NFTs and me: Still waiting for the sunlight to hit my face

Try as I may, I don’t think I will ever truly get NFTs. Of course, I’m not saying the tech eludes me, because that isn’t necessarily the case. It’s more that I struggle to see the value proposition of them sometimes.

There’s a guy living inside my head who likes to remind me that I don’t have to understand the value proposition of something for that something to be valuable. He’s right, I know he is. But there’s this other voice that always dominates, a voice that sings “it makes no sense” on repeat.

Some of you might know today was an important event for the Wax community. An event known as NFTopia. Honestly, I wanted to check it out, mostly out of curiosity. I was hoping that it would click, that I’d listen to someone talk about NFTs and suddenly the clouds would part, and sunlight would finally hit my face. But it never happened.

Add to my confusion the disappointment of not making it to see Hive account@crimsonclad do her magic, simply because UTC still throws me off. I spent about an hour wandering around the VR world, looking at posters—at least I think they were posters—and scratching my head.

“Are these games?” I’d often ask myself, before moving on to the next poster of something that reminded me of Plants vs. Zombies.

In my defense, I’m not a gamer. My first console was an Atari, and although I loved games growing up, I seem to have quit them for one reason or another. It’s not that I hate them, don’t get me wrong, but more that I can’t stand the guilt of spending so much time “enjoying” leisure. Is that telling?

At any rate, a few hours went by, and I went back into the VR world to see if I’d find something—anything—I could relate to. I came out empty-handed.

I will admit, the man singing and playing guitar on the screen in the back was doing a pretty good job, and that I did enjoy. But the rest of the conversations made very little sense to me.

Maybe it’s the fact that I’m not a content creator, not really. I have plenty to say, and I punish this blog of mine with my rants almost daily, but I’m not “an entertainer” so to speak. Ironic, to be honest, since I did perform on stages for a long time. But that’s not connected to what we’re talking about here. Online content creation is a whole different story.

The end of the day approaches, and here I am—still unable to grasp the value of NFTs, just like the first time I wrote about them six years ago (possibly). If Hive account@nonameslefttouse was still around, he’d probably tell me again about the connection between creator and audience, and I’d probably agree. A few days would pass, and then I’d stumble across a poop emoji minted on WAX—or Zora, for that matter—with a valuation in the double digits. All the “work,” all the “understanding,” would collapse as if a house of cards met a gust of wind.

At any rate, I think NFTopia was a success. Plenty of people seemed to enjoy their time and possibly even walked away with valuable tokens. I, on the other hand, never understood what one was supposed to do with all the wallet addresses that kept popping up in the chat.

All that’s left for me to do is laugh it off.

I’m simply aged out.

MenO