NFTs are a bubble, and that's a good thing.

Bill Gates never said that 640KB of memory was sufficient for everyone's needs, but that statement remains in everyone's mind. It was factually true when said: no one had any idea what to do with so much computing power.

We carry around powerful computers. Our phones are able to do more than our PCs were able to do a decade ago, and that's with a smaller footprint, less power consumption and nicer interfaces. But have our requirements changed during these ten years? Most people use their phone and PC for social interaction, drafting documents and some light gaming. The purpose has not changed, only the interface.

And that's why NFTs matter. NFTs, or "Non Fungible Tokens" are works represented on a blockchain, which are traded over some kind of platform. These may be either works of digital art, sold to the highest bidder, or digital representations of distributed registries that allow trading or using them over a set blockchain.

Currently, most of the NFT craze is based on the sale of digital artwork. Projects like the Creative Commons Collection at OpenSea are traded for substantial amounts. People going after the NFT craze and speculate that two things: (i) NFT prices are tied to the Ether price (or the price of other blockchains that manage the token; and (ii) In general, artwork prices tend to outperform the S&P500.

CC0 Michael Prado

There are, of course, two problems. The art indices do not include things like drawings made by kindergarten children drawing stuff for their friends or doodles that people make; they represent high-end, valuable, paintings made by people who made the cut. The risk in buying art by an unknown artist as an investment (and not because you like it) is as high as investing in penny stocks, if not higher.

Now, there's a reason people invest in NFTs; and none of them are that They missed the bitcoin and ethereum craze and believe that NFTs are the next best thing; They don't have money to buy actual homes, so they buy virtual ones in hope of selling them one day and buying a real one; They can't afford artwork and don't have a home they own to display it. It's the whole "millennials don't have homes because they eat avocado toast". It's not true.

People buy NFTs because they like them. I want to believe that no one in their right mind would actually buy an NFT because they think it's a great investment. We got so used to buying virtual stuff, that owning just a "virtual" item is not as virtual as it was once. We don't buy physical music records, just the files (and in some cases, not even "buy", but stream); we don't buy computer games, just a virtual file. In that game we buy virtual assets. We have virtual friends that we never met, and have virtual assets. Why wouldn't someone own virtual art?

(Adi Galili drew me, 1996)

And here's where the problem lies. Virtual art is reproducible. The mere fact that someone can just press copy and paste the art into another realm and steal our artwork might mean that it's worthless; but that's not true. We live in a world that stolen or copied works of art are there; they have their own market. The reptime community at reddit values "replica" (fake) watches; people buy copies of the Mona Lisa printed on T-Shirts.

Art has value; and it's the joy that art brings to our life.

Now, back to the Bubble.

NFTs have taught us one thing: there's a use case for applications on the blockchain. It started with the ICO craze of 2017, the NFT craze came in 2021, and hopefully more applications would be developed. We're in 1980 and a virtual nonexistent Bill Gates says that the Ether blockchain has no uses because it's only used for NFTs and ICOs. That's where we are.

We have the world's most powerful computing network. It keeps upgrading every day. We can use it for whatever we imagine. Just imagine harder.