When I heard about Non-Fungible Tokens, I thought it was a joke. Make something digital non-useful, assign a “unique identifier” and sell it? Who could be that stupid to invest in that?
Apparently, a lot of people:
A recent study looking at the price of thousands of collections seems to suggest the answer is “yes.”
A report by dappGambl based on data provided by NFT Scan and CoinMarketCap indicated that 95% of non-fungible tokens were effectively worthless. Out of 73,257 NFT collections, 69,795 of them had a market cap of zero ether.
By their estimates, almost 23 million people hold these worthless assets.
NFT Crash: 95% of the Market Is Now Worthless, Study Finds (businessinsider.com)
Allow me to explain this in Boomer terms: Some dumbasses thought that buying a Pet Rock with a serial number would be a sound financial investment. Right now, they are not even worth to bust a window in an abandoned house.
At the end of the day, the three commodities that will always pay will be beans, bullets and band-aids. You may include precious metals for trading and even there will be a time when they will cease to be useful.
Some artists made a lot of money selling them. The guy that does “Stonetoss” for one.
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He was on the right side of the trade, and sold a lot of NFTS in a single day when they were new and hot.
Huh, who could have predicted that?
Remember, this is a generation that’s been raised on online ‘pay to play’ games that can shut down at anytime and buying ‘tokens’ to get credibility on social media.
Wait… what?
My beanie baby collection actually has more value than NFTs? Whooo-Hoooo!!!
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Seriously, I heard someone bought the first tweet for a ridiculous amount of money and thought “you have to be F-ing me!” Glad to see the stupid is getting the rewards they so richly deserve.
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And, the 23 million people are now petitioning their politicians for a bail out.
Remember yall- these are the times of morons eating Tide pods and drinking boiling water for social media….. We need to come up with something like this, maybe “silver plated bullets kill zombies “…. I never figured out “precious metal investments “, what good is a bunch of gold when the smelly stuff is flying?? Ya can’t eat it.. I used to luv the adds “we will even store your gold FOR you”… ya I bet.. silver is probably a better commodity but lead is the best..
@curby: For whatever reasons, gold has been viewed as inherently valuable for millenia.
People will be willing to accept it a a medium for exchange even when the fecal matter has hit the air circulator.
We hope…
Ludwig von Mises wrote a detailed analysis on this (I think in “the theory of money and credit” which is, or was adapted from, his Ph.D. thesis). “Money” is an intermediate object to work around the hassles of straight barter. Basically, any item that a community will accept as a placeholder for actual goods or services, one that is non-perishable and comes with a fairly constant supply, can serve as money. So why gold? Because it, over the millennia, has met those requirements better than anything else. As I’ev seen pointed out somewhere, the price of a well made man’s dress suit, in gold, has remained roughly constant from the days of Julius Caesar to today.
Is gold the only possible hard money? No; silver has often been used, and in earlier times or some smaller communities anything from salt to cattle to particular sea shells. (Hence the word “salary”, from the Latin word for salt.) But gold is handier so it persisted.
Will gold always be a good hard money? No way to be sure, but if you want to store wealth in some way that you hope will work beyond the apocalypse, it’s a better bet than most. Yes, store lead and powder too, but those are tools more than stores of value, though in a pinch they will serve for both.
copper and lead will always be “precious” metals to me.
Pet Rock pretty much is the perfect example for this
@Bad Dancer: At least Pet Rocks™ were cheap and Beanie Babies™ were (are) cute and fairly cheap.
Yet another Tulip Craze, but you don’t get any pretty flowers.