Cafe Society is Maxwell Social’s semi-weekly magazine on the intersection of community and society — an anthropological look at the underpinn

Club Necaxa