NFT sales plummet nearly 90% from their peak as collectibles market cools
I never got the hate for NFTs.  It seemed like the logic translation of collectibles from the phyiscal world into the digital world.<p>If an artist makes a painting, that original painting has collectible value.  If the same artist makes copies of it, those copies have less value.  That seems to make sense to most people.<p>Now imagine if an artist makes a digital painting.  Is that work of art any less meaningful or valuable?  Of course not.  But there&#x27;s been no way to define an &quot;original&quot; in the digital art form, and so there&#x27;s been no way to assign collectability to digital works of art.  NFTs seem to provide a way for an artist and fans to collectively agree that some digital object is the original, and to treat it as such.<p>The bonus is that it provides another avenue for digital artists to make money, which to my mind is always a good thing.<p>I get that the concept is hard to wrap our brains around, because at the end of the day it&#x27;s a collective delusion.  Everyone just agrees to say that some arbitrary string of bytes is the &quot;original&quot; and anything that comes after it isn&#x27;t.  But ultimately how is that different from the arbitrary rules we use to define which physical object is the &quot;original&quot; and why those arbitrary rules define value.<p>That said, I haven&#x27;t looked too deeply into the technical side of NFTs, so this is more my take on the concept than the application.  I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s slews of caveats, like how most NFTs only store a hash, the importance of exchanges, etc.  And I totally agree that the market was in a huge bubble, so that&#x27;s definitely worth criticizing (to an extent; I mean people can do whatever the hell they want with their money ultimately.)<p>Is there a flaw in my take here?  Are NFTs somehow more arbitrary and asinine than other collectible markets simply because they&#x27;re digital?  Or is everyone hating because hating new technology is as cool as it has ever been?  I suppose Dropbox did turn out to just be git+rsync, so <i>shrug</i> &#x2F;s