NFTs Are Valuable and Should Be Treated As Such
NFT from the “Bored Ape Yacht Club”. Credit to forbes.com.
If you have been on the internet in the past five years, chances are that you have heard of cryptocurrency. And if you have been on the internet in the past eleven months, then you’ve probably heard about NFTs. Now if you haven’t, an NFT is a non-fungible-token which essentially means that you have this file/jpeg/png that you alone own. I think that NFTs do hold value, despite what most people might tell you.
In 2017, (sadly) after bitcoin jumped from $3,000 to $20,000 my brother and I invested in a GPU mining rig. If you don't understand what that is, it's essentially using a bundle of graphics cards and dedicating it to a company for their use to which they provide bitcoin in return. The reason a company would want to do this is because if they have to render large amounts of information/graphics heavy stuff, then they would pay people like me instead of building a huge server farm. Essentially, they pay people like me to lease my computer for power.
NFT's are just a picture that you can screenshot. It's thousands of dollars on a picture of a monkey that doesn't necessarily hold real value. While at least cryptocurrency is backed by USD in some cases, NFT's are backed by cryptocurrency. This puts NFTs in a spot where there is more factors than just its own market, rather, it also depends on the fluctuation of cryptocurrency. This makes buying an NFT way too big of a risk for little to no reward in just holding onto it as a token of sorts.
The biggest criticism of the whole process is obviously that anyone has the ability to just snipping tool an NFT then boom, now you have the same picture too. The problem with that is with people who don’t realize what the block chain is. There’s a record of every owner of the NFT leading up to the current holder. With this, if I had a screenshot of an NFT that is worth millions of dollars then tried to sell it, you can easily see on the blockchain who actually owns the picture. Think of it like taking a picture of the Mona Lisa. Sure, you have a picture of the Mona Lisa but you don’t own it.
While NFTs are relatively new, I think that's what makes them all the more valuable. For example, take an early on NFT such as a CryptoPunk, one of the first collections to rise to hundreds of thousands of dollars. At first, they weren't selling for much more than $30-$40, but now, some have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. This means that the early you get it, the more value it will hold in the future.
“NFT art by a teenager.” Credit to TIME.com
Another part of NFTs that hold value would be that they can come in many different forms. While most people think that NFTs are exclusively artwork, they can be different things such as tokens, tickets, and even MP3 files. The value in this can be found in whatever the owner of the NFT sees in it. For instance, the band Slipknot sold NFTs that were audio bits and teasers for their upcoming album. The value in this can be seen easily through whoever wants it. It's the electronic equivalent of buying a demo tape of the album. Even older bands such as Megadeth sold NFTs, one of which sold for a whopping $18K.
What we are living through is just the start of something greater. I predict that NFTs will, in some small way, become a part of everybody's lives through mediums such as tickets, files, artwork, and even gaming objects. But it's all subjective, so saying that NFTs don't hold value doesn't make much sense when it can hold value in the minds of others.
If you are the person who regrets not getting into cryptocurrency when it first came out, you should invest in them now while it's in the earliest stages. NFTs may be a part of everyone's life soon, in the form of any kind of ticket to ANY event, so why not get familiar with it now and be ahead of the curve before everyone else. Go onto websites such as OpenSea.io, Rarible.com, or Foundation.app, and check it out for yourself.