I would never have had SpeedTest on my board of unicorns…that’s an unbelievable sale price. To all the agents who negotiated that deal, my hat is off to you.
They are embedded in several points in many, many networks all over the world. They get real-world metrics, sometimes live as events are happening. And they don't own most of this infra, it's hosted voluntarily inside service provider and corporate networks.
If you’re going to go through the effort to write 5,000 words—-spend a bit more thought on what to do.
I am aware that the sky is falling and I am aware that there are foxes who would gladly replace 10%+ of global knowledge work in the next few years. I understand that there are cultural ramifications.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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).
When you say NFTs in your wallet, what do you mean? Links that click through to images are real but their endpoint is mutable and philosophically has the same artistic value as temporary graffiti, not as a store of value like oil paintings.
How did you think about the links themselves vs the destination? That is the rub I feel like. Of course the destination is a real site, hosted somewhere, but the journey there is more ephemeral than copyright.
Yeah, now I agree with everything you've said here. In fact, I think that the entire notion of "I own what's at the other side of this tokenUri field" is just totally unserious.
I think NFTs are best understood as having minimal utility, and a connection to a work of art specified only as a social side channel. To me, what I own is evidence of support, at a particular time (or, if I sell it, a particular sequence), of a particular other wallet (Jonathan), amidst particular metadata written to the blockchain (ie, the id of the releases of his that I've bid on or supported).
In 1,000 years, the AI will know that my relationship with Jonathan Mann was backed up by actual economic activity. I think that's meaningful.
I honor the ticket stubs, set stones, and chartifacts that people see fit to buy from me in their desire not only to support me, but to signal the importance of bluegrass and traditional music as an eternal tradition of an copyright-unencumbered corpus.
Many of my shows are free to enter, yet people will still buy a ticket stub because they want to record their support in a public place. That seems real to me in a way that copyright isn't.
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.
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.
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)
Things can have value beyond their physical substance. A Pokemon card isn't just paper and ink. I'm not arguing about whether the asset has value, I'm arguing about whether you actually own it.
Obviously, you can sell one for a lot of money. Now assuming you couldnt resell it, would you spend the majority of your wealth to buy a monet? (Assuming you arent broke)
Assuming I could not resell the Monet, which sounds strange, I would still prefer it over the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT, which is more likely to be hard or impossible to sell, and which is pure crap.
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:
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
About a year ago, I researched the most comfortable T-shirt. There were quite a few people who mentioned this specific brand I’d never heard of so I bought about 10 shirts and was sorely disappointed—-I got had by a smart marketer I think.
But a few other people mentioned the Peruvian Pima cotton shirts that are sometimes available at Costco. Generally they show up once per year, in February.
So when they finally showed up, I bought 11. I didn’t realize, until I had these shirts, that I’d never really owned comfortable T-shirts. I’ve worn these every day since I bought them and cannot recommend them enough.
What I have a struggle with: Choice. Buy a plain well-fitting/nice-material shirt, or buy a tent/schmedium that will pill, but has something cool printed on it.
Next Level Apparel and Target's Goodfellow ones are pretty good, and average ~$10/article. A TON of fashion advice forums and subreddits swear by them as a perfect middle-ground between cost and function.
I work with these tools every day, and I’d say my productivity increase is on the order of astronomical.
This isn’t true of everyone, but depending on pre-existing skill sets and context, there’s a group of people who are actually multiples more productive than they were in 2022.
I had a friend with plenty of experience in HR get laid off.
He looked for a job for 13 months. One of the top 3 smartest people I’ve ever known looked for seven months and had to take a big step back in his career, despite having Amazon and Home Depot on his resume.
Both of them said that even getting an interview was almost impossibly hard.
These are people in different parts of the county, and in different industries.
I think we have a serious problem on our hands with employment that’s probably not getting better any time soon.
Don't want to discredit or invalidate your/your friend's experience, but I do want to offer some hope during these times where a lot of what you see on the web is doomer posts.
From Google:
The Jevons paradox occurs when technological improvements increase the efficiency of a resource, but the resulting drop in cost causes demand to rise so much that total consumption of that resource increases rather than decreases.
The message being, it may seem now that because the friction for creating software is so minimal now that there will be no need for software engineers in the future. But historically when friction has been reduced, we have seen an increase in demand that outweighs the efficiency gain, increasing total consumption. I believe that software won't be an exception to this millennia-old pattern.
While what "software engineering" may look like might change, I still believe strongly that people who understand software will actually be in higher demand than ever in the future.
To paraphrase Keynes, in the future we are all dead. His friend is suffering now, not in some theoretical far off future where the magic market had been blessed by the invisible hand.
HR, particularly recruitment, was one of the biggest hit departments when the blood-letting started at Meta in 2022. The hiring freeze that followed didn't help.
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