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0 pointsnyc_data_geek13mo ago0 comments

Having been bullish on NFTs, which were never more than hype in the primary use case promulgated for them, is absolutely a strong argument against having good intuition of breakthrough innovation. It demonstrates an inability to differentiate between hype and utility.

NFT's for real estate ownership, container tracking etc. could still have some form of utility. But what people think of when they hear NFT's isn't that, it's shitty monkey jpg's.

NFT's were never the next big thing, except for a very specific subset of very gullible idiots.

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PaulDavisThe1st3mo ago

> Having been bullish on NFTs, which were never more than hype in the primary use case promulgated for them, is absolutely a strong argument against having good intuition of breakthrough innovation.

I always thought that NFTs were completely ridiculous and essentially nothing but hype. But then again, I thought that amazon wasn't going to work either, when I was there building it, so I'm not sure that even in a given individual "good intuition for breakthrough innovation" is a unitary thing.

jacquesm3mo ago

That's a good point. I've had the same: I lost a bet on HN for a hundred bucks that Facebook would never break a billion in revenues. I - mistakenly - thought people would not be so stupid as to hand over their private lives to the likes of Mark Zuckerberg. But they did.

NFTs are just as stupid, if not more so and this time at least it looks like sanity prevailed. But the problem is more complex than just boolean 'made' or 'fail', and I think that's where the investment angle comes in. Investors bet on 'the next wave' all the time. And NFTs looked to the clueless as much as 'the next wave' as mobile phones or the transistor did at some point in time. The big differentiator to me is whether or not a thing like that requires a belief system or not. If it does then I don't give it much chance. But then we have all of crypto as a counterexample and quite a few people got stupidly rich peddling that.

rchaud3mo ago

NFTs followed the exact same path as crypto, which many predicted would happen. Crypto became a speculative asset traded on exchanges because it was too volatile and transaction-cost heavy to ever be used as a medium of exchange. NFTs being crypto-based were soon descended upon by finance bros and scammers who saw the opportunity for a quick buck, eliminating any possibility to develop it for utilitarian things like house deeds and concert tickets or whatever.

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