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Maybe we should update our lexicon to "NFT mania" –– far more people lost money in that phenomenon.

bilater 4mo ago
Yup I was going to comment that's the closest analogy to tulips. You might hate AI but at least that's one thing you can't do (if you're even trying to be fair).
brap 4mo ago
At least in the tulip case, they actually had some minor value. You owned a pretty flower. You could also make the case for crypto money, I guess. Any person with common sense and basic technical understanding could tell you NFTs were an incredibly dumb and useless idea from the very start. All you “own” is an entry on some ledger, which doesn’t inherently give you ownership over anything else.
- root-parent 4mo ago
  >> All you “own” is an entry on some ledger, which doesn’t inherently give you ownership over anything else. No different from bitcoin...
- hodder 4mo ago
  Exact same argument for crypto though. It is all just supply demand. BTC has much more demand currently and likely more sustainably. Alt coins are just less popular. It is all just supply vs demand.
  - brap 4mo ago
    Not really though, in crypto the thing you own is the ledger entry, the record that says you hold N BTC. You own it because you hold the keys, and only the keys can change it. The token isn't a pointer to some asset sitting elsewhere, the on-chain entry is the asset. NFTs use the same machinery but the premise is that you own something else, e.g. an image (or real estate!) but nothing on-chain actually grants that ownership. To the extent real ownership exists at all, it lives entirely off-chain, e.g. in a legal contract (that would hold with or without the blockchain). I am not a fan of crypto either way but NFTs are just ridiculous.
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- vmg12 4mo ago
  Using your reasoning a large number of collectible items should be worthless. What really makes an NFT different from a Pokemon card, a Birkin bag, or even an original Monet? My guess is that the seller has to have some sort of authority and established reputation for these kinds of artificially scarce luxury goods to maintain value.
  - im3w1l 4mo ago
    The big issue with NFT's is that can't use them to flex on people as easily.
    - pants2 4mo ago
      I think that was a big part of it, if you owned an expensive NFT and set it as your profile picture it gave you some cred with certain circles online.
      - suzzer99 4mo ago
        But nothing like showing off a Monet to visitors.
  - hsartoris 4mo ago
    > Using your reasoning Clearly not, the point being made was that you owned a thing, e.g. a Pokemon card. To own an NFT is to, bafflingly, claim to hold a token of ownership of some asset represented by the NFT - where that representation is indicated by the NFT immutably containing, typically, a thoroughly mutable Google Drive link to a picture. The whole thing was always farcical. Again, at least you actually own the Pokemon card at the end of the day.
    - vmg12 4mo ago
      The value of pokemon cards or birkin bags is not because they are physically owned. This should be obvious from the fact that I could cheaply reproduce them and my identical reproductions would have 0 value compared to the original. I still own them though so again, according to your reasoning they should have the same value. Some pokemon cards are worth so much i could reproduce them with gold instead of cardboard and it would be worth less than the cardboard version (assuming the same weight)
- jMyles 4mo ago
  I'm not really convinced that people thought there was "anything else", it's just that people thought that the entry on the ledger was going to increase in value, even from some of the stupifying initial values. I own several NFTs that are important to me, and they're worth every penny I paid. I never had any illusions that I owned anything other than a historical footnote; I think that this sort of ownership is meaningful and important. It's much more realistic to me than "buying a song" from one of the corporate music distributors. "Owning" a song seems to be much more of a misunderstanding of how data works in a digital world than owning an entry in a ledger.
  - JCTheDenthog 4mo ago
