Are CryptoPunks truly worth hundreds of thousands of dollars?
blog.miy.com
blog.miy.com
NFT trading is a small number of suckers, lured in by much larger amounts of (a) money laundering - there's a lot of dirty ETH out there that's been turned into a slightly smaller amount of clean ETH by running it through a few sockpuppet NFT-trading accounts (b) wash trading.
(I have a purported chat log from the creators of Cryptopunks claiming they wash-traded the cryptopunks to make it look like there was a secondary market. It came from a source I think highly of, but I can't claim to have authenticated the chat log as a smoking gun admission of wash trading.)
I truly don't understand this whole thing, who are these people? How can hype alone move such massive amounts of money? I guess it's very similar to how stock market has worked for decades.
What I can't understand about the NFTs that seem hugely popular [Crypto Punks being a fine example] is that:
A: There is often little or no artistic talent involved in making them. I mean Crypto Punks are just sub- 1980s Sinclair Spectrum level pixel art
B: The collections are huge [10.000 for Crypto Punks, I've read]. So where's the exclusivity in owning one?
C: Such huge collections cannot be hand-made so are obviously churned out by some automated computer process. So where does the feeling you own a piece of 'art' created by an 'artist' come in?
Yet Crypto Punks and their ilk sell in massive numbers for insane amounts of [albeit virtual] money. Whilst actual real artwork, produced individually [as opposed to being spat out by an automated script] by real talented artists [and yes, I do modestly include myself in that number!] garner nor interest whatsoever.
https://twitter.com/etherrockprice/status/143164180043171431...
They'll be remembered as an interesting footnote to the everything bubble that we're now seeing due to massive production of USD and other currencies. As the currencies devalue, asset prices (and later consumer prices and wage prices) rise in concert and all sorts of scams proliferate as people try to cash in - I'd count most NFTs as part of those scams - scam artists painting the tape and purchasing nominally worthless items at inflated prices, in the hope of drawing in other suckers who want to get rich quick and selling the worthless assets to them.
I don't think they have long term value, the concept is not useful because there is no jurisdiction and no enforcement, NFTs and the digital art associated have far more in common with tulip bulbs or beanie babies than works of art, and as with beanie babies, they'll crash when other assets associated with them crash, but not before a mania which has everyone questioning whether they truly are worth what people say they are worth, and not before a lot of people lose an awful lot of money.
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2015/03/02/beanie-baby-bubbl...
The current owner of the Mina Lisa, or any physical work of art essentially has exclusive viewing privileges if they like. They can choose to hide it away. They can hold it. They could even destroy it if yet wanted to.
You can’t do any of those things with a NFT, so I was wondering if there was actually anything to distinguish an owner from a non-owner apart from classification as “owner” and the right to sell it.
Is it really that valuable? Kinda. There are a lot of rich people with rich kids that have no idea how money works, and will throw anything at a new fad.
The real winners here are the creators of CryptoPunks and other NFTs, though. The value will only be high with a great marketing campaign, so their profit would be what they manage to sell them for minus the marketing costs of elevating themselves over other NFT Pog makers.
So...
No.