John Cleese Sells the Brooklyn Bridge as an NFT

Lack of liquidity is implicit in non-fungible tokens. You have to find a buyer who wants the exact item you have. That may be hard. It may require paying for advertising, which means the return can go negative.

With a uniform commodity, there's a market with prices. Non-fungible markets don't crash, they stall. You can't sell, but that's not visible on marketplaces, especially if they're designed to hide listings that are not moving. (This is common in real estate; un-saleable property is taken off the market, then re-listed, so it doesn't show as "for sale for 72 weeks".) What we're probably going to see are markets with huge numbers of items that are not selling, but have high asking prices. This will create the illusion of value, because someone will add up the asking prices and claim that's a "market cap". The illusion of volume and liquidity can be created with wash trades.

There are getting to be a quite a number of blockchain based virtual worlds, where you can pay way too much for virtual land. Few people actually log into those virtual worlds and spend time there; they just trade land. "The metagame is the game", some analyst wrote of Decentraland. (Which, despite its name, is totally centralized. You can't run a Decentraland server yourself.)

I used to go to art openings in SF, and sometimes we'd look at some bad piece and ask "will this be around in 10 years or will it have been tossed out?" Years later, I suspect most of it went to a Dumpster long ago.

[1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/Franklin-Mint-The-Three-Stooges-Dec...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlQNPg5-hgk

People compare NFTs to trading cards. But if you already think those things are basically useless zero-sum speculative Greater Fool insert-other-overused-but-apt-buzzwords bullshit, your opinion of NFTs won't be improved much.

NFTs, in their current state and hype wave, are probably a little like the dotcom bubble. It definitely doesn't imply the internet and the world wide web are bubbles, but it implies a major disconnect of some kind. I'm more interested in the future of semi-fungible tokens and novel, creative uses of NFT/SFT smart contracts. Plus just smart contracts in general.

(But you have to say it in Forrest Gump's voice.)

Perhaps with people focusing on that, we can get more quality products IRL. I went to an eye exam where the optometrist was wearing arcteryx gear during my exam. Perhaps she was going to jet off to some location where that stuff was needed, or perhaps she just liked it for fashion. But nonetheless, when people start wearing things that need real quality for non-quality reasons eventually brands start wising up and selling at the same price but with worse quality.