My gut tells me that NFTs are best understood through looking at the 2009 global financial crisis. Or rather, the housing bubble that preceded it.
If you're a producer whose market has become a bubble, then your incentive is to produce as much as possible. So in that 2004-2007 time frame, new home construction went crazy. Trouble is, the actual product during that bubble wasn't houses, it was mortgage-backed securities: houses were just a means to an end.
Thus the incentive was for lenders to get as many borrowers approved as possible, which led to a sharp degradation of lending standards. It didn't matter for the bank, since they were gonna sell the debt off; it was only a problem for the buyers, which unfortunately seemed to mostly be pension funds.
When you degrade lending standards, you still have to gussy it up with smart-sounding terminology. First we had adjustable-rate mortgages, which have lower interest rates today so you can squeak by with lower income. Once all the blood was pulled from that stone, we moved on to "low-doc" and "no-doc" loans, which are more colloquially known as "liar's loans."
Still, banks have no reason to scrutinize, because they aren't holding onto them. And nobody else had reason to scrutinize, because the ratings agencies gave them great marks. The end goal was always just to produce more and more debt securities, since that's what the incentives told you to do.
So that's how I see NFTs: they're a solution to the problem of being able to produce enough assets to keep a bubble growing. I mean, that fact is baked into the very design of NFTs, since while crypto"currency" has issuance rates baked in, anyone can create any number of NFTs.
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My gut tells me that NFTs are best understood through looking at the 2009 global financial crisis. Or rather, the housing bubble that preceded it.
If you're a producer whose market has become a bubble, then your incentive is to produce as much as possible. So in that 2004-2007 time frame, new home construction went crazy. Trouble is, the actual product during that bubble wasn't houses, it was mortgage-backed securities: houses were just a means to an end.
Thus the incentive was for lenders to get as many borrowers approved as possible, which led to a sharp degradation of lending standards. It didn't matter for the bank, since they were gonna sell the debt off; it was only a problem for the buyers, which unfortunately seemed to mostly be pension funds.
When you degrade lending standards, you still have to gussy it up with smart-sounding terminology. First we had adjustable-rate mortgages, which have lower interest rates today so you can squeak by with lower income. Once all the blood was pulled from that stone, we moved on to "low-doc" and "no-doc" loans, which are more colloquially known as "liar's loans."
Still, banks have no reason to scrutinize, because they aren't holding onto them. And nobody else had reason to scrutinize, because the ratings agencies gave them great marks. The end goal was always just to produce more and more debt securities, since that's what the incentives told you to do.
So that's how I see NFTs: they're a solution to the problem of being able to produce enough assets to keep a bubble growing. I mean, that fact is baked into the very design of NFTs, since while crypto"currency" has issuance rates baked in, anyone can create any number of NFTs.