Beanie Babies, Baseball Cards, Comic Books all had period of rampant speculation whos markets were destroyed once people who "invested" tried to turn their assets back into cash. Hobbyists just suffer through these periods.

Anecdote time, I was at an Xmas party and people were talking about what crypto they were investing in. I said I speculated a bit, then got spooked and got my money out of Crypto.com. (which wasn't easy). This got everyone interested, they had no idea how to turn their Crypto back to dollars. The market is going up, because there's a one way flow of money.

For many people, NFTs are also a hobby not an investment. You just hear about the investors because they are the loudest.

> NFTs are also a hobby not an investment. You just hear about the investors because they are the loudest.

Or the only voice, because no one else is interested in looking at a hash for fun. The real artwork is easily digitally duplicated and so if your hobby was to look at the art, you do not need to purchase the NFT.

Spending a few dollars on NFT "ownership" is worth it to me to have my name next to something, just like spending $10 on a League of Legends skin is worth it to some people to have their name next to a piece of artwork in a video game.

I am literally interested in looking at a hash for fun, since it shows up online in NFT viewers with a little picture of it in my account. $10 is such a small amount of money to me, if I didn't spend it on an NFT then I may have bought a CS:GO skin or hypothetically some Candy Crush lollipop hammers, spent it at the arcade or put it into a slot machine or something. The NFT sparks better conversation.

That's before getting into the fact that if I buy an independently drawn NFT, that $10 doubles as a donation to help support the artist's work, and the NFT becomes public proof that I helped financially support the artist.

You can also spend money and get a star named after you. I suppose you could assign an NFT to the stellar coordinates and sell the stars as well.

Not only could you sell stars as well, you could sell the same star on multiple chains!

I'd totally buy a star NFT sold by God, which is the correct equivalent.

And how would you verify that the address the NFT is sign with belongs to god?

I would presume God would find a way to make his intentions clear, maybe through his earthly agents in his church.

If you are concerned that this would need to happen off-chain, and I would need to trust my channel to God NFT launch announcement, then you are of course correct, but note that is is not a slight on NFTs.

NFTs are conceptually no different than the "Google Digital Art Marketplace", except people are less concerned it will be shutdown in two years.

so NFTs are Candy Crush lollipops, but not attached to a particular game?

That's probably the weakest of my examples, since lollipop hammers are at least valuable for their utility within a video game.

I would think of art NFTs as more like character or weapon skins - completely useless except that it's visually appealing and you can show off your "ownership" of it to other people within the game. With art NFTs, the "game" so far is just NFT viewing tools, social media profile pics, etc.

Actually, premium Steam profile borders might be an even more apt analogy, since they aren't tied to any game and are also useful solely for vanity.

Of course, then you have NFTs that actually do represent usable in-game items like with Axie Infinity or Gods Unchained, but that's an adjacent topic.

I know people who made a decent living from sneaker trading though.

you can make a decent living in all kinds of nonsense if you can either find a way to predict collective mood swings or just get lucky. with millions of people scheming at blockchain stuff there will be thousands getting lucky over and over thinking they are smart

But at what point do we qualify something/someone as “smart”? I’d argue that someone that’s getting lucky over and over again are clearly on to something. As the saying goes: “You create your own luck”.

> But at what point do we qualify something/someone as “smart”?

That's a good point. We can only give our guess based on what we know. For example, people regarded Alan Greenspan as "smart" before 2008. I now think he is an idiot at best and a horrible, malicious person at worst (the truth is probably somewhere in between). Maybe things will change in a few decades and people will then recognize him as "smart" again? It is pretty silly trying to predict the future.

> I’d argue that someone that’s getting lucky over and over again are clearly on to something. As the saying goes: “You create your own luck”.

I present Sir Isaac Newton as a counterexample. Clearly a smart person but just because someone is smart does not mean he was right about everything. In fact, we know now that his nonsensical "work" with alchemy killed him. I am positive that this fad will fail. I am just annoyed that now the name web3 is taken by this nonsense.

People made good money selling Beanie Babies, Baseball Cards and other fads... at the beginning of those.

Most of the entertainment industry is about predicting collective mood swings.

Yeah I grew up in the hood and some of the more successful people from my area started their financial life by sneaker trading.

Same. Know a handful of ppl making well into 6 figures a year selling on StockX.