Thread by @alexisohanian

Had a call w a very smart investor who dismissed NFTs, trading cards, collectibles as Beanie Babies + I nearly fell out of my chair, but I get it, if you're not tuned into the power of culture (esp internet culture) this all looks like a fad, a blip. I need to do a video on this.

and FWIW those Beanie Babies are still worth something... but yes, the supply massively outpaced the demand + cultural value...

mentalfloss.com/article/573674…

"But what about all those worthless NFTs being created? Most of those are going to go to zero."

Yes, I agreed, 99.999% are going to be worthless. But 99.999% of ALL paper is worthless, but the medium isn't flawed, it just hasn't got art from Picasso on it.

The projects that matter will retain value in the long-term -- the internet as a culture machine + community connector creates a potential audience that is much, much bigger than beanie babies, which were the project (e.g. Bored Apes). "Stuffed Animals" were the medium.

Basically, if you didn't understand (or got mad about) why Supreme makes as much money as they do from shirts last decade... you're probably going to miss this, too. But this is a FAR more functional medium than shirts or stuffed animals or paper, because it's programmable

I wrote this 2 years ago, trying to convince folks that when NFTs hit gaming, it would change everything (now we have seen @SorareHQ @AxieInfinity generate an ROI for gamers we've never seen before)

medium.com/initialized-ca…

Loads of people would email me if one of these awards didn't show up on time in their trophy case on their @reddit profile. I created trophies as a way to game-ify + motivate ppl to post on Reddit when karma scores got too high. I didn't realize they'd become STATUS.

And that's when it clicked for me - I even hired a contractor to ship a very janky version of a Snoo avatar generator in 2007 to allow redditors to feel even more of a connection to our community + platform: chir.ag/alien/

Lesson for me there is I should've resurrected it as soon as ETH launched. My mistake.

If you're having fun, empowered, and earning real value you can feed your family with, the stakes become 100x higher for you to actually switch to another game. Consider how amazing it'd have to be

https://twitter.com/Jihoz_Axie/status/1440790217204457474

This is just the start and there will be lots of ups and downs along the way, but the next decade looks very bright for Web3. Keep building, my friends.