Collectors: Why collect? What do you believe?

Modern, digital technology is a tool, created and wielded by humans, ostensibly under our control. Throughout history, the adoption of new technologies has driven profound shifts in society and this has been especially true when the technologies connect humans in new ways (shipping, telephony, trains,... See more

Digital art suffers from perfect reproducibility, and hence, a lack of scarcity. There is no “real” version — even in the artist’s studio, copies proliferate in backups, on shared drives, and in cache files. For decades, we have experimented with watermarks and anti-piracy tech to try and enforce a physical, world-of-atoms scarcity on digital... See more

NFTs are interesting in that they have built-in provable scarcity that ensures value. In the analog world, scarcity is something either circumstantial (the virus that wiped out tulip production) or mandated (Beanie Babies being “retired”). With NFTs, it’s in the code. CryptoPunks are valuable, for instance, because there will only ever be 10,000.

A digital file, when intersected with the ubiquity and scale of the internet, can be “seen” by anyone. NFTs push the notion even further. By adding to the ideas of abundance and scale those of passionate distribution, patronage, the day-one fan and, yes, ownership. Concepts associated with scarcity, now distributed out to the abundant world at... See more

What NFTs enable for the first time is a decentralized, universal digital representation and ownership layer through which scarcity, uniqueness, and authenticity can be transparently managed