huge shout out to squarespace for sponsoring this video stick around till the end to learn more now on to the video in NUMBER_TOKEN i was in high school and i was checking all the tech news and blogs every day one topic got quite a bit of buzz nfts non-fungible tokens something that confused a lot of the forum members was what would these do like yeah you could own digital plots of land in some future application that didn't exist you could own a digital collectible and yeah early this year nfts popped up again but it wasn't in forum posts it was everywhere there is some element of nostalgia to me at first but slowly i started to realize that this isn't going away now yeah i could sit here and rip on all the nft scams for the rest of the video but instead i wanted to discuss why this technology is at its very core so pointless now i think digital items have proven that they can hold real value reselling digital assets has been quite a thing for quite a lot of time and you know if you want to resell something that you bought sure why not defining value though of digital items can be kind of difficult most items have two elements to pricing their worth one is the tangible utilitarian function what can this thing do a car drives a tool does tool things to make your life better the other element is intangible values of important scarcity what it represents in the context behind it while a pt cruiser is more useful than say the declaration of independence which is just a piece of parchment with ink on it one is undeniably more valuable nfts try to add on to this concept by creating scarcity that normally can only be found in physical items create a batch of NUMBER_TOKEN jpegs with a special code that allows it to be identified as such the problem is this doesn't need to happen i mean at all there is no reason why a resource that is infinitely reproducible needs to have that reproducibility restricted unless you're gonna sell it or resell it yes this is a speculative market but unlike real speculation these items will eventually be worthless so you may be asking if these nfts are really useless how do they sell for so much i mean just random things that you've never heard of breaking in millions of dollars well it's probably a scam you might have seen carl jobs video about retro game sales going up and it started with a group of sinister guys buying each other's collections to increase the perceived value the way it works is say uh me and gary me and gary have a thousand copies of mario kart wii on hand we could sell each of these copies online for NUMBER_TOKEN bucks and make some money or i could buy a copy from gary for a thousand dollars and then i sell the same copy back to him for NUMBER_TOKEN and then he buys it for NUMBER_TOKEN and so on and so forth neither of us have spent any money at all yet the perceived value of the market is that this game is now worth thousands of dollars and then we sell our copies there's a lot of evidence to support that something similar to this is happening in nfts right now people with vested interest buying and selling these things for far more than they're worth to validate the worth of nfts as a whole this can be harder to trace if
START_SPONSOR_TOKEN huge shout out to squarespace for sponsoring this video stick around till the end to learn more now on to the video END_SPONSOR_TOKEN