an ancient bitcoin?

A colleague in my department earlier today shared this link with me. Not understanding it in the least, except with some dim thought that it means the world is going crazy, I shared it with my good friend @Valentinian, who urged me to share it with Coin Talk. Whatever it means, I will pass on it, and stick to my tetradrachms, staters, denarii, siliquae, solidi, hexagrammata, miliaresia, and stavrata....

https://nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fopensea.io%2Fcollection%2Fcoins-on-the-chain&data=04%7C01%7CBRAUNLML%40UCMAIL.UC.EDU%7C7701fc36e9a84da745a108d99c9e0999%7Cf5222e6c5fc648eb8f0373db18203b63%7C1%7C0%7C637713024836644905%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=E5PLSNHl9tOKPO2ZKGSZ%2BGWfLp9Wp8MiP%2Fc1JNIy7Sw%3D&reserved=0

 

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Etherium (ETH) is currently trading at $4310.60/coin. This shiny spinning picture of an ancient coin costs 0.2 ETH. That is $862.12 based on the current ETH price. If I had a spare $860 to set on fire, I would buy a real coin.

More money than sense, some people...

 

On the one hand I think someone would have to be an idiot to spend basically anything on this(but I feel that way about pretty much all NFTs). On the other, I wish I could convince a lot of people currently in the coin market to spend their money on things like this instead of actual coins...

 

Sorry, I'm in the camp that thinks NFTs are a sucker bet.

First off, there's nothing preventing anyone from copying your link and displaying it, privately or publicly. Usually, ownership implies some kind of access control.

Secondly, you don't actually OWN the image. What's on the blockchain that you "own" is the URL that points to somebody's server.

How many times have you followed a link, only to find out the domain is gone or the site's been reorged and you can't find your page? With an NFT you are betting that never happens. If it does? So sad, too bad, you own a dead link!

Now if you sell a cat video for $250K, you probably can afford to keep the link live for many years, but are you feeling THAT lucky?

 

Sensible people and anyone outside of Generation Z you mean?

 

But, there are only ten of that spinning picture available! Get your order in before they are all gone!

I thought the tulip-bulb craze was a well-known delusion and the buyer of a tulip bulb at least got something.

 

I've been assuming that something like this -- collecting "unique" digital images of photos of ancient coins (not the photos themselves, never mind the actual coins!) -- was about to happen. Why don't we all just sell images of the coin photos we post here and tell the buyers that they're non-fungible? I'll even throw in an autograph for free! Let's see; if I can sell a couple of hundred images of coin photos for $10,000 apiece. . . .

 

Glad to see I'm not the only one having difficulty wrapping my aging head around crypto. NFTs posing as "art" reminds me of Duchamp's infamous 'Fountain', technological Dada. According to this Artnet article, a CryptoPunk NFT sold for 124,457 ETH (~$500 million) on Thursday.

 

I'm holding out for an Athenian decadrachm and an Eid Mar denarious.

Oh, wait. There are already images out there.

 

D.F. Grotjohann, who has a VCoins store until about 2010, is now selling ancient coin NFTs at https://opensea.io/DFGrotjohann.

He has 13 ancient coins listed as well as two samurai cartoons. One of the coins is a nice looking Alexander Octodrachm. The price is 3.5. The currency of that price is Ethereum, which works out to US$15,532.

The buyer receives the ancient coin in addition to the digital rights.

 

I'm in the wrong business.

 

Yes. It all makes perfect sense to me.

On an unrelated subject: I'm selling some attractive real estate near Alpha Centauri, free view of earth guaranteed. Your chance to enjoy the legendary, never-ending sunsets of the twin stars! Ever toe-dipped with your CT-friends at the shores of your very own private methane lake? Interested?
Free GIF's for all!


Anyone?

 

Does it have breathable air? I'm kind of partial to that - it's just a thing I have.

 

Yeah, well...

Yes! But it comes at a surcharge. But as a CT'er you'd get a discount, of course...

Tempted?
The GIF's are really good...

 

For the price of a real silver example, you can get a picture of a real gold example!!