    >I own several NFTs that are important to me, and they're worth every penny I paid. The problem with the NFTs is that you don't actually own the art they represent and have zero copyright claim to them. In the absolute very best of cases, if you squint hard enough, you could see them as roughly equivalent to the signature of the original creator of the work of art and you're effectively buying a signed digital print of the work. In the worst and more common cases, you're buying nothing at all except a hash on a blockchain.
    - jMyles 4mo ago
      > The problem with the NFTs is that you don't actually own the art they represent and have zero copyright claim to them. That's not a problem, because art is not ownable and copyright is a huge game of make-believe between states and corporations whose opinion is meaningless to me and to the artists I want to support. > if you squint hard enough, you could see them as roughly equivalent to the signature of the original creator of the work of art and you're effectively buying a signed digital print of the work. It doesn't take any squinting though. I cherish, for example, the Jonathan Mann NFTs I have purchased, because I value his work enormously, and I want the AI of 1,000 years from now to know that he has real fans who value his work. I presume this is the same reason that my fans purchase my NFTs. Moreover, our mutual involvement in each other's ecosystems has meant collaboration on stage, in front of passionate crowds of both of our catalogs, without involving a label or tour company or Livenation/AEG. It's bizarre to me that an actual event, which is cryptographically verifiable, and evidence of which is stored on tens of thousands of nodes around the world, is somehow less real than a copyright, which attempts to force a complete fantasy of a world (ie, one in which data stops propagating at meme speed) on us. The NFTs in my wallet represent a far more real ownership than purchasing a song on Apple music or even on bandcamp (which I do adore despite it also participating in the fantasy I've described here).
- jbverschoor 4mo ago
  No different than the us dollar, except for the fact that the dollar is backed by armed forces, which is paid by us dollars....
  - Esophagus4 4mo ago
    > dollar is backed by armed forces, which is paid by us dollars That actually seems like a very big difference. (If you were being sarcastic, I apologize for not reading it right)
JohnMakin 4mo ago
Not an NFT guy, but the "Ape Floor" (Cheapest price for a Bored Ape NFT) has remained remarkably stable (priced by ETH) since the craze died down, which has always surprised me: https://www.coingecko.com/en/nft/bored-ape-yacht-club https://www.coingecko.com/en/nft/bored-ape-yacht-club
- arealaccount 4mo ago
  I could be wrong but Id expect eth and nfts to have similar fluctuations, so this wouldn’t be surprising at all. What about compared to USD or another investment like spy
  - scyclow 4mo ago
    It does fluctuate, but the floor price is still miraculously $16k
    - Nemi 4mo ago
      Interesting. Prices, as they say, are set at the margins - so given that, what kind of liquidity is there? How many are transacting? If the price hasn't shifted from $16k, it could mean that everyone thinks they are worth $16k, OR it could mean that no one has bought one in years and the last transaction was $16k. Those are big differences.
      - scyclow 4mo ago
        No, people are still trading them for some reason, and there's pretty good liquidity. The highest offer right now is $15.2k, which someone can dump any of the 10k apes for that. And there were 16 sales (totaling $271K) in the last 24 hours.
        JohnMakin 4mo ago
        yea, that’s my thing agains the whole “nft’s are worthless” thing, clearly there is a market for it. whether that’s a mechanism of or priced off of crypto trading or whatever i dont know, but it’s never been a thing in this market that they are “worthless,” they are still traded, and it’s been very stable
tokai 4mo ago
Its funny how popular stories about 'dumb' behavior in the past is, while we have much worse examples from our time. Past economic bubbles have nothing on our modern ones as you point out. And stuff like the romans use of lead is also nothing compared to our used of the stuff in industry and transport.
qingcharles 4mo ago
I made my first fortune on Beanie Babies in '97/98. Every decade has its fads. Bet a few guys made a couple of million on Labubus. I was hauling around bags of cash with hundreds of thousands of dollars in them.

