What Most Critics Miss About NFTs: The Participants Are Non-Fungible Too

These are early days in the march towards a truly user-owned internet, and it is quite normal that the critical building blocks of such an effort (in this case, NFTs) get misunderstood and criticized quite a bit. Here is one perspective to help NFT critics see the light.

Who pays 69 Million dollars for a gif that you can download on the Internet? How about 2.9 Million dollars for a tweet? Even if you knock off a few zeros from these numbers to discount for bubble-time behavior, it is impossible to miss the signal here – this has all the makings of something huge. Or does it?

In most cases. the buyers of these non-fungible tokens do not even get to own the copyright of the artifact in question. There is also no direct way to monetize these purchases at the moment, and not all of them fall under the ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ bucket – particularly since what is being bought, is basically ‘digital certificates of authenticity’  – surely it would take quite a bit of imagination to see beauty in 0s and 1s, right?

So here is the perspective that might clarify things a bit – the user-owned internet magnifies the fact that the participants – which is all of us – buyers, sellers and middlemen – are basically non-fungible. We are all unique in our own ways, and, critically, that includes what we value and how we value them. Unlike other markets where a lot of analysis can be done with ‘buyers’ and ‘sellers’ as groups, with the user-owned internet, it is impossible to group the participants in any way that would facilitate such analysis. Every single participant is unique, and more importantly, for the vast majority of transactions, unlike other markets, mostly represent individual interests alone (DAOs are the exception). This, coupled with the fact that our digital lives will soon just become our lives overall, should help the NFT critics see the light.

If you can imagine a world where you wake up, look at your fungible portfolio (stocks, currencies etc) and your non-fungible portfolio (your NBA topshots collection, that Elon Musk tweet etc) – complete with performance stats (returns in the case of fungible, and revenue / interest indicators – video views / bids in the case of non-fungible) and extrapolate that to the whole world – each with their own non-fungible portfolio, based on their own interests (Chess NFTs / Recipe NFTs / Movie Moment NFTs..) – you will see the light. We are all unique – we are all non-fungible!