Rarity, by its very nature, cannot be too abundant. The more plentiful it becomes, the more it loses its defining property. There is only one original Mona Lisa, but every NFT project spits out a combinatorial number of images all built from a small number of assets and pretends they are all rare.
Each NFT is indeed unique, but since there are tens of thousands similarly unique NFTs—most or them are not really rare. One could claim that rare paintings are the same—that if NFTs are not rare because there are other NFTs, then by the same logic Mona Lisa should also not be rare because there are other paintings. But the Mona Lisa’s rarity is real, because no other paining is valued like it. The second most valuable painting is The Last Supper is also very rare and valuable—but it’s not the Mona Lisa.
If you try to make the same claim about NFTs—e.g. “Bored Ape #4444 is rare, but it is not Bored Ape #5555”—I’d reply that this claim can be reversed—“Bored Ape #5555 is rare, but it is not Bored Ape #4444″. This doesn’t work for the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper—“The Mona Lisa is rare, but it’s not The Last Supper” doesn’t make sense, because the Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world. The Last Supper is more famous that any painting other than these two, which makes it still very rare and valuable, and while the ordering is not always precise and can vary from evaluator to evaluator, there can usually be a rough estimation of “about <ballpark> other paintings are at least as famous as this one”. The lower that estimation—the more rare and valuable the painting is.
Are there NFTs that are more rare than any other NFT? Probably. But there can’t be that many of them—certainly not as many as the NFT advocators pretend there are.
And this is enough to explain why they are looked down upon, but not enough to explain why they are ridiculed and even hated.
My hypothesis is that the hatred they receive recently is related to Facebook’s big announcement about the metaverse!
Rarity is a finite resource, but that does not mean its total amount is some physical constant. The thing that determines how much rarity there is to split between the rare things is the number of people interested in it, and the amount of resources and attention they are willing to put into that market (that’s, of course, a simplification—because there are many intersecting markets. But it’s good enough for this discussion). In order to get more people into NFTs and increase the value of existing NFTs (assuming the demand increases faster than supply), the NFT investors need to get non-investors into that market.
Facebook coined the term “metaverse”, and changed their name to indicate how serious they are about it, but there is still very little consensus about what exactly the metaverse is going to be. The NFT people sees this as and opportunity—they want to push for metaverse assets to be managed by NFTs. They are already working on profile pictures (how are profile pictures related to the metaverse? Well, we can’t agree what the metaverse is, so could you really say they are not?) to be NFT verified. They want the VR aspects of the metaverse to also be NFTs—so if you get a sword in a game, you get the NFT of it so that it’s registered in the blockchain as yours. Same for virtual land, same for everything else.
And these are all things that people just assumed would be free. Or at least nearly free. And there is no reason for them not to be free. But the NFT guys want you to pay for your virtual things on more computing power for verifying your ownership than the computer power spent on their graphics and physics, just so some other avatar won’t have the same instance of a virtual shirt as your avatar.
This is an obvious scam that people are seeing from miles away—and they are pushing back by attacking NFT and crypto on social networks.
My hypothesis is that the hatred they receive recently is related to Facebook’s big announcement about the metaverse!
The metaverse idea has been around before Facebook changed their name. Neal Stephenson used this name in his 1992 novel Snow Crash. And in the crypto space, this idea existed at least around 01⁄21 - https://www.notboring.co/p/the-value-chain-of-the-open-metaverse, but given that Not Boring is relatively lagging, I wouldn’t be surprised if the ideas that fall under the metaverse label existed months, even years before that post. So Facebook changing its name and the crypto folks using the label “metaverse” are rather coincidental than a planned effort to part users with their money.
And, to your point about “NFT people” trying to extract profit from NFTs, I understand that idea is just the opposite. Right now, content published to platforms like Facebook or Twitter is difficult to extract and transport over. But NFTs exist on some blockchains, which is globally readable—a Twitter or Facebook cannot “lock in” your NFT. They can only build some integrations to enable you to showcase it and show other users that you are the owner, but that’s as far as they can go.
The metaverse idea has been around before Facebook changed their name.
True, but Idan Arye’s point could still be accurate. Facebook isn’t very popular these days and them announcing that they’re heavily investing into an ominous-sounding thing related to NFTs could indeed increase anti-NFT sentiments.
That said, I think NFTs were already hated in some circles before the Facebook announcement. Discord initially announced some NFT extension, but the CEO back-pedalled on it after massive backlash.
