NFT's - New Economic Frontier?

Post Reply New Topic

On a certain level this seems weird, a bit like an explosion in popularity of something like Second Life thinking but.... the more I think about it, I have to wonder if it's one of the ways in which we're building another abstraction of economic activity on top of what we're already doing in the real world (although Wall Street derivatives, shorts, etc. seem like they might be a few steps out past this).

The question - is it likely that this is going to actually fuel economic growth? Making software or making art and selling it, for example, is an economic activity and this is economic activity at least provisionally for a massive virtual world where it seems like the idea is to create niches.

This raises some interesting questions - like once most people have been replaced in the work place by automation, lets say people are living on stipends, what does economic activity look like? Is it people just buying basic staples, paying for entertainment, etc. or is it also them playing capitalist or venture capitalist in virtual worlds?

https://www.theverge.com/22310188/nft-e ... to-art-faq

Personally as a financial advisor NFTs seem like one big scam to me.You would be much better off dollar cost averageing into a index fund over 40 years than even touching NFTs.Also,NFTs are an example of the greater fool theory.

I'd say that's true unless they find some other utility other than being seen as valuable for the sake of being unique, and it would have be something like several billion people going to Metaverse or some similar place for much of their social and work lives.

At this point I see them more as a curiosity and I wonder if they're indicating a likelihood that we will be creating more virtual space for the sake of in some sense 'spoofing' or at least theoretically trying to generate more areas for economic activity.

Id say NFTs have virtually zero chance at something that has been working for decades in the stock market.The greatest minds cant even beat index funds all the time so I see no reason to believe NFTs are any different.I would choose the stock market every time and 3 times on sunday over NFTs.The stock market is so much better than NFTs because the market has a 300 to 400 year plus record of success.I think young people need to stay away from alternative investments or at least use only play money for it just like a casino at Vegas.Although NFTs could prove as big of a asset class as crypto but even then its just gambling and not a real investment.NFTs seem like a ponzi scheme to me and way too good to be true but hey thats me but I am saying that as a financial advisor.

I think NFTs are here to stay. There is certainly a bubble situation happening right now in financial sector around it, pretty much the same as dotcom bubble, but technology has nothing to do with that. There is nothing fundamentally new about NFTs, we already have thousands of tokens used as proof of ownership or status in our everyday life. This technology is going to become part of our everyday life just like social media and streaming is now.

That may be true and all but if you want to make millions for retirement index funds would be a much safer and virtually guaranteed way to do it.I would not bet the farm on NFTs or put any money whatsoever in any kind of token but maybe its because I just dont feel like I know enough about those things.But I would go with the stock market everytime over NFTs if you want to be a multi-millionaire in 40 to 50 years.I think NFTS are a rip-off for the most part.NFTs are just a casino like Vegas.The stock market is a much safer bet than NFTs and has a 300 to 400 year plus track record.Even if NFTS are a technology that has staying power it prolly wont be as good for making money as a simple index fund not by a long shot.

So much of a thing's fitness for use is classifying it correctly.

For example - chairs are fine for sitting in but they make poor ladders and even worse tea cups. Someone who just needs a tea cup probably wouldn't buy a chair and someone who just needs a ladder shouldn't buy a chair either.

The question I had in my OP - I see Mark Zuckerberg opening up Metaverse and I can see where Second Life'ing the internet could be a shot at creating growth in virtual spaces where we're out of physical territory to colonize. My question is whether virtual space is really anything like adding continents or to what extent the production of value is limited to physical / tangible assets. I note to that last comment that as an electronic musician - DAWs are great in that I have a big rack of synths on my computer not dominating my bedroom. I obviously can't eat a digital production but they have value as much as they have rapid scalability. Seems like the trick is then sniffing out the boundaries to figure out what value cases digital goods can cover, which cases they can't, and both how to keep our P's and Q's aligned as well as knowing what the consequences are if we get confused about perhaps less obvious boundary cases (for example we're unlikely to say 'Let them eat virtual cake!' because the need to put something physical in your stomach is too obvious but there might be other instruments where the tether to physical goods production is slightly less intuitively apparent).

NFT is general purpose technology. What would happen is virtually all large companies would adopt NFTs as part of their business, just like IT and Internet. Things like selling music, games, movies, cars, real estate, stocks will use NFT as underlying technology.

Please forgive me but whats metaverse and second lifing the internet mean?I am confused.I dont think everyone will live in the metaverse.I think we have a lot of the earth left to populate before the whole world is overcrowded because there are still many rural areas of Texas and the U.S. that have not been fully developed and populated but could be.However we will always need the physical world even if a lot of people are living in computers in the metaverse or whatever.I have no interest in second-lifing on the internet but maybe thats just because I am an old soul.I would rather build buildings in the real world and buy ranches and farms in the real world than the cyber world second lifing.I also have no interest in the VR Metaverse of Facebook because I dont trust that corporation.I think they would spy on me even more than they already do if I bought their VR Metaverse thing.

Last edited by Texasmoneyman300 on 09 Nov 2021, 9:00 am, edited 1 time in total.

I dont know much about technology but say I wanted to buy a big ranch or mineral rights or a rent house or a hotel how would NFTS be used theoretically in those transactions.Also how would a discount brokerage use NFts when I buy stocks or index funds?I bet there would still be a lot of small companies that would not adopt NFTS even in the medium or even long-term future potentially.Like I dont see how my company would get any benefit from NFTs so there has to be more companies out there that feel this way at this point.