 

To me, this illustrates that there now is a part of the population that thinks of the "digital world" as their main reality. From their perspective, objects that exist mainly or only in the internet appear as valuable or even more valuable than their equivalents outside of the digital realm.

On the other hand, those wondering about the $860 coin image, including myself, continue to live mainly in the good old-fashioned "carbon world." We use digital media as an easy surrogate for face-to-face communication, not as a virtual place to live in. Thus, we attach more value to houses, shares, cars, bullion, fancy food, shoes, and ancient coins than to NFTs and similar shenanigans. The same principle can be applied to the weighing up of empirical facts vs. Twitter debates, or flesh-and-blood friends and family vs. Facebook contacts.

Time will tell who is right. Personally, I like to think of cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and online debates as symptoms of a cultural flirt with the possibilities of digital make-believe. Still, it is hard to ignore the real-world influence that this type of make-believe has gained over the course of the last few years. Thinking about the possible consequences of this development is indeed rather nightmarish.

To keep this coin related, my Croesus coin is only made from silver and not even a full stater. Nonetheless, I would never trade it for an NFT. I'm firmly rooted in "camp carbon," I assume:

Kings of Lydia, under King Croesus, AR ⅙ stater, 565/53–550/39 BC. Obv: confronted foreparts of lion and bull. Rev: two incuse square punches of unequal size. 8–11mm, 1.76g. Ref: Berk 25; SNG Kayhan 1019; Sunrise 13.

 

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I'm selling the blank space above this comment.

 

Sorry folks but this strikes me as a natural progression from the mindset that brought is the slab that prevents touching the coin or even seeing it to advantage. Who remembers the 'funds' thirty years ago where you could buy shares in a portfolio of exceptional ancient coins that you could never see?
https://lootingmatters.blogspot.com/2011/11/looking-back-to-athena-fund-ii.html

Yes, they got a disease (a mosaic virus strain) that made tulips that were 'different' looking (some beautiful) but tended to die off at a disturbing rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_breaking_virus
I now propose a new service through which you send a coin and it will be infected with bronze disease (silver and gold coins take longer so the turn-around time for return of your upgraded specimens will be a few decades longer). While no specific dates are guaranteed, management will strive to get any gold coins submitted back to you within a century of the original submission. As a limited time bonus, no payment for these services will be required in advance for raw coins sent in untracked first class mail but a $50 (cash or bitcoin) deslabbing fee is required for coins in plastic. Franchises are available.

Send coins addressed to Santa Claus, North Pole.

Whoever said, "There is a sucker born every minute" considerably underestimated the number of sheep available for fleecing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_a_sucker_born_every_minute

 

How much are you charging for the image?

 

I suspect much of this thread is based on a misunderstanding of blockchain. I'm no expert (extremely far from it!) but the value of blockchain seems to be that it makes something impossible to duplicate. That's like having money that's impossible to counterfeit... which lends it a little value on its own. Then there's also a guarantee of limited numbers. In the case of bitcoin, the limitation is imposed by the mining algorithm. In the case of NFTs the numbers are limited much more drastically, sometimes to 1 only; in the case of the OP, to ten only. Finally, due to the distributed nature of blockchain, there's a guarantee of persistence over time. These things can't just disappear because of some glitch somewhere. (So @Burton Strauss III's concerns are completely misplaced.)

Once someone actually places a legitimate (i.e. not deceptive in some way, like buying from yourself) value on one of these absolutely unforgeable, indestructible items of limited supply (say, someone buys one for a hundred bucks) it will tend to retain some of this value based on the special characteristics of blockchain. The trick is getting people to buy some in the first place. No doubt many NFTs will stay at value zero forever, just like many cryptocurrencies will never take off. But real value is generated when enough people agree to value the thing.

So the OP coin isn't really a collector's item. It's a unit of cryptocurrency. At least that's my beginner's conclusion... would be very happy to be corrected/enlightened by someone who actually knows about this stuff!

Still, I prefer itty bitty coins to bitcoin.

Athens tetartemorion, c. 393-294 BCE, 0.17g and 5mm - one of the last holdouts of the move from silver to AE token coinage. Token coinage which enough people decided to value...