Tiptoe through the Tulips

[RE]

I remember reading about these things and for a long time couldn't even figure out what they were or how people were "creating" them, and then even more could not figure out why they were worth anything.  As P>T> Barnum used to say though, "There's a sucker born every minute".  Are people ever going to drop this Crypto world of fantasy money?



https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/nfts-worthless-researchers-find-1234828767/

Your NFTs Are Actually — Finally — Totally Worthless

RE

[K-Dog]

Capitalism at it's best.  Digital private property with no concrete existence.  Property which requires technology to see and which requires real world technology in a social network to keep and maintain.  Social networks which may turn out to be as ephemeral as the fizz in soda pop.

Somebody is always trying to find an angle.



Digital swampland for sale.

Exchange value stands in for value but is not value itself.  Exchange value is only an expression of value.  Exchange value is coupled to use value, another expression of value.

NFTs clearly have negligible USE VALUE.  While both USE VALUE and EXCHANGE VALUE are expressions of VALUE, they can't stand in for each other.  But they are related.  They are both expressions of VALUE.

What happens when anything is multiplied by zero?

Yeah.  That's right.

Price discovery (exchange value) also naturally yields zero. 

I think so.  Marx covers price discovery in Capital Volume 2?  Volume 1 (in the mail to me) describes the capitalist mode of production.  Value is explained but a market for the products of capitalism (commodities) is assumed in Volume 1 as conversion of commodities to money is external to the loop of production.  I won't know for sure until I read it. 

[RE]

Price discovery (exchange value) also naturally yields zero. 

I think so.  Marx covers price discovery in Capital Volume 2?  Volume 1 (in the mail to me) describes the capitalist mode of production.  Value is explained but a market for the products of capitalism (commodities) is assumed in Volume 1 as conversion of commodities to money is external to the loop of production.  I won't know for sure until I read it. 

Another one of Father Karl's astute observations.

Similarly I may have mentioned a few months back a young couple of Traveling CNAs (Nurses Assistants who do the majority of the grunt work to keep old folks alive by changing their diapers and wiping their butts) who were capitalizing on their own labor value as demand for their services exceeded the supply and drove up their wages also had a plan to retire by age 35 by trading in the exchange value of limited production Sneakers endorsed by Michael Jordan and other pro athletes and which traded on the internet for 10's of 1,000s of FRNs but could be bought if you knew the right suppliers for the bargain price of $3-6K a pair.

I was very suspicious of this get rich quick scheme and probed them with questions while teaching them chess in the common are, asking where they kept their inventory of these sneakers since as travelling CNA's moving every 3-6 months around the country they couldn't possibly be carrying more than a few pairs.  To answer this question they showed me the photo of a lovely VA farmhouse they said they owned outright and where they said they warehoused the sneakers in the barn.  Said lovely farm was also supossedly empty, they weren't renting it out. Supposedly also their parents did the shipping on them as the orders came in.

They were making great money as CNAs with their hotel living space paid for and a rental car, and were working 6 12 hour shifts a week, which with overtime as a couple had to be near if not over $200K per year, so I sort of believed them.  Besides this however they also were planning to move to NYC, where they aid they were acquainted with a multi-millionaire who had made his money with some equally stupid scam.  I figured that even if they were telling the truth about the sneaker scam, even selling a few pair a month they couldn't be earning much more than $500K/year, while to live in the high rent district around
Park Avenue that kind of money is pocket change.

The young wife was very attractive and great eye candy for me while teaching her to play chess and had an awesome cute butt which looked great in her collection of pastel colored, tight fitting scrubs to admire when she periodically had to stop the clock and scamper off to wipe some other old guy's butt after finishing on the toilet.  Even better were the occasions on which she was assigned to my court and wiped my butt after I pressed the Call Button next to the toilet. 

I did advise them both that selling their farm/sneaker warehouse to live in a condo in New York Shity with Collapse coming was a bad idea, but they seemed unwilling to pay attention to this advice so I stopped handing them out my pearls of wisdom and stuck to teaching chess.  After they were summarily dismissed (which never happens) for being uncooperative and lazy CNAs and supposedly returned by their agency to the VA SNIF they came from back home, I concluded that most of what they told to gullible, senile old folks was fantasy they entertained themselves with during 12 hour shifts wiping butts or changing linens when the diapers were insufficient to contain the diareah excreted several times a day by the 17 residents they were responsible for keeping alive, so Medicaid would keep paying the $16K/mo to the corporation that owns this SNIF and a dozen others like it sprinkled around the country.  We all collectively are the real value here, producing not only truckloads of shit every day but profit to the shareholders of this corporation. It is through our assholes that taxpayer money gets transferred from da goobermint into the hands of the filthy rich owners of the corporation who of course never have to change a diaper or soiled bedding to collect far more money even than the better than average wages paid to lazy and mendacious travelling CNAs.  Although it is POSSIBLE these two were telling the truth, IMHO the only way they could afford NYC is if the cute wife worked as a high class whore, and showed up at the Plaza Hotel after booking a dozen filthy rich stockbrokers on her website charging $1000/hr for a 12 hour long shift of flatbacking, which she could double by booking 2 at a time as the deli meat in the sandwich with a stockbroker plowing the wet soil in front while the CEO in the rear completed the merger by packing her fudge from behind.

Anyhow, porn short stories aside, it IS true that people buy/sell these limited edition sneakers on the net, which DO have some use value but no more than a $50 pair of Chinese sneakers you can buy at Walmart for low, low prices every day.  Although they are more tangible than digital NFTs, I am no less astounded that they have an exchange value in the $1000s, simply because they have a celebrity endorsement and are produced in limited runs.  How can people BE this stupid?  It boggles my mind.

RE

[K-Dog]

We all collectively are the real value here, producing not only truckloads of shit every day but profit to the shareholders of this corporation.

Being full of shit has value after all.