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Would be cool to have some sort of well defined "bubble-mania-meter" but it is unfortunately quite subjective.

The role of scarcity is something interesting to consider as input. Scarcity (perceived or actual) is more natural with tulips or anything that is a tangible, real object.

NFT's tortured way of creating "digital scarcity" sets them, imho, apart from other bubbles. Given how much of modern life revolves around digital they are probably the forerunner of much worse to come.



Scarcity of paintings is almost completely artificial and their value rests on so-called provenance just as it does with NFTs.


> almost completely

strange but true, scarcity comes in different sizes. Is the infinity of NFT's the same as that of paintings? How many types of infinite junk are there? Or is this infinite itself?


There is also an infinity of paintings. Pay me enough and I'll get a pot of paint and crank out as many as you like.


Sorry to bring you the bad news, but your lifetime is (likely) finite and each brush stroke takes away a bit of that precious finite time.

In contrast, while digitally reproduced crap is also fundamentally finite, it can be replicated gazillion upon gazillion times more without any effort or sacrifice.

This is the so-called zero-marginal cost of (re)production [1]. Some people think its a blessing, some people think its a curse.

With AI algorithms it gets even worse. You don't only have infinite copies of the original, you also have infinite variations of the original.

Interesting times.

[1] https://books.google.nl/books/about/The_Zero_Marginal_Cost_S...


I guess that depends on whether or not you consider the distinction between the Mona Lisa and a print of the Mona Lisa almost completely artificial.




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