How do you use distributed relational database systems to buy a big ranch or index funds? This is underlying general purpose technology. This is what banks, real estate agencies, stock exchanges and governments use to keep transaction and ownership records for you. It would be pretty much the same with NFTs for the most part. But at the same time consumer oriented services and marketplaces would emerge offering direct NFT transactions, just like it's happening at the moment with digital art as the most obvious application.

Oh then i guess the only use i would have for digital art in NFTs would be if it had the same tax saving benefits as collecting fine art in real life.

You have a wrong idea of what NFT is. It is not an alternative to "real life" fine art, it is an alternative technology of record keeping and handling transactions. It is used to handle transactions and ownership of fine art too. "traditional" records and transfers of ownership of collectible fine art used as an investment asset are just as "digital" as NFTs. Original paintings rarely change location physically, when you win an auction or buy it from another collector, all that changes is a record in a registry.

Oh okay Maybe I am just ignorant on this issue but I tried reading that article and it said there are versions of fine art or something that are used in the NFT technology.The only way I would buy digital art would be if the federal government gave it the same tax benefits to save a lot on taxes for the rich otherwise I am not interested.I was not speaking about the technological side of it I was talking about NFT digital art as a seperate asset class in the financial sense.

Ok, think I can help here.

Do you have any familiarity with Bret Weinstein's 2014 and onward discussions about the differences between geographic frontiers, technological frontiers, and transfer frontiers?

If not I'll give a quick run-down:

Geographic frontiers - unexploited lands with natural resources that we'd care about. To some degree you have a push for commercializing the inner solar system starting with the moon, mars, trying to mine asteroids, etc. because it's the idea that if we can open that up in a cost-effective manner we might be able to keep Bretton Woods alive and keep the world peaceful through trade.

Technological frontiers - The ability of technology to leverage what resources we have so that we can get more out of them for less or much higher potential value configurations of them.

Transfer frontier - colonialism and pogroms of all sorts. Pretty much whoever can't defend their stuff in the face of superior military or military technology ends up living as serfs or worse under someone who needed their stuff more than they did. This is also what happens as an output of large scale instances of Rene Gerard's 'scapegoating' or what some people have termed on a psychological level 'mass formation', ie. the kind of stuff that gets people detached, isolated, a bit deranged, and willing to run at murderous utopian ideologies if everyone else is doing it - which leads of quite often to pogroms and expropriation of minority groups.


The concern is that Bretton Woods is hitting environmental constraints, that what's worked since the 1970's is running out of room to expand (finite planet and all that), in so many ways the craziness of the past four or five years in part comes from social medial hitting critical mass (Jonathan Haidt) but also it seems like things got a lot crazier after, perhaps almost as a result, of the 2008 crash and where it told us that our post 1980 neoliberalism is at (that we're hanging in that null space that Europe did between WWI and WW2) - to that last point Mark Blyth has talked about the need for a fourth economic system to replace neoliberalism which he said might be something like a Keynesianism 2.0.


So from the above it seems like a lot of our elites would be looking for pressure release valves and distractions to keep the west from going full Lord of the Flies. To some degree 'woke' seemed like it was adopted as this sort of distraction (and even better - the elites could pass themselves off as 'anti-racist' and white-knighting without paying a dime more to the working class or give them any benefits, which makes the their criticisms of rural Republicans 'voting against their own best interests' or 'dying of whiteness' laughable when it's just the pot calling the kettle black).

When I said Second Lifing the internet - I mean exactly that. Second Life is pretty much Metaverse that's been around at least a decade longer, perhaps without VR as part of the core platform (at least when I tried it) but the idea would be to get our lives and concerns, possibly increasing amounts of our economics, brought into a virtual space and doing that as a pessimistic effort to try and get us abstracting our instinctive zero-sum competitiveness into a space where it does less damage and, perhaps more importantly, where some forms of growth could be virtual and you could turn much more of whatever post capitalism / neofeudalism we're headed toward being an endeavor of winning a video game (of sorts - you still have similar jobs, you're just meeting your coworkers in virtual spaces for meetings ).


I don't see myself doing much with Metaverse myself and TBH I don't really get all that switched on by video games either or at least haven't since I was in jr high. At the same time though I notice that I'm a bit of a novelty and that most people - wherever the 'place to be' is for deciding the 'who's who' of who's in or who's out, essentially where the latest, greatest, hottest human pileup for social climbing resides - a really noticeable portion of our population is on that like flies on crap, enough people to shift technologies of that sort from being curiosities to things that you can't opt out of without losing your competitive edge (which means not being able to earn much of an income).


So I'd have to admit that I'm a bit less optimistic about Metaverse folding and dying on contact, or at least if it doesn't someone else within a year or two will figure out how to make it flashy enough to get the desired effect. The question - can online growth actually extend enough value for it to be like adding new continents, particularly when we're in a place where so much of the value that's created has far less to do with factory production and much more to do with high tech gadgets and manipulation of finance. If you want to call that clown world fair, but I could see NFT's doing quite well in clown world.

Oh okay thanks for explaining it to me.I dont understand everything you said exactly but I understood a lot of it.I could even relate some of it to my world and my line of work.I dont know everything about Breton Woods but i dont think a world based on the U.S. dollar being a fiat currency and being the world reserve currency is sustaiable.I think eventually that will end and its gonna be real bad when Breton Woods and the US economic system based on a fiat currency implodes.However I would rather drill 1,000 to 10,000 oil and gas wells in the real world than in the metaverse.