Are NFTs Status Symbols?
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It wasn't purchased by Steph Curry on a whim as a status symbol. It was probably given to him as part of his roll out deal with FTX.
It's nearly the same roll out move every other FTX celebrity sponsor has made, of which, there are now many. They get paid to act like they're interested.
None of this is organic. It is all a sham.
Not saying NFTs are not a sham, just that I was super surprised at how interested he seemed in the subject.
> Not saying NFTs are not a sham
How do these two statements go hand in hand?
(1)Consider all the artists "unrecognized" during their lifetime; did their genius just get discovered after their deaths? No, it was just at that point their works were a limited commodity, and not well distributed yet, and so suddenly became good places to park wealth. That isn't to say there isn't good and interesting and thought provoking work being done, but it's definitely only loosely, if at all, correlated to price. A good artist with nothing else can expect to sell a custom painting for $1k, tops. A hack artist with a known PR person in the art world can get themselves selling them for hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
That's not really right, my wife is a painter without gallery representation who sells in $5k-$12k range. Through her I've met many other people in this "middle tier". A well connected gallery can get collector eyes on your art at fairs like Art Basel and further increase the price of paintings to the higher tens of thousands. Beyond that, there's a relatively small circle of prominent living artists selling for $100k-$1M; these are mostly talented hard working people with distinctive styles that find an eager collector audience. The tier beyond that is an even smaller group of "celebrity" artists -- which is maybe who you're referring to as "hack artists" since it includes some gimmicky work.
“Not saying apps are a sham”
… I don’t understand how those two sentences are contrary in your thinking. What do you see?
Actually it's not fundamentally different at all!
In fact, most of the hyper NFTs seem to come from series of generic artwork with variations in the 1000s or 10,000s. The goal isn’t to produce good art, it’s to produce a massive quantity of low-effort or algorithmically generated pieces so they can be sold and traded in volume.
I have feeling that everyone in and out of NFT communities are fully aware that this isn’t about the art at all. It’s about hype and trading and profit. The art just happens to be an excuse to mint new tokens now that the crypto coin market has been flooded with 1000s of altcoins for a decade.
Personally, I wouldn't waste my money on this stuff, but I don't get the anger. Perhaps people feel upset that others are making significant money from this and it doesn't feel 'fair'?
Encouraging the crypto scams means we're going backwards on climate change at a time when we need to be sprinting forward. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/private-equity-f...
If you care about climate change, this doesn't feel like a particularly high leverage area to focus on.
You use your private key to verify ownership. In the digital world, this is the closet you can get to having the "original thing". You can disagree with this, but it doesnt matter because obviously the NFT market believes in this.
Some NFTs just sit there, the same way an original piece of art will just hang on a wall. However, some NFTs can have 'utility'. For example, owning one can qualify you to buy a piece that is exclusive to collectors of a particular artist. The artist can also verify holders and send out physical products. Some artists are using profits to re-invest in larger scale NFT projects as well, like virtual worlds and games.
Twitter followers are between $5-30 per thousand, and Discord server members look to be around $70-80 per thousand. People pulling crypto scams will frequently fake popularity, back in the ICO days it was standard to have a telegram channel filled with 20-30 thousand bots.
They can be totally differnt besides their fungibility.
Yep, status symbols. NFTs are just internet bling/flexing, like digital cold chains and chunky rings.
If you have status, you can leverage that to get money.
The two are not directly fungible, and work is needed to convert one to the other. But it is straightforward to obtain one for the other, in direct proportion to how much money or status you currently have.
The real trick is to have enough money and status, and cleverly use both to simultaneously get more of both.
Yes. I would download a car.
It's fine, though, it brings back money into the economy. Not much different from extracting huge sums for champagne with a few milligrams of gold sheet, or jeweled smartphones. The only difference is that they're buying an imaginary luxury object.
Is owning a rare baseball card a status symbol?
I still see it as someone paying $180k for a common, non-original, useless rock, it doesn't mean that the value of that rock is now $180k.
>>[Status symbols] also need alibis, plausible excuses for ownership other than the intentional acquisition of status symbols ... The best alibi for NFTs is that they are an investment ... to cunningly flip later.
So when the market becomes saturated and the ability to flip (aka the alibi) is gone, will the market collapse?
Isaac Newton, one of the smartest men who ever lived, lost loads of money in the South Sea Bubble.
no.
They know it is a scam, since that the only winners are the celebrities, influencers, meme creators. The collectors who keep buying NFTs however, have to wait and find another fool willing to buy it off of them for even higher.
You bought a mutable token in a poorly thought out "investment" scheme based on hipsters shilling nonsense? Here's your sign.