future. So that's why they are going for large sums so soon. I am not one, but I do think they are right.
It's not even ownership, at least in the classic art collector sense or in the sense of having a meaningful degree of control over the work. Torres retains ownership of the copyrighted work. What he's selling is a transferable limited license that doesn't even include any commercial use rights.
What's a little mind-blowing to me is that the terms of the site don't indicate that the license is an exclusive license. The buyer gets no legal guarantee that Torres won't sell another such license in the future.
The nyan cat image is out there, copied all over the place. The buyer isn't getting a commercial license or anything like that.
I'm really not sure what the buyer is getting here.
Who can validate that?
And is there a way to lend a piece for a defined amount of time before getting it back?
As far as I can tell, they don't even have any contractual claims to prevent the author from selling another Nyan Cat.
They can, however, show that they were the first blockchain address to have blown $600K on Nyan Cat (if you ignore the previous transactions, which were presumably related to the auction itself?)
> After 3072 hours of manipulating BGP, a Nyancat was drawn on this RIPE