what does this even mean? how is collecting a digital card different than collecting a cardboard with a photo on it?
Baseball cards are worth money because of their scarcity. Digital items can be copied endlessly at virtually no cost, so the whole idea of scarcity is a fraud when talking about digital anything.
Basball cards cost nothing to manufacture. I can print a million at home. The “official” ones are scarce because the company that has the right to print them made only a few “real” copies.
That Lebron card will only have 45 copies or whatever and that is the #1 serial.
There is no difference if you take a minute to think about it. The only question is if people will want the collectable or not
They could and they didn’t. You can’t print a 1998 rookie card because it’s not 1998 anymore.
It isn’t a “card.” It is a digital file, it can be copied exactly.
I can enjoy a baseball card during a power outage.
You are right that people value it enough to spend this kind of money on it, but it’s a fad that I wouldn’t expect to last as long as Beanie Babies did. At some point someone is going to figure out how to make an exact copy of one of these things and the market will disappear.
it isn’t a “digital file”. it’s a token that is unique and cannot be copied. it is infinite time harder to copy than an actual card.
people can enjoy the digital card whenever and wherever they are in the universe and not have to worry about spilling water on it.
you’re just kneejerking it a bit i think.
I think this is a completely stupid idea doomed to failure. I felt the same way about:
- Compact discs
- The internet
- Bitcoin
So you should probably go all in.
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Think about digital piracy. People just absolutely do not think of software/digital information as a real thing in the same way. Lots of people pirate tons of movies, music, TV, who would never steal the analogue equivalents even if they knew they could get away with it. So the gif or whatever can have this non-fungible token associated with it, but if they can have the gif without the token, as far as they’re concerned all they’re buying is the token. Nobody’s going to want to buy the token except as speculative investment.
I can see this NFT stuff being useful for some purposes, but not, I don’t think, for magically making gifs worth tens of thousands of dollars. Just doesn’t pass the smell test.
i think people really enjoy collecting sports things. it’s a fun user experience when you can actually get packs. the only issue with this is that it boomed out of control this week and the entry level became too expensive.
we already have millions of people collecting ‘meaningless’ digital shit for endless amount of games. this was bound to happen. i have yet to read a single good argument about why physical sport cards are different.
But kinda like what @anon10387340 just said, I’ve been wrong enough times to stop being certain.
no one gives a fuck about the gif by itself, you can watch it on youtube. The only value it has is from the idea that NBA Top Shot is a valuable collection. If it won’t be one, the cards will lose all value. “faking”/“copying” isn’t really a concern here imo as it’s actually a given that nothing is unique except the idea.
Certain people have too much money and the ones who couldn’t pay 350k for a Blastoise this week are doing it for a Lebron clip.
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I mean yeah, that’s what I’m saying. People will see it as just buying the token and the token isn’t a sports thing, it’s some computer nerd thing.
i still don’t see how it’s different than this:
it is literally a printed image. it sold for 4 million dollars. this exact one. if i print it now, i will have 4 million dollars.
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But one of them is ‘real’ and your printout wouldn’t be ‘real’. The only ‘realness’ in this case is the token and people aren’t going to care about the token.
the only ‘real’ think about is some company in ohio that says their cardboard is real and no one will care about cardboard. I don’t see how this argument is still in any way different.
@goofyballer i don’t get the comparison. Baseball cards aren’t the Wu-Tang album here. They are the album that anyone can listen to on spotify. This is my exact argument.
Baseball cards have no feature. There are nothing except an image of a player that you can get for free and the general agreement that the cardboard is worth something based on arbitrary criteria
It’s different in that your argument is empirically false. I’ve already made my case based on rates of piracy versus rates of theft of physical goods; people do the former far more readily and often than they do the latter, because they don’t value software the same way they value physical items.
Come on Yuv, this is a really dumb argument. Your printing of a Mickey Mantle rookie card, a black lotus or a 1st edition Charizard is not the same as the real thing. No one thinks it is. Thats exactly why they’re valuable!
Netflix has been quite successful even though digital piracy exists.
You are saying a digital collectables cannot be worth anything. I will bet anything I own that this is 100% false, regardless of how this site works.
Goofy’s argument is that digital sports cards won’t be fun for enough people. I don’t know about that, because I find both ‘real’ and ‘digital’ sports cards to be idiotic.
I know, that’s what i’m saying. I just think there’s a decent chance that “printing” a Lebron #1 edition digital card will not be worth the same as the “real” thing to a lot of people with a lot of money.
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Netflix and Spotify are successful because they made it more efficient than piracy!
Having to torrent every album when it came out, then upload it onto an IPod is much more effort than paying $7 a month for everything, especially when a VPN costs that much anyway.
No one is saying people won’t spend money on stupid things.
Not really. I’m saying they can’t be worth much. Even the digital items people pay for now operate within digital environments (MMORPGs etc) where their scarcity can be artificially maintained. That’s not for no reason.
But the scarcity of these items are completely under the control of the company that manufactures it. I think that’s the point you’re missing or that I’m missing. The card isn’t really the silly gif. It’s the fact that it’s silly gif #1 edition cosmic yada yada whatever.
It’s dumb as fuck, but no more dumb than a baseball card to me.
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