Yesterday I was talking with a friend of mine to try to wrap our heads around what's happening, and we can't help but feel that a lot of this NFT hype is based on FOMO and the craving for having something unique with high perceived value: like, everyone wants a Black Lotus, without having to wait 30 years to find out that there's actually people that have also some emotional investment into these items, and are willi…
look at what happened to baseball sports cards in the late 90s and still continue today
holograms, refractors, patch cards, "printing plates" cards. these cards are "valuable" because of the perceived scarcity but the issue is trying to get one is completely random and based on luck whereas the original value of baseball cards was people didn't keep them in mint condition and kids put them on their bikes to make cool sounds.
same thing with comic books. the comic book makers produced the scarcity or collectible, and then produced too much of that scarcity and the whole comic book market imploded.
this guy's art is cool, and good for him for making tons of money off it. but it does feel like partly FOMO and also some people have too much money during the pandemic that they don't know where to park so they dump it into stuff like this.
i think the biggest issue with this stuff is it's already skyrocketed well outside the range of even relatively well off individuals. i certainly don't have the money to outbid someone who put in nearly $800K for basically a blockchain entry. like how are you going to get normal people to care about this other than, "it sold for a lot of money" which is basically the only reason this stuff got an article in esquire.