At Ledger, I met someone who significantly influenced my life. To preserve his anonymity, I will refer to him as X1 in this post and the following. X1 is about ten years older than me. This age gap rapidly meant he stepped into an older brother's shoes, and I think he enjoyed the role. He has invaluable experience in crypto, one of the finest senses of humor I've ever encountered, an impressively sharp thought process, speaks three languages, plays guitar, and is probably better at martial arts than Mark Zuckerberg... amongst other things. X1 is a gambler of JPEGs stored in unorthodox fashions, from references to IPFS hashes on Ethereum to inscriptions in Bitcoin satoshis. One day, his influence on me finally converted into my worst financial investment. A small price to pay to understand a crucial idea: You are what you own.
I'm a dick, but I like it
I grew up in an environment that associated success with physical symbols such as fancy cars, modern houses, and expensive watches. X1 always had vindictive words for it. He's never been in this world, and crypto was his revenge.
I was miles away from understanding why people would spend a single dollar to own a JPEG. The answer is Culture. When you own a beautiful CryptoDickButt like mine - bought 1.5 ETH less than a year ago and worth 0.3 ETH today - you send a social signal and join a community of owners, and there is a market for that. People speculate on the future of cultural trends, memes, and ideology. I probably placed the wrong bet on dickbutts, but I have no regret: I'm still in love with this beautiful creature of pixels.
A financial consolation came from my first manager at Ledger. He's been the greatest manager I've ever had, a great software engineer, and the most degen of all degens, forever lost in the Cosmos. From his distant planet, he brought me back a badkid that I sold for 4000 dollars. When the collection went live, he minted an entire class for a few bucks. I sold mine more for the social signal than the cash. I'm bullish on Ethereum. Ethereum is my religion, and Vitalik is my prophet. Owning anything on another ecosystem is a betrayal.
Can NFTs have a utility?
Misconceptions plague global opinion on NFTs. The last bull market valued monkeys' JPEGs at millions of dollars. No mind can comprehend such nonsense; most artists can't recognize them as art, and they're right. But NFTs aren't these JPEGs. NFT is a technology. Hating on NFTs is like hating on IMAP/SMPT because your mailbox is full of spam. NFTs enable anyone to own a piece of data online. It can be literally anything, from music royalties to scientific papers or house title deeds. If their real-world application remains limited, it's mostly because society isn't ready for it. Record labels are hard to disrupt, Elsevier will not easily give up on scientific paper distribution, and most states want to control house ownership. Let's comfort ourselves with two activable NFT use cases:
Factchain NFTs are honorific badges bestowed to guardians of truth: authors of community notes who combat disinformation on social media. They could unlock access to a group chat on warpcast to emphasize the community or allow owners to connect on reserved areas of Factchain.
You got it, NFTs can grant their owners access to token-gated features online. For example, I'm writing this series on the wonderful paragraph creators' platform, which allows me to restrict article access to the owners of specific NFTs. Sometimes, creators want more granularity in their distribution. Publishing online used to be either all or nothing. Not anymore with NFTs.
Don't hesitate to mint your favorite post from my writing challenge. It will probably never serve any other purpose than showing your support and helping me grind daily.
See you tomorrow.
