A commonly cited success story of NFTs is CryptoPunks. They were 10,000 uniquely generated pixel art avatars released on the blockchain for free. They’ve since become a hugely sought after item with market prices greater than $7MM.
I didn’t understand what’s going on until hearing Kevin Rose and Aftab Hossain talk about collecting them—these are Star Wars action figure collectors sharing their passion for buying the digital equivalent of a Rocket Firing Boba Fett.
It’s far more endearing to think of NFT enthusiasts as Star Wars action figure collectors.
See also:
- CryptoPunks prove that NFTs provide digital scarcity because there is a market (buyers and sellers).
- Web3 as weaponized Star Wars action figure collectors is an interesting dystopian angle.
- Bitcoin and Ethereum use the same amount of electricity as the country of Austria whereas those tiny Star Wars action figures were a one time plastic. The difference in relative pollution curves might match the difference in price ($150,000 for the most rare Star Wars toy, $7MM for the most rare CryptoPunk).
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Search Engines Grind Increasingly Fine
The abundance of stuff—both online and offline—means that every conceivable niche is available to everyone. Search engines are niche machines that are increasingly sophisticated at directing attention to these fine grained interests.