Fair enough! As a neat entry point into it: the sneaker reseller world is incredibly high tech: the bot platforms make huge amounts of money and have quite good UX these days. Impressive bits of tech, even if I despise what they're used for.
NFTs need support of the big names but they already have better solutions for what they want. Currently NFTs are creating their own set of *mon cards but I don't see why I would want that.
Another example - currently digital games aren't resellable and NFTs could solve that problem. But why would Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft etc want that?
- New brands are created all the time; you don't have to be Nintendo to do so. maybe you get bought be Nintendo after.
- Big brands ultimately still need to go where the customers are.
- What the blockchain gives your digital good is a sense of permanence. This may not matter for an individual purchaser who simply wants to speculate in a hot market, but there would be no such market if the ownership ledger was run by single company. The narrative that these ownership records exists on a blockchain that will survive any particular startup failing underpins the whole thing.
There is also the grading system and you can't really make the card go up in grade, just down.
The whole boom in the 80s really started because boomers came into their prime earning years. When they were kids baseball cards were mostly to put in their bike spokes to make a clicking noise or thrown around so cards in great shape were in short supply. Most importantly though they were not coins or stamps that their parents collected.
I use to listen to a radio show 5 years ago for card collecting that the whole show was basically people calling in and the host telling them the cards were not worth anything.
This past year though is the all time high for sports cards but we already well off the peak.
The problem with NFTs is they came along at the peak of the everything bubble so the prices have nothing to do with reality. Digital collectibles make perfect sense and are no less goofy than anything else people collect.
Not something I would ever buy but ultimately nothing is as goofy as the price of an original Mark Rothko painting. To me that is the gold standard of collectibles and the rationality of the collectibles market.
A piece of thin cardboard changing in value based on a guy hitting more home runs.
Stamps and coins are the WW2 generation version of all this.
Practically everyone has their own personal form of gambling and at the same time everyone believes all the other forms of gambling are foolish.
What I should have said is that it seems a lot of people dismiss NFTs with a certainty that doesn't seem justified considering there are other collectibles like baseball cards without any inherently valuable physical properties that have retained their value long-term.
I honestly don't know anything about the sneaker world besides that it exists, so that shouldn't have been my example.