Looking beyond appearances to the essence, NFT is not mysterious

Looking beyond appearances to the essence, NFT is not mysterious

The content of this article mainly contains my understanding and thoughts on NFT.

I personally simply categorize the currently popular NFTs into:

NFT Project Tokens

NFT Games

DEFI+NFT Mining

NFT Artwork

NFT project tokens are the easiest to understand and participate in. Recently, the NFT sector has soared. NFT games include development games like CryptoKitties, and the recently released "Demon Slayer" that draws blind boxes and collects cards. The most eye-catching and the one we don't quite understand is probably NFT art. Every time the news comes out, the transaction volume of hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars attracts people's attention.

For example, some time ago, American art collector Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile sold a 10-second video created by digital artist Beeple for US$6.6 million; the NFT version of Rainbow Cat was sold at a high price of US$580,000; the highest bid for the NFT auction of Twitter CEO's first tweet is currently US$2.5 million; NFT collectors spent a total of US$255 million to purchase wonderful video clips of NBA stars.

Every time this kind of news pops up, I can't help but ask: Why! How can it be sold so expensively?

These two days I have been thinking and understanding, slowly connecting it with real life, and it seems that I have found the direction of understanding.

NFT Artwork: The essence is art, and the form of expression is NFT

Is it the artwork that got on the NFT train, or is it NFT that got on with the artwork? In the final analysis, NFT artworks are essentially art, and their form of expression (carrier) is NFT technology.

My rough understanding is: "Mona Lisa's Smile" was originally painted on paper, and now NFT technology is used to "paint" it in the virtual world, forming an "NFT version of "Mona Lisa's Smile"" that cannot be touched but can be seen.

If you can understand why the "Mona Lisa Smile" is so valuable in real life, I think you must also understand why the price of the NFT version of the artwork is so amazing.

Art is priceless, but artworks are priced. Art is a niche, and NFT artworks are a niche among niches. Maybe not everyone can understand or accept why an NFT artwork can be sold at such a high price, but it does not prevent some people from being willing to pay for it, and some people are willing to speculate on such a high price. I pay for my preferences, which is a consumption behavior and also a value investment behavior.

Of course, I think price and value are two different things. I don’t know how much investment value there is if the hype exceeds the value of the item itself.

NFT Artwork: Did I buy a work of art or ownership?

Someone in the chat group said before that if I saved the Rainbow Cat emoji package that sold for millions, wouldn’t that be like getting millions for free? What’s the difference between the artwork I saved and the artwork in the hands of collectors who paid for it?

The core of our doubts and misunderstandings is whether these works reproduced by screenshots or copying digital files are the same as the original works?

I naively thought that this was the same as the "Mona Lisa Smile" that I bought on Taobao for 50 yuan. What I own is just a copy, and it does not have the value of the original painting.

But a big shot raised another question: Are the NFT artworks on the chain just different in numbers?

In real life, genuine and fake products are identified by age, materials, craftsmanship and other techniques. However, there are no such differences in NFT artworks. For these intangible artworks, do the owners only get a proof of ownership? Then think about a question: Can NFT artworks fully realize the value of artworks?

According to a news report by Lianwen, the original work "Morons" by street artist Banksy was sold by a group of crypto artists for about US$100,000 and then burned, and then made into an NFT.

This is very subtle. Originally, "I own this work and am the unique owner of this work. I can appreciate, touch or show this work to others alone." However, NFT turns this artwork into "I am the owner of ownership (this work is the only proof of authenticity)".

Summarize

After some thought, the NFT field is not so mysterious and difficult to understand to me.

The technology is new, but the things in the NFT field are more likely to be integrated with reality. It can be said that compared with other NFTs, it is the most closely integrated with reality and the most practical, just like the virtual 2.0 version of the real world. As a person in the cryptocurrency circle, I personally think that we cannot simply apply the same approach to cryptocurrency speculation to NFT. As for how to make this sector hot and make money, there is now a simple and crude way: an eye-catching price.