NFTs, digital art, and the value shift between IRL and virtual life

And now there’s what [Venkatesh Rao] called the cryptobourgeoisie. There’s effectively an information advantage that young people can have that potentially allows them to capture some of the value that the Boomers have.

It’s still way too hard. It’s still way too hard to onboard people into crypto. The fiat onramps are finally getting there. But even getting, you know, ETH [Ethereum] onto a Web 3 wallet, and adding custom tokens — there’s a lot of basic stuff that needs to be figured out.

if you’ve got your identity tied to an Ethereum address, and you’ve got a Beeple in there, that’s no different than someone walking into your house and seeing a Picasso, in a lot of ways.

When I used to get ready for school, I would spend money on clothing for the first day of school, so I could impress 400 people. And the kind-of TAM of people that I could impress, of 400 people, is an order of magnitude smaller than who I can impress on the internet.

The macro thesis that I’ve talked to a bunch is this idea that value is shifting from IRL meatspace into our virtual lives.

If I were speculating on a centralized system, I’d be wary of them a) changing the rules, and b) having some kind of top-down change that prevented me from accessing my account, or whatever it is.

And clearly, there was a latent demand for people who wanted to own work from their favorite creators, and creators who wanted to sell things directly to their fans. That kind of combination was really potent.