Rarity, by its very nature, cannot be too abundant. The more plentiful it becomes, the more it loses its defining property. There is only one original Mona Lisa, but every NFT project spits out a combinatorial number of images all built from a small number of assets and pretends they are all rare.
Each NFT is indeed unique, but since there are tens of thousands similarly unique NFTs—most or them are not really rare. One could claim that rare paintings are the same—that if NFTs are not rare because there are other NFTs, then by the same logic Mona Lisa should also not be rare because there are other paintings. But the Mona Lisa’s rarity is real, because no other paining is valued like it. The second most valuable painting is The Last Supper is also very rare and valuable—but it’s not the Mona Lisa.
If you try to make the same claim about NFTs—e.g. “Bored Ape #4444 is rare, but it is not Bored Ape #5555”—I’d reply that this claim can be reversed—“Bored Ape #5555 is rare, but it is not Bored Ape #4444″. This doesn’t work for the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper—“The Mona Lisa is rare, but it’s not The Last Supper” doesn’t make sense, because the Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world. The Last Supper is more famous that any painting other than these two, which makes it still very rare and valuable, and while the ordering is not always precise and can vary from evaluator to evaluator, there can usually be a rough estimation of “about <ballpark> other paintings are at least as famous as this one”. The lower that estimation—the more rare and valuable the painting is.
Are there NFTs that are more rare than any other NFT? Probably. But there can’t be that many of them—certainly not as many as the NFT advocators pretend there are.
And this is enough to explain why they are looked down upon, but not enough to explain why they are ridiculed and even hated.
My hypothesis is that the hatred they receive recently is related to Facebook’s big announcement about the metaverse!
Rarity is a finite resource, but that does not mean its total amount is some physical constant. The thing that determines how much rarity there is to split between the rare things is the number of people interested in it, and the amount of resources and attention they are willing to put into that market (that’s, of course, a simplification—because there are many intersecting markets. But it’s good enough for this discussion). In order to get more people into NFTs and increase the value of existing NFTs (assuming the demand increases faster than supply), the NFT investors need to get non-investors into that market.
Facebook coined the term “metaverse”, and changed their name to indicate how serious they are about it, but there is still very little consensus about what exactly the metaverse is going to be. The NFT people sees this as and opportunity—they want to push for metaverse assets to be managed by NFTs. They are already working on profile pictures (how are profile pictures related to the metaverse? Well, we can’t agree what the metaverse is, so could you really say they are not?) to be NFT verified. They want the VR aspects of the metaverse to also be NFTs—so if you get a sword in a game, you get the NFT of it so that it’s registered in the blockchain as yours. Same for virtual land, same for everything else.
And these are all things that people just assumed would be free. Or at least nearly free. And there is no reason for them not to be free. But the NFT guys want you to pay for your virtual things on more computing power for verifying your ownership than the computer power spent on their graphics and physics, just so some other avatar won’t have the same instance of a virtual shirt as your avatar.
This is an obvious scam that people are seeing from miles away—and they are pushing back by attacking NFT and crypto on social networks.
The metaverse idea has been around before Facebook changed their name. Neal Stephenson used this name in his 1992 novel Snow Crash. And in the crypto space, this idea existed at least around 01⁄21 - https://www.notboring.co/p/the-value-chain-of-the-open-metaverse, but given that Not Boring is relatively lagging, I wouldn’t be surprised if the ideas that fall under the metaverse label existed months, even years before that post. So Facebook changing its name and the crypto folks using the label “metaverse” are rather coincidental than a planned effort to part users with their money.
And, to your point about “NFT people” trying to extract profit from NFTs, I understand that idea is just the opposite. Right now, content published to platforms like Facebook or Twitter is difficult to extract and transport over. But NFTs exist on some blockchains, which is globally readable—a Twitter or Facebook cannot “lock in” your NFT. They can only build some integrations to enable you to showcase it and show other users that you are the owner, but that’s as far as they can go.
True, but Idan Arye’s point could still be accurate. Facebook isn’t very popular these days and them announcing that they’re heavily investing into an ominous-sounding thing related to NFTs could indeed increase anti-NFT sentiments.
That said, I think NFTs were already hated in some circles before the Facebook announcement. Discord initially announced some NFT extension, but the CEO back-pedalled on it after massive backlash.