Messing around in cryptocurrency gets you to thinking. It kickstarts the old noggin.
What is value?
One thing that reoccurs to my noggin is the concept of value. When first getting into crypto I asked online for help as to how to explain bitcoin to someone. A response that was received advised to start by talking about money. I thought then that that was an odd response. It was not. As I learned about crypto, I learned that that was a terrific response.
The crux of the "talk about money" explanation, at least in this sense, is that "money" has no value when it's just ink printed on paper. Infinity paper money means no value to that paper. It's a pretty simple concept.
I wrote a while back about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book I read years ago and can't shake from my head. The gist of the post, and book, was that quality matters. The same may be said of value. We each evaluate quality in our own right and assign value accordingly. That book begins with the quote:
“And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good—
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”
We don't need to ask anyone else if that painting has value or not. If we like it, it does. If we don't like it, it still might have value because somebody else likes it.
NFT value and a little NFT story (and a song)
Some recent NFTs I made brought back the idea of value to me. More specifically, value is a subjective thing. Some people will place value on something, others will not. I suppose this is nothing ground-breaking. The old adage, "One man's trash is another man's treasure has been around forever." But, here's the scenario that came to mind for me...
I've enjoyed making NFTs using AtomicHub.io. The endeavor has been entirely for the fun of it and the joy of creativity. For the holiday season, I made up a little song called "Christmas Puppy" | animated music video. No laughing at my singing! I tried.
I gave them away to anyone who offered an address. The supply was initially infinite. Being a bitcoin fan, this bothered me. Infinite supply? Humbug! This isn't fiat currency! I planned to cap the supply on Christmas day (and did, at 76).
A couple of days before Christmas, I went to a Telegram channel that seems to specialize in (1) announcing airdrops and (2) talking jibberish, trash and nonsense about NFTs. Maybe those are in the wrong order, not sure. I posted a link to claim a free NFT. I posted a link to https://nefties.com/puppy for anyone else interested in getting one. The NFT claim link stayed, the web link was immediately deleted by a mod and I was banned for 12 hours for excessively posting something-or-other. I'd published a few similar ones, maybe three or four, over the week prior.
Anyhoo, that's fine. It's their channel, their rules. I'm okay with that. The odd thing to me was at the same time, there was a weird thing going on where people would post suicide memes. Not sure why. Didn't care to read why. Apparently, this was funny (?). Each user tried to post a funnier, more clever meme of a suicide, but a funny suicide so that's okay. Hmm. My post had no value. It was spam. But dem memes had value! Hmm.
Some of my Christmas Puppy NFTs that I'd given away started popping up on the AtomicHub marketplace. People who'd asked for one received one. Most hodled them, some sold them. The pennies began to rake in. The Christmas Puppy eventually sold for 1 solid WAX, about 4 cents! The Christmas Puppy NFT was mooning!
So, whereas one mod saw the NFT as valueless spam to be banned, others saw value to sell and buy.
People are funny.
As a by-the-way, if anyone wants a free NFT, I give them away all the time to get people started. Visit https://nefties.com/start and I'll give you one.
:)