I kind of get the concept behind doing NFTs of actual things, like works of digital art, music, even tweets, because those are digitized records of ownership of things that were previously intangible but also with legitimate scarcity.

But the NBA topshot thing is so LOL silly. You're purchasing a GIF of a clip from an NBA game that can be watched for free at any time. These are artificially scarce, like a baseball card, Magic the gathering card, beanie baby, etc. You're just hoping that greater fools come in after you to keep buying these things.

But if the marketing team at NBA topshot can convince people that these are legit scarce and legit valuable then bravo to them and they will make a lot of money. The profit margin on these has to be huge, plus they get a cut of each transaction. The thing that makes it so bubbly and shady is that they are heavily promoting it as a way to make money. Otherwise it's no different than baseball cards or stamps or whatever.

Actually after thinking about it, can't you buy the ownership of a digital piece of art using existing copyright or property laws? So what is the point of the NFT then? Like if I'm an artist and I make a painting on my computer and I sell an NFT of it, what am I selling that couldn't be sold before?

Meh, the whole thing is so nebulous but I guess if you can convince people that something is valuable then it is.

I agree that Topshot is pretty dumb and ultimately Dapper Labs will rake in most of the money. They're selling lots of packs and also raking in 5% (!!) of every marketplace transaction. That's like a poker site with 5% uncapped rake -- they love it when all these new breed of shitcoiners play hot potato with their moments. 5% to them each time.

But you must realize that all collectibles are intrinsically worthless. I agree with you that Topshots is quite like baseball cards -- some baseball cards like T-206 Honus Wagner and 1952 Mantle's are worth a fortune despite just being pieces of paper/cardboard. Will that apply to Topshots too? Idk

At least the scarcity and demand for old baseball cards, stamps, coins, etc. is the result of organic forces. In theory all of these collectables with no intrinsic value have artificial scarcity but most of the older ones started off either as not scarce (like most baseball cards) or the scarcity was not done on purpose (misprinted coins or stamps).

All these newer "collectables" are designed from the very start to be scarce and to be traded for money. Especially digital ones, where an infinite number of new ones can be created with a stroke of a key.

As I said before, I guess the marketing team at Topshots did a good job of implanting the idea into people's heads that having "ownership" of these supposedly rare and valuable things is desirable.

I think they've created a good casino that funnels most of the money to themselves.

Most of the people playing in the casino are hoping more new people come into the casino after them. I think it will be interesting to watch when 1) withdrawals of any size are enabled for all users -> lots of money leaves -> can inflows match outflows? If they do, do people lose interest when number no longer go up fast? If prices are flat for a few months it loses a lot of the get rich quick appeal it currently has 2) tax time -> people with significant profits will owe a lot and need to cash out / sell moments

https://evaluate.market/ has the market cap of topshots at 1.5 bil. i don't know if there's a ton of room to grow that, but there's certainly a ton of room to make more cards

Jack Dorsey selling an NFT for his first ever tweet. Bid is at $2.5million. OK then.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/07/tech/...ter/index.html

What are you getting when you own the NFT for a tweet? Do you legally own the tweet? Do you have access to it on twitter and can retweet or delete it?

Obviously you get the ability to resell the NFT. But do you get anything else besides this nebulous concept of "ownership" of the tweet?

The whole thing reminds me of how bitcoin started. First, they had to sell people on the concept of cryptos. And then once people believed cryptos were money and had value then they traded it back and forth and evangelized to others to get other people to believe in the concept of cryptos who would pump up the value and then evangelize to more people, who would buy in and pump it up, etc. etc.

All the while people are doing nothing with cryptos but trading it back and forth but it has value because people believe it has value and they keep getting more and more people to believe in it. I don't say that to frame it as a pump and dump or a ponzi. It's more like a religion, or if you want to phrase it pejoratively, like a cult.

tulips

https://opensea.io/accounts/clowncore

You are getting rugged. And to your trading-back-and-forth point, yeah this is a big thing to worry about in NFT's (wash trading). Rarible has seen a lot of it, Opensea, etc.

Looks like we have a mini-blowoff top here for NFT's, depreciating gains out there on niftygateway & topshot, hashmasks clones galore and dubiously structured tweet ownership by vcent. TokenisedTweets started this a while ago in a shoddier way but vcent went viral first. SingIdea (instagram/music nfts) and crbn.io (defi/nft facebook) coming into the space recently too.

