Thread by @Santiag78758327

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) as Peak Property Rights

1/ Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has afforded humans the idea of claims on digital abstractions as property rights on the internet. I can purchase ETH or XRP or any other digital asset & the double spend is protected.

2/ What we are really talking about is the careful accounting of shared states in distributed databases so that consensus is arrived at & disagreements are precluded. This naturally lends itself to the concept of property rights as those are conflict resolution concepts.

3/ Global society has been on a secular trajectory with the advent of technology & the expansion of private property rights towards the pinnacle of those two concepts (peak in the sense of ultimate expression not moral judgement of good/bad). Started with currency, an abstraction

4/ By keeping careful track of shared state the concept of digital scarcity is simulated. The natural intuition is to reject this scarcity with the simple premise that information theory suggests duplication at low costs negates the idea of scarcity.

5/ If we recognize that money is an abstraction of value expression, art an abstraction of emotional expression & world view, & digital assets expressions of code, we realize that they are all interoperable expressions of our value sets.

6/ The arguments behind why BTC is scarce apply to NFTs, there is a cryptographic consensus that the market utilizes to recognize the property rights of an individual on a claim to an abstraction. This is obviously absurd at face value because property rights are absurd.

7/ Humanity has reached the pinnacle of the absurdity of property rights by extending the legal framework in meat-space (to keep ourselves from killing each other for scarce resources) to code enforced digital abstractions infinitely reproducible. The value is in the claim stupid

8/ So if cash / fiat are abstractions of societal consensus around value, ETH is a code abstraction around digital value, NFTs an abstraction around artistic monetization, who are we to critique the absurdity if the markets / laws / code deem it so?

9/ The real critique of NFTs isn't the obvious absurdity of reproducible bits, it's the distillation of our societal values around property rights brought to their logical conclusion in relation to other abstractions. Trading $ -> ETH -> NFT is one "reductio ad absurdum".

10/ Well, "The Mona Lisa is real-world tangible form of art that has clear value! Not NFTs!". I would retort by stating that the Mona Lisa is an abstraction expressed by Leonardo Da Vinci using the technology available at the time, brushes, canvases,... to portray emotive intent.

11/ The Mona Lisa is no more real a human being with a tantalizing expression than the atomic colorations of the pigments, she is a construction in our mind that society has since conditioned us to consider valuable for posterity, e.g. via consensus.

12/ It is therefore both condescending & anachronistic to critique NFTs on the merits of the medium rather than on the subjective merits of artistic talent (which ultimately the market distills into a monetary value via supply/demand).

13/ The real critique here isn't around NFTs, it's about the distillation of human expression of art, a divine engine, into the baseness of transactions, stores of value, & supply/demand. As a pragmatic investor, I'll be happy to buy/sell NFTs for profit.

14/ I wouldn't do so because I believe they truly are scarce, because it's the claims stupid, but because there is market for those like a market for any other abstraction (stocks, cash, bonds, etc.). We are in the endgame now & it shows.