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by koonsolo
1913 days ago
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Real world item (person): Honus Wagner Link item: 1909 T206 baseball card Value: $2 million Why don't you start printing these baseball cards and sell them? Ha, but you say the baseball card is a real physical item, and a NFT is not. Well, an NFT is as real as the movie I watch on YouTube, the song I listen to on Spotify, and the numbers my bank shows. But now you say the baseball card was part of a game, and so it's value is not from the person but from the collection game itself. Well, a lot of NFT's are also part of a collectible game. Would love to hear the difference between a "physical" item and a "digital" item, or a "physical link to a physical item" or a "digital link to a physical (or digital) item". |
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It’s not an issue of realness. Of course an NFT is real, it’s a long number and is just as real as 3 or PI or any other number.[1] The issue is instead ownership. When I own a baseball card I have a physical card no one can take from my house/vault/whatever without the police getting involved. When I own the copyright to a movie I can choose to let other people watch it or not.
When I own an NFT it means there’s a blockchain somewhere that says I own a particular number. As long as the blockchain is still in existence I can prove that the blockchain says I own the number and I can transfer that number to you.
That’s not exactly nothing but it’s pretty darn close. It smells like a scam. You do raise a good point that it smells like a scam in the same way that a lot of consciously created collectibles do. Once comic books, baseball cards, or stamp producing nations started pushing their products as something people should buy because they’d appreciate in value they started to feel a lot scummier (and not conincidently the items in question rarely increased in value the way organic collectibles had.)
So, sure if you can get someone to pay you a lot of money for the “ownership” of some 256 digit number in some blockchain somewhere by claiming it represents the star Vega, as long as you don’t lie I suppose it shouldn’t be a crime. But you can’t expect the rest of us to respect the way you’ve chosen to make a living. You are going to get downvotes because you are promoting a disreputable activity.
[1] Hope you appreciate the effort it took not to make a math joke here.