Be careful out there. Yes, this cycle hasn't gone into full force yet but NFT stuff is getting a bit out of hand for the moment.

the crypto punk art is amazing. Kind of what I imagine Basquiat's art would be like if he were alive today and had a computer. Very crude but visually appealing.

I think it's the opposite. We are just getting started.

Soon we're going to see NFL nfts, MLB nfts, WWE nfts, Star Wars nfts, Marvel nfts, etc. Feels like everyone will strike while the iron is hot and the fad will end relatively quickly.

Not sure about NFTs for actual things like art, music, etc. There could be longterm demand for those.

I agree - I do have a few topshots, and am certainly no fanboy or true believer. I believe much of it will be a short term bubble (although I do think some of the rarer ones could last and easily replace traditional baseball cards).

However, within the next month or two, I think it could go higher still. They are having to limit marketplace listing because they can't keep up, and they are freezing new accounts to the site because they can't keep up with demand. Further, unopened packs are being sold on eBay for 10x+ because so few people could score one.

IMO these are not the actions that have seen the top blow off yet. I do agree that maybe the multiples of returns go down from the absurd levels, but there is likely a lot of room to run.

I don't collect art or rolexes or any collectibles, so I'm not the target market. Just put me in the group that doesn't get NFT.

I think the topshots are pretty cool. Cooler than regular collectable cards for sure. Not hundreds/thousands of dollars cool, but definitely a sustainable market there.

I also believe it is sustainable. It provides easy liquidity and proof of authentication, which are typically difficult factors of holding any sort of collectable. Also is associated with the NBA, which isn't really at risk of just disappearing.

That said, I do not think a random 'card' of a bench player is going to be worth $15-$25/each for long. I think it'll end up like real baseball cards, all the value is stuck to the most rare/oldest cards, whereas most of them are effectively worthless.

Cautionary Tale:

Maybe I'm an idiot. I just purchased the new Kings of Leon NFT album on opensea. In order to use opensea I was told I needed a MetaMask wallet, so I made one. I transferred about $150 in ETH to my MetaMask wallet, which cost me ~$6 in fees from Coinbase. Then I went onto opensea and purchased the album. I clicked through the purchase and didn't think anything about the purchase was weird, until I noticed my balance said $7 left. I had $144 and the album cost $64 so htf do I only have $7? How about MetaMask charged me $74 in fees that I didn't even notice and couldn't even find details about until I found EtherScan. This game looks like it's made on hype and is trying to rip off as many newbs like me as they can. I'm glad I bought the first album sold as an NFT, though I doubt very seriously I'll buy anything else unless the fee structure comes down from charging 115% of the transaction in fees. Did I screw up somehow (other than participating)?

When originally purchasing for $64, did you expect to be able to sell it to someone down the line for more? Or did you just want to own it on the blockchain. I'm still trying to wrap my head around NFT.

Says current price of album is $180 here
https://opensea.io/assets/0x6d8cc2d5...91bb756e1/3016

That's a guy who bought the album and is selling it on his own account. There's one listed like that for sale for $435 too. There's a limited number and the lower the number the more they ask.

As for why I got it, yes, I plan to keep it, but I can also redeem part of my purchase for a vinyl record they send to you if you buy the NFT.

Part of the reason for the purchase is that this is the first NFT album released, and some degen paid me a $50 debt in bitcoin 4 years ago and I finally decided to do something with it.

The fee you paid is for ethereum blockspace inclusion. You should understand how this works before using any blockchain (it works ~the same in Bitcoin). MetaMask is a web wallet. They only charge fees if you use their TokenSwaps feature which is basically a DEX aggregator with an embedded fee on top. MetaMask does not receive any of the fee you paid -- that goes to whoever mined the block that included your transaction.

It's true that currently Ethereum Layer1 is bad for small transactions due to surge in network use and surge in ETH price. Plenty of layer 2 solutions are live now (Polygon, Loopring, dydx on StarkWare, xDAI, Optimism mainnet launching this month) with much lower fees and more projects are migrating there (Uniswap and Synthetix will be on Optimism).

The guy just wanted to buy an album and you have 2 paragraphs full of words no one has heard to explain why he paid over 2x what he was expecting

Not a new argument at all, but its pretty hard to see the layman ever adopting crypto in its current state. And we aren't in the infancy here, we are a decade in.