NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are digital assets that represent a wide range of unique tangible and intangible items, from a piece of art, sports memorabilia, or even a tweet.
They’ve been around since 2014, but are gaining notoriety now because they are becoming an increasingly popular way to buy and sell digital assets. Forbes reported that £123M has been spent on NFTs since November 2017.
This weekend the “Charlie bit my finger” video clip was auctioned as an NFT and sold for a whopping $760,999 (£538,000).
What are your thoughts about NFTs in general? Do you think they’re a temporary craze or an investment with long-term potential?
I think it’s very much like the Barbra Streisand Effect. Although not trying to hide the items, everyone will just see the items already or listen to them and either make a copy or forget about it before they are purchased:
How do you then monetise something when it is more shielded than ever?
The only positive thought is there was an investment firm bought a stake in the rights to 33,000 songs including Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas.
Not the digital asset as above but maybe there is something there that could be similar to the rights purchase.
Yeah I guess this is why the “charlie bit my finger” video is a bit different because they are taking it off Youtube? Whereas in other instances the asset has still been available to everyone?
My sister is selling quite a lot on foundation and a few other marketplaces. I’d say it’s quite interesting, but not sure / understand the current mania.
I’m down with NFTs but I think they’re a bit in a bubble atm.
The main issue I think is their potential to silently crash. For example: you buy an nft for £100 but can no longer sell it so it’s essentially worthless instantly
I think NFTs will really come into their own in a more everyday way of tracking ownership
I find NFTs are a bit difficult since there is no intrinsic value - even if they’re taking the video off Youtube I’m sure that content will be in the public domain forever.
I suppose there’s value in it for the one person who can say they have the “original” but then it has to be treated in much the same was as fine art!
@danjameswalker I like the idea that they’ll be used to track ownership more generally, it’s a good use case.
Just wanted to get some exposure to NFTs and found this one cool tbh. Mooncats is one of the earliest NFT projects on Ethereum so thought the price would go up due to increased demand for NFTs and the scarcity of these (only 10,000 unique ones I believe). So far it’s gone down in value a bit and it’s quite expensive to sell as the fees are high on Ethereum
NFTs themselves have no value. If I sell an NFT artwork, all I have is a little token saying I own it. I can’t stop people from making copies of the artwork itself. I don’t have a physical object that I can put anywhere. And I haven’t had the copyright in the artwork assigned to me.
Now, if you put in place something of actual value together with the NFT, such as access to an account, assignment of copyright, or whatever - then fair enough - but also, why is the NFT needed? Just use an Ethereum smart contract in that case.
The explosive growth off NFTs is nothing but a hype machine, same goes for Altcoins like DogeCoin. It’s a pump and dump.
You can’t make money out of thin air - someone somewhere is paying the price for it. In the case of NFTs and alt coins, it’s the people left holding the bag when the market crashes and people move on.
Agreed, I’m not sure what problem they solve over and above a unique way of selling something. A great bubble for creatives right now but environmentally horrible and fundamentally not required.
