Speaker 0
0:00 – 4:28
The two criticisms from the right that, you know, I can just copy and paste the JPEG and on the left saying that NFTs create scarcity are both correct and incorrect. The NFT is a representation of the piece of media, and that part is commodified blockchain, which you can buy and sell if you are the owner most of the time. So it doesn't it creates scarcity, not in the media itself because you can always copy and paste that media if you have a link to it, but it creates scarcity of the space next to that piece of media where the name or the public address of the owner should be. So the actual piece of media, like, the the idea or the concept itself isn't commodified. It still keeps the same Internet form that we're used to in Web two point o. There is no way to enforce that someone does not copy and paste the JPEG or whatever piece of media that you're holding onto this IPFS site. However, there is scarcity in that there can be only one person who is able to put their name onto the space next to that piece of media. So whenever Varoufakis, Lee Carter, and all the others say that NFTs are commodifying? The answer is a lot more complicated. It's it's yes and no, and it really depends on the design because you can also make it, you know, you can you can link the non fungible token to, for example, a physical good, which is actually, becoming a lot more popular with luxury brands. But that luxury brand, that that, like, luxury good, you know, a Louis Vuitton purse or something like that, you you can have, like, a claim that you own this because you own the NFT. The scarcity is already there in the physical product, in this Louis Vuitton bag. You are just mimicking the physical form of the Louis Vuitton bag into a digital space by using the blockchain, which you could otherwise not be able to do without some sort of very, very strict centralized legal authority. But then there's the other question there's the other thing that why do people still want to purchase these NFTs? Like, what is the the benefit? And, of course, the the biggest sort of benefit is just like flexing when it comes to the crypto art. It's just being able to say that, hey, that's my public address. That's my name. That's right next to this piece of media that you can find to in the link in the IPFS that I own. And so in order to get someone to sort of fetishize the art itself or that piece of media itself, the artist needs to sell that media onto a platform. And so now it begins to mimic almost exactly what is already a thing that happens today, in that social networks and relationships become fundamental to NFTs. Whereas as compared to, like, cryptocurrencies, they only require cryptocurrencies only require that someone accepts that particular cryptocurrency and that they, you know, believe into the future of that cryptocurrency that later they will be able to spend it. NFTs require that the artist needs to create some sort of audience and needs to create some sort of desire for collectors to want to own that piece of art because they think, you know, in the future maybe it'll be worth, more because they like the work of the artist. Or they just like the work of the artist so much that they want to be a patron and make sure that the artist is paid for their work in in some sort of way. There's a couple of different reasons why someone may be interested in purchasing an NFT, particularly in in crypto art. So it's a slightly different variation of the need for a type of social system, which is very antithetical to the, like, extreme anarcho capitalist libertarian view of extreme individuality and, like, the desire or belief to not need any sort of social networks in order to, like, survive, and that's why they hit the government and that and so depending on how loose of a definition we want to use for for tokens, in a sense, like, everything is an NFT. It's just that the standards that have been adopted by the industry, in particular in Ethereum, have allowed for the mass proliferation of NFTs to make it easier to mint an NFT in a form that is easy for people to understand and for web applications to pull information from.