Coinbase NFT: Create. Collect. Connect. Launching This Year
coinbase.com
coinbase.com
I also believe its a Digital Tulip, even more so than Doge coin. Even BTC (when tulips bulbs were a thing they were trading high too, it doesn't mean they have real long-ish term value)
China already banned cryptocurrencies. Meanwhile, not insignificant portions of the US tech sector along with investors, including retail investors, are investing time and capital in the cryptocurrency and NFT scam markets.
The idea being that we live in a rapidly digitizing world (software eats the world) where everybody has a smartphone. To them it seems an inevitability that you have a digital wallet holding your assets, whether they be physical or digital.
In your case, it won't have a JPEG, which you consider gambling. But it might have concert tickets, a token of your favorite football club, assets from a game you love to play, or even the proof of ownership of your real estate.
I don't know how and if this vision will materialize but that's the big idea. Your concern that companies and institutions are invested in digital assets (specifically NFTs) is misplaced, the actual gambling is done mostly by big crypto holders.
EDIT: I see now!
> After you're on the waitlist, you'll get a referral link to share. Be first in line for early access by referring others. The more you refer, the higher up in line you’ll go.
This waitlist concept is just artificial scarcity for accounts that aren't actually scarce and that have no reason to be limited. The only way to increase your position in the queue is to advertise it and get more people lower down to buy into the premise, further pushing the illusion to everyone else that the positions at the front of the queue are valuable and in demand.
In other words, it's the perfect way to launch an NFT platform.
[1] https://www.fintechmarketinghub.com/post/coinbase-the-power-...
Also you can download all 10000 in minutes with:
mkdir copy-all-degen && cd copy-all-degen && curl -O "https://data.solanart.io/img/degenape/[1-10000].jpg"
I can take a picture of someone else's bank balance, I can even edit the html on a picture of my own bank account to have the same numbers and post that on twitter. It's the same pixels, sure... but it doesn't let me spend the dollars.
Example: If I were a famous artist, sold NFTs with my art, said you could only enter my gallery opening if you are an owner, you absolutely can't fake that by "minting your own". The signatures wouldn't match.
The owners of those things aren't holding priceless art they can resell but they do definitively OWN those things despite their value generally being at or close to $0. It's the same for NFTs and your example proves my point.
It's never been about the image, it's about the provenance.
At least in recent history, visual content has always been copyable, and digital content PERFECTLY copyable, but NFTs are unique in that they attach an easily verifiable ownership record to digital content, much like physically holding something provides ownership in the real world to complement the physical characteristics.
I don't see anyone in this post's comments calling for the end of paper because someone used it to print a photograph of the Mona Lisa and someone could potentially try to sell it (although I imagine some people argued this when photographs came about).
New mediums have always started their lives looking like copies of old mediums.
Attach to as included with the download, or point at as a separate piece of data?
I've got some friends who are modeling the CryptoPunks prices with machine learning over at https://deepnftvalue.com
Pretty interesting stuff. These asset prices behave pretty exotically.
Interesting (but not particularly surprising) choice for ranking the waitlist members. OpenSea (which is also a YC company, wow!) has been dominating this market to an amazing extent in the last year, so it will be interesting to see how well this pans out for Coinbase. Here's a graph of NFT MM marketshare by volume for the past year: https://i.imgur.com/C0l9O1Q.png
In the case of NFTs, I don't blame anyone for wanting to be the one selling the shovels, so I'm interested in seeing how this turns out for Coinbase over the next few months/years.
Presumably Coinbase will be hosting the URLs and letting users pay real money to create and trade those on-chain pointers.
(Yes, cryptocurrency is at a point where they're trying to make you believe that buying pointers to URLs is a revolution in art and finance and mankind's freedom.)
Optimistically, NFTs give artists and photographers a new channel to sell their work without being constrained too much by middle men. As an example, photographers often try to monetize using stock agencies, whom fully dictate terms and give them pennies, whilst keeping most of the resell value themselves.
As such, NFTs offer less gatekeepers, less or no cut on revenue, as well as new technical possibilities. The artist has far more control, and thus economic freedom. At least potentially.
As to whether this actually leads to artists more successfully monetizing is another question entirely. Too soon to tell.
This is a benefit of cryptocurrencies in general, but doesn't explain specifically how NFTs themselves (rather than a generic selling platform not utilizing NFT tokens) increase the artist's economic freedom.
A NFT is on chain and immutable. Further, they can have smart contracts where artists dictate advanced terms.
So you have more freedom and control in general. As to whether this leads to more monetary success is another question.
You know, this problem is a lot more generic than many think. There is no such thing as "forever hosting" for a fixed one time cost.
It is obvious from their layout that their purpose is the sale and speculation of the products sold there. It is evident that the quality of the "work" published is utter garbage, devoid of any aesthetic value.
Now look at DeviantArt or any website dedicated to creating a community of artists and artisans. Then tell me that NFT isn't anything but a grift.
Some believe they have the right to not be pillaged, because a society looks out for its weakest.
Some believe: too bad, let 'em crash-n-burn and grind em into haggis when they fall. That's life.
The question is: do we want to let the cons prey on the weak in our society? I'm sure it'll never possible to stamp out all the possible ways to exploit people, but I think it wouldn't hurt to help protect people who aren't hip to the con.
I waffle about this issue. For example, when I see people throwing their life savings at a rich Prosperity Gospel preacher (google that shit, it is totally bonkers and elderly fall for it!) I fall into group #1, but when I see people gobbling up Kardashian NFTs, I fall into group #2.
Tough call...
An NFT has a clearly listed price. Pay that price and you will own it. And you will get exactly what you paid for. That's not a scam. Nobody robbed you of your money, you willingly gave it, and you got the listed product, and not something else entirely.
A scenario that I would consider scammy is an NFT that is minted without permission from the original artist.
What are they getting though?
It's like saying when you spend $1,000 for a beanie baby (or a cabbage patch kid if you're older) you got something of transient value driven by cultural hype.
On its face, yes you are right: you got a doll for a lot of money, or a token for a lot of money.
But you weren't buying a doll, you were buying hype whipped up by con men that it will be worth more to another person who is conned. Dolls aren't worth thousands of dollars unless a critical mass agrees they are.
Its the Austrian economic theory why diamonds are worth more than water, when water is necessary for life and diamonds are just shiny rocks.
I consider that a scam too.
You are correct that words do matter. We need to call these what they are: scams and cons.
I think perhaps you are trying to partition a scam or a con into a "bait and switch", that is also a scam/con, at the expense of everything else. That's what it sounds like to me.
The famous art work consisting of a banana duck-taped to a wall, is that a scam? I consider the value of that work zero, somebody else might consider it worth a million USD. Yet I see no scam, just a subjective valuation.
A subjective valuation isn't equal to a scam. We could go back and forth on the definition of a scam, but in a context of regulation it does matter.
That's how the physical world works. You or I can scribble whatever we want on a piece of paper and the median value of those creations is $0. It doesn't mean there isn't a valid art market that uses the same medium.