[zepto]

> The reason that something is valuable to collectors is the social contract between creator and recipient.

No, it’s because the valuable object is physically scarce, and exists as a material historical artifact independent of any ledger. NFTs have never and will never have these attributes.

You can't ignore this reality when advocating for them, otherwise you're peddling a fantasy.

[douglaswlance]

>No, it’s because the valuable object is physically scarce, and exists as a material historical artifact independent of any ledger. NFTs have never and will never have these attributes.

Collectible cards are scarce by design. Manufacturers print millions every year. They could reproduce the same card for decades. They could also print them on demand. Whenever someone orders the card, print it for them, and ship it out. It is artificial scarcity.

Collectible cards must be graded and registered to be valuable. An unregistered Michael Jordan rookie card would be assumed to be a fake. They exist in a ledger.

The social contract between collectors and manufacturers is what creates the value. The manufacturer agrees to generate verifiable scarcity, and the collector agrees to purchase seemingly worthless cardboard and ink at a markup.

[danuker]

> independent of any ledger

This seems an arbitrary restriction to me. Why must something be independent of a ledger to have value?

[zepto]

This is a property that NFTs can never have, so claiming that NFTs are equivalent to physical collectibles is certainly false.

If you are saying that something requires a ledger entry to have value, then you are simply proving that it has no intrinsic value.

[danuker]

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_theory_of_value :

> An intrinsic theory of value (also called theory of objective value) is any theory of value in economics which holds that the value of an object, good or service, is intrinsic, meaning that it can be estimated using objective measures.

If you use "what someone last paid for it" as a measure of intrinsic value, then they have intrinsic value.

[zepto]

> If you use "what someone last paid for it" as a measure of intrinsic value, then they have intrinsic value.

Clearly this doesn’t meet the requirements of an objective measure.

A single tulip bulb was purchased for 2500 florins in 1636. That represents 10 years of a skilled laborers earnings at the time.

If you believe that the price an NFT sold for on a ledger represents its intrinsic value, then you must also believe that a tulip bulb’s intrinsic value was equivalent to 10 years of skilled labor.

Obviously this is absurd, and history proved it so.

[danuker]

> objective measure

How would a bunch of subjective meatbags be able to come up with an objective measure?

If everyone agreed that X is an objective measure, it could still be wrong.

Give me a concrete example of what you think is an objective measure.

[zepto]

Sorry - I edited my comment while you were posting this. Feel free to reply to my full comment, since I address the consequences of this line of reasoning there.