Brave new world we're living in. I've been chewing on this, so, some thoughts:
1. I concur with the assessment that for those who are really trying to go full liquidity on trading cards, going digital is the way to go. The tricky part is how you give a sense of value to something that isn't physical.
2. Cryptocurrency clearly provides a template here as it's been quite successful in the sense of values going up...but while I think cryptocurrency makes sense as a concept, the way the value of crypto has skyrocketed over the past decade seems to me to be completely divorced from any sense of real value.
Maybe I'm wrong on this, and if so, please correct me, but to me that skyrocketing is just a product of people coming to believe that something "will go up", and so long as that continues unabated, it does go up, thus resulting in objective profits and a closed, reinforcing loop for those looking for proof of investment potential.
And that's a phenomenon that is inherently fragile even in things like the stock market where the shares are anchored on something fundamentally real - ownership of a company earning revenue.
3. Hence, building "moments" like this in the wake of the success of crypto is inherently fragile too. You can make money as long as others believe, but you have to expect that the bubble will pop at some point.
So, make money on the flip, and by all means use something like this to diversify your portfolio, but don't expect this stuff will have value, say, 50 years from now.
4. The same is true for actual cards to a degree of course, but the basis for trading card value is that you're getting a genuine, fundamentally limited artifact from some point in history. Values can go down, but so long as society holds, there's going to be value in historical ephemera.
5. I'm trying to get my head around the actual "moment" that you're getting and I'm struggling.
Fundamentally, the issue for me is similar to others: I don't see any true scarcity to the product. If someone wants to see a clip of a player 50 years from now, they're going to be able to see it elsewhere on the internet legally for free. And of course, for the vast majority of these players, people are going to care far less about them in 50 years than they do now.
I understand that the "moments" here come with a kind of serial number, and that might be enough to actually drive interest given the mature state of internet collectible investment, but my fundamental question:
Why is this clip with its serial number any better than the clip I can get for free elsewhere?
Someone mentioned that you can print your own copy of actual cards too, but aside from the fact that selling those would be illegal, the quality for most of us would be terrible.
6. When I find myself thinking how I could fix the problem here, there's a pretty straight forward solution:
Let people actually buy shares of the actual footage and get a dividend whenever that footage is used in a way that generates revenue.
I'd love to own the rights to, say, that perfect set up dunk from Wade to LeBron back in Miami a decade back, but if me paying for a "moment" doesn't actually give me that, then what am I actually getting?
Anyway, won't be surprised if this takes off because it's only slightly more abstract than cryptocurrency, but I think there's something fundamentally missing in the theory of its scarcity at this time, and I'll be staying away as I'm not a flipper, I'm someone looking to buy stuff I think has the substance to stay valuable for a long time, and I'm not convinced of this.
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