2021 has seen the rise of NFTs,
these are the non-fungible tokens
called crypto collectibles, they
come in a lot of different forms,
but they exploded in popularity
earlier this year.
A video clip that was created by
digital artists people whose
real name is Mike Winckelmann,
was flipped her record $6.6 million
last week.
It originally been bought for
around $67,000.
By the way,
this what I'm referencing is from
earlier this year, so this was one
of the first big sales of an NFT.
And you might not have been
paying much attention this year.
You might be wondering what
are NFTs?
Well, look partially it's
complicated and also you might not
need to know it for much longer.
But basically it's digital,
verifiable one owner images or
memes or videos,
and that might strike you as on its
face kind of stupid.
I'm with you buddy,
[LAUGH] I know I'm an idiot,
I don't get any of this stuff.
But anyway,
back at that time earlier this
year, one of thousands of computer
generated avatars called
CryptoPunks sold for $2 million.
A crypto art rendition of
the Nyan Cat meme from 2011 sold
for $590,000 in an online auction.
A meme for $590,000.
Well so why, why did this blow up?
Well, there was a lot of
conversation about this.
There were some pros and
some cons advocates and
people who are against it.
Proponents say that they fix a big
problem with the Internet, which
is artists not getting paid for
the distribution of their content
online.
Seems like a totally
legitimate concern.
At the same time, critics see
the NFT craze as another potential
speculative frenzy in crypto that's
sure to fizzle out eventually,
that was earlier this year.
Well, the fizzling seems to have
come.
Because NFTs apparently peaked on
May 3, when $102 million worth of
memes and paintings and songs and
stuff were sold in a single day.
The crypto collectibles market made
up $100 million of those sales.
Overall $170 million in NFTs
were transacted in just seven days.
Now that was at the beginning of
last month, according to data
analyzed by Protos,
just $19.4 million in NFT sales
were processed in the past week.
Which means that they declined
by somewhere around
90% over the course of one month.
We have other stats, Dr. Shot we've
never talked about NFTs before.
Obviously, I'm a little bit bites
against this sort of thing, but
what are your thoughts about it?
>> Somebody got rich.
I don't know much about it, man,
I remember when it first came out,
it was a craze,
people were excited about it and
it looked good, right?
I mean,
it had this upward trajectory.
And I keep things simple man,
I invest in simple things.
I do have some rules to investment,
I don't invest in prisons.
I won't invest in companies that
won't hire those that have been
incarcerated before.
So I have these rules, so
I keep things really simple.
When there's this,
is not just cryptocurrency, that's
the thing that makes it even more
confusing because cryptocurrency is
already kind of confusing.
It's different than that, it's
an added layer of something else in
the cryptocurrency market.
So because it was hell confusing to
me, I never got involved in it.
But I just tell people, man,
you get what you pay for,
buyer beware,
make sure you research and
follow the market.
Because if you took your money out
before May 3rd,
you may have been okay.
>> Yeah, some people
definitely made money.
I mean, whoever it is that was able
to sell the Nyan Cat,
they got their money's worth for
that image of a Cat, I think.
They got several Ferrari's for
that cat picture.
Anyway look,
what I'm mostly talking about here,
what the analysis is mostly talking
about and my frustration is about
the, I think objectively outsized
payments for specific things.
Not the fundamental idea that there
should be some sort of verifiable
ownership of digital content.
That's fine, and that will exist.
For I would guess a 99.9%
of artists and song makers and
meme makers and that sort of thing,
they're not going to be making
millions of dollars for
their thing.
And long after this
speculative bubble has burst,
hopefully they'll have a technology
that they can use.
And if that leads to more people
getting paid for their content,
that's a good thing.
But this is madness.
This is some of the stuff we've
seen with stocks, some of the stuff
we've seen with cryptocurrency.
This is people desperate to get
rich off of the perception that
people can get rich.
>> Yeah. >> And so they say that it
can happen so that other people
can believe that it'll happen,
it is a self-fulfilling financial
prophecy that for some will result
in them getting rich.
There are people who have made
a big off of cryptocurrency, there
are people who made it big of NFTs,
but every dollar they've gotten
will be funded by people
who will not get rich off of it.
In best case scenario they end
up with a picture of a cat.
Some people will not even have
the picture of a cat, they're
just going to lose everything
when these bubbles burst.
>> It's kind of like Herbalife.
>> Yeah, but at least in that case
you get herbs, right?
>> I don't know, what do they sell?
>> You can it,
if that's something in the garage.
>> Exactly, you got a big box of
something juicy, I don't know.
Anyway, so we'll see,
maybe it'll come back and
there's still some subcategories of
NFTs that are doing okay.
But the massive, frenzy, people
were just looking around their hard
drives to find something to label
for a million dollars and
selling it.
That might have died off for
a little while, but we'll see.
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