Reminds me of Moon Shares from like 20 years ago. You could buy property on the moon and the company would verify ownership for you.
Although this is totally different, because it’s blockchain.
Although this is totally different, because it’s blockchain.
Thorstein Veblen already in the late 1800s had pointed out that an object's utility as a status signal increases in tandem with its uselessness. The object must then also be recognized among peers as difficult to obtain. For the moon shares analogy to work, being objectively worthless or grossly overvalued is insufficient, it had to have also been exclusive and coveted among the "high class".
its closer to tulip mania with a 'distributed' MLM pyramid scheme twist.
There is nonetheless a clear mapping to physical art world collections in terms of owning a rare work by a skilled artist and having it connected to some trusted proof representing a unique transaction with that artist.
Status cannot be manufactured, it spurs naturally due to having rare things such as a big mansion, grammys, academy awards, winning the Super Bowl , winning the NBA title, winning the World Series etc.
All those things are both rare and cannot be copied.
NFTs instead are easily copied idividually (right click) or even in bulk as this torrent file proves.
Second life did a much better job at representing status goods in the digital world than NFTs.
And I know people in here don't want to hear it, but given its history and its budget Zuck's Meta will improve upon what Second Life did and knock it out of the park like it did with social networks.
In the art world, wealthy collectors will overbid on works by artists within their collection to hugely inflate their price. There is also a large amount of pressure on appraisers to overvalue work and for Art houses to turn a blind eye to some known forgeries. The wealthy will donate to museums to lend to an air of prestige to their collections (with tax evasion by charity write offs a nice bonus) and, whenever forgeries are found in collections, lawsuits and bribes are used to silence all but those with rare levels of integrity.
A less exclusive but still grossly over priced example is the recent world of fast fashion product drops. There, mass produced, cheaply manufactured, labor exploited goods are sold for many times their production costs by creating an illusion of scarcity and prestige. This is done by manipulative marketing tricks where social media and celebrity worship are key vehicles.
This, sadly, is the nature of humans. NFTs are in the process of attempting to install themselves as status goods. That is the psychology when denouncing "right clickers".
No, you're copying a piece of media that NFT links to. What you're not copying is a verifiable claim of spending unreasonable amount of ETH to have a record in blockchain pointing to that piece of media.
POF? Proof-of-foolishness?
Except the blockchain only keeps the url, so the “content” doesn’t get any of the properties of the blockchain
That said, tokens that are not pinned to IPFS are fucking worthless, and it's hard to tell whether an NFT is pinned to IPFS unless you're skilled at navigating Ethereum contacts.
Within the moon share ecosystem, moon shares have the exact same kind of authority.
Value's always worth what someone will pay, sure. But blockchain authority isn't more special than any other database. It has some fancy properties, but they don't affect the authority.
Contrast with a token in your wallet on the blockchain. As long as your private keys are secure, nobody else but you can transfer that token anywhere else. Nobody else can convincingly represent that they are the owner of it. The blockchain proves irrefutably that you own it. The blockchain, as represented by the consensus of thousands of nodes, is the ultimate authority of who owns what on that blockchain.
Neither of those are necessary for the blockchain because nobody can assert ownership of the blockchain tokens without the private keys to your wallet.
Let's say you go to Sotheby's and you buy Van Gogh's Starry Night at auction. Along with the actual painting, you'd get a certificate of authenticity showing the provenance of the work. Basically, a record showing everyone who owned it before you and certifying that this is, in fact, the real Starry Night that Van Gogh painted. The real value of the painting is not in the painting itself, but in that certificate proving that it's the real original. If you tried to sell the painting without it, you wouldn't get many buyers. There's lots of people who could paint an exact replica of Starry Night, but there's still only one real Starry Night. Likewise, anyone can make a copy of a piece of digital art, but there's only one NFT, and if you don't have the NFT in your crypto wallet, you don't actually own it.
So, think of it as a certificate of authenticity for digital artworks, although it can be used to represent ownership of other things as well, if people agreed to it. It can also do neat things like transfer a portion of the sale price back to the original artist every time it's sold, which isn't currently done with regular artworks.
Not true. Banksy sold a painting for $1.4 million and it shredded itself right after the auction ended. Three years later the shredded remains (presumably with the certificate of authenticity) sold for $25.4 million[1]. So, no, the value is not in an intact painting.
Forgers can artificially age paintings. It's amazing the lengths they go to. Maybe something like Starry Night has been analyzed enough that it could be verified, but other works are not. It's not really known how many works of art on the market are forgeries.
> No one would want to buy the certificate from you but let you keep the painting in your vaults
Actually people do this all the time. They pay millions upon millions of dollars for a work of art and it gets loaned to a museum and possibly sent all over the world. They still own it though. There's also freeports[2] around the world with warehouses full of art. You can buy an artwork and it never moves from the warehouse, just the record of who owns it changes.
[1] https://nypost.com/2021/10/14/shredded-banksy-artwork-could-...
The value of art is art. If we disagree then you are admitting that both the art world and crypto are heavily used for money laundering.
In what sense does a Token give you any ownership over any part of the image? If someone does a copy&paste operation and starts selling "your" image on a t-shirt, does your NFT give you any way to stop them?
I can go to the Louvre and take a picture of the Mona Lisa. That doesn't mean I own the Mona Lisa.
Authority within the moon share ecosystem is validated only by the people who own the company.
But the potential authority over the actual moon is the same under both systems.
Right.
And a blockchain only solves a tiny percentage of ownership issues. It solves those issues with powerful mathematical certainty, and if you could live inside a blockchain your problems would be solved*, but don't confuse that sliver with the full set of real-world ownership issues that exist with or without a blockchain being involved.
* if there are no bugs or hacks
But whatever, think whatever you want. Just know that you're the guy in 1995 ranting about how this silly Internet fad is just something nerds waste time with.
In 1995 most of the uses of the internet were stupid. Eventually, they became useful. Hopefully the same happens with crypto
https://nftmoon.space/en/home/
How anyone thinks all this isn’t a bubble is beyond me…
As an investment asset? Almost certainly. Nobody is going to want your CSGO skins in 20 years time when it doesn't have any players anymore, and we don't often hear about $50k second life purchases anymore when they were a weekly news item in the noughties.
If you buy one because you want to play with it? Fine, that's not a bubble. Enjoy!
If you are just buying one just because you think the value will go up, and the asset doesn't generate any returns other than the price people are willing to pay for it, and other people primarily want it because they think the price is going to go up - you are probably in a bubble.