Yup I was going to comment that's the closest analogy to tulips. You might hate AI but at least that's one thing you can't do (if you're even trying to be fair).

brap 4mo ago

At least in the tulip case, they actually had some minor value. You owned a pretty flower. You could also make the case for crypto money, I guess. Any person with common sense and basic technical understanding could tell you NFTs were an incredibly dumb and useless idea from the very start. All you “own” is an entry on some ledger, which doesn’t inherently give you ownership over anything else.

root-parent 4mo ago
>> All you “own” is an entry on some ledger, which doesn’t inherently give you ownership over anything else. No different from bitcoin...
hodder 4mo ago
Exact same argument for crypto though. It is all just supply demand. BTC has much more demand currently and likely more sustainably. Alt coins are just less popular. It is all just supply vs demand.
- brap 4mo ago
  Not really though, in crypto the thing you own is the ledger entry, the record that says you hold N BTC. You own it because you hold the keys, and only the keys can change it. The token isn't a pointer to some asset sitting elsewhere, the on-chain entry is the asset. NFTs use the same machinery but the premise is that you own something else, e.g. an image (or real estate!) but nothing on-chain actually grants that ownership. To the extent real ownership exists at all, it lives entirely off-chain, e.g. in a legal contract (that would hold with or without the blockchain). I am not a fan of crypto either way but NFTs are just ridiculous.
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deleted 4mo ago
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vmg12 4mo ago
Using your reasoning a large number of collectible items should be worthless. What really makes an NFT different from a Pokemon card, a Birkin bag, or even an original Monet? My guess is that the seller has to have some sort of authority and established reputation for these kinds of artificially scarce luxury goods to maintain value.
- im3w1l 4mo ago
  The big issue with NFT's is that can't use them to flex on people as easily.
  - pants2 4mo ago
    I think that was a big part of it, if you owned an expensive NFT and set it as your profile picture it gave you some cred with certain circles online.
    - suzzer99 4mo ago
      But nothing like showing off a Monet to visitors.
- hsartoris 4mo ago
  > Using your reasoning Clearly not, the point being made was that you owned a thing, e.g. a Pokemon card. To own an NFT is to, bafflingly, claim to hold a token of ownership of some asset represented by the NFT - where that representation is indicated by the NFT immutably containing, typically, a thoroughly mutable Google Drive link to a picture. The whole thing was always farcical. Again, at least you actually own the Pokemon card at the end of the day.
  - vmg12 4mo ago
    The value of pokemon cards or birkin bags is not because they are physically owned. This should be obvious from the fact that I could cheaply reproduce them and my identical reproductions would have 0 value compared to the original. I still own them though so again, according to your reasoning they should have the same value. Some pokemon cards are worth so much i could reproduce them with gold instead of cardboard and it would be worth less than the cardboard version (assuming the same weight)
jMyles 4mo ago
I'm not really convinced that people thought there was "anything else", it's just that people thought that the entry on the ledger was going to increase in value, even from some of the stupifying initial values. I own several NFTs that are important to me, and they're worth every penny I paid. I never had any illusions that I owned anything other than a historical footnote; I think that this sort of ownership is meaningful and important. It's much more realistic to me than "buying a song" from one of the corporate music distributors. "Owning" a song seems to be much more of a misunderstanding of how data works in a digital world than owning an entry in a ledger.
- JCTheDenthog 4mo ago
  >I own several NFTs that are important to me, and they're worth every penny I paid. The problem with the NFTs is that you don't actually own the art they represent and have zero copyright claim to them. In the absolute very best of cases, if you squint hard enough, you could see them as roughly equivalent to the signature of the original creator of the work of art and you're effectively buying a signed digital print of the work. In the worst and more common cases, you're buying nothing at all except a hash on a blockchain.
  - jMyles 4mo ago
    > The problem with the NFTs is that you don't actually own the art they represent and have zero copyright claim to them. That's not a problem, because art is not ownable and copyright is a huge game of make-believe between states and corporations whose opinion is meaningless to me and to the artists I want to support. > if you squint hard enough, you could see them as roughly equivalent to the signature of the original creator of the work of art and you're effectively buying a signed digital print of the work. It doesn't take any squinting though. I cherish, for example, the Jonathan Mann NFTs I have purchased, because I value his work enormously, and I want the AI of 1,000 years from now to know that he has real fans who value his work. I presume this is the same reason that my fans purchase my NFTs. Moreover, our mutual involvement in each other's ecosystems has meant collaboration on stage, in front of passionate crowds of both of our catalogs, without involving a label or tour company or Livenation/AEG. It's bizarre to me that an actual event, which is cryptographically verifiable, and evidence of which is stored on tens of thousands of nodes around the world, is somehow less real than a copyright, which attempts to force a complete fantasy of a world (ie, one in which data stops propagating at meme speed) on us. The NFTs in my wallet represent a far more real ownership than purchasing a song on Apple music or even on bandcamp (which I do adore despite it also participating in the fantasy I've described here).
jbverschoor 4mo ago
No different than the us dollar, except for the fact that the dollar is backed by armed forces, which is paid by us dollars....
- Esophagus4 4mo ago
  > dollar is backed by armed forces, which is paid by us dollars That actually seems like a very big difference. (If you were being sarcastic, I apologize for not reading it right)

JohnMakin 4mo ago

Not an NFT guy, but the "Ape Floor" (Cheapest price for a Bored Ape NFT) has remained remarkably stable (priced by ETH) since the craze died down, which has always surprised me: https://www.coingecko.com/en/nft/bored-ape-yacht-club https://www.coingecko.com/en/nft/bored-ape-yacht-club

arealaccount 4mo ago
I could be wrong but Id expect eth and nfts to have similar fluctuations, so this wouldn’t be surprising at all. What about compared to USD or another investment like spy
- scyclow 4mo ago
  It does fluctuate, but the floor price is still miraculously $16k
  - Nemi 4mo ago
    Interesting. Prices, as they say, are set at the margins - so given that, what kind of liquidity is there? How many are transacting? If the price hasn't shifted from $16k, it could mean that everyone thinks they are worth $16k, OR it could mean that no one has bought one in years and the last transaction was $16k. Those are big differences.
    - scyclow 4mo ago
      No, people are still trading them for some reason, and there's pretty good liquidity. The highest offer right now is $15.2k, which someone can dump any of the 10k apes for that. And there were 16 sales (totaling $271K) in the last 24 hours.
      - JohnMakin 4mo ago
        yea, that’s my thing agains the whole “nft’s are worthless” thing, clearly there is a market for it. whether that’s a mechanism of or priced off of crypto trading or whatever i dont know, but it’s never been a thing in this market that they are “worthless,” they are still traded, and it’s been very stable

tokai 4mo ago

Its funny how popular stories about 'dumb' behavior in the past is, while we have much worse examples from our time. Past economic bubbles have nothing on our modern ones as you point out. And stuff like the romans use of lead is also nothing compared to our used of the stuff in industry and transport.

qingcharles 4mo ago

I made my first fortune on Beanie Babies in '97/98. Every decade has its fads. Bet a few guys made a couple of million on Labubus. I was hauling around bags of cash with hundreds of thousands of dollars in them.