A Beginner's Map for Getting Started with NFTs

Resources and my takeaways after a week of diving deep in the NFT space.

In the past week I tried to get answers to these questions :

• Are NFTs similar to other collectibles, say, paintings?

• Do you get the same rights from owning an NFT as from a painting?

• What things can be NFTs?

Takeaways

In the past week, I learnt that:

1. NFT adds artificial scarcity to the otherwise digitally abundant information on the internet. It is like a tradeable unique place on a public blockchain that is associated with a specific piece of data like an image, video or code that is freely available on the web.

   Think of it as a geeky implementation of bragging rights or a way to channel financial support from fans to artists.

2. The way the NFT space is evolving is similar to how collectible comics were faring in the 90's, the latter eventually turning out to be a bubble.

3. Currently, NFT prices are led by crypto millionaires.

Resources

1. NFTs: Redefining Digital Ownership and Scarcity

   A great non-nerdy explanation of what NFTs are and how can they potentially impact digital artists.

   Scarcity is notoriously difficult online. Content flows too freely; it is too easily copied, replicated, shared, and distributed. [...] Perhaps most detrimental, it has made it harder for people and would-be collectors to value digital art in a similar way we value physical art.

2. What the NFT World Can Learn From the Great ’90s Comic Book Bubble. (It’s a Cautionary Tale) :

   This article provides a great summary of the comic book bubble and how the NFT space is moving similarly.

   Most experts will tell you not to buy art for profit, but for passion, because it’s almost impossible to predict what society will value in 5 years, let alone 30 or 50. That’s why it’s dangerous that the NFT boom has people thinking the “money is the art.”

3. The Gray Market: How Deep-Pocketed Crypto-Collectors Are Rushing Into an Old Art-Market Trap:

   As happened during the Japanese real estate bubble when wealthy Japanese shot up art prices, one of the main reasons why NFTs are being sold for insane prices is due to a few crypto wealthy people outbidding each other.

   Christie’s also noted after the sale that 91 percent of participating bidders(in the Beeple's Everydays sale) were new to the house.

Rabbit holes

These are the 3 topics/websites/tools/people that I often came across in my research. These might be worth getting into during another later week:

1. Cryptokitties

   This was the first widely popular game that at a time accounted for more than 10% of all ethereum transactions. The virtual kitties on the game are designed as NFTs.

2. Virtual worlds(Cryptovoxels, Decentraland)

   NFTs have application in buying and selling virtual pieces of land/parcels, buildings, objects and like in these worlds. It would be interesting to read about what such projects promise and how are they faring.

3. Metakovan

   He is the person who bought Beeple's Everydays: The First 5000 Days for $69.3 million. He has founded the crypto fund Metapurse. One of its projects is B20 where it has bundled a bunch of other NFTs created by Beeple along with a virtual world museum and tokenised their ownership into the B20 tokens.

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   Thanks for reading. Best of luck.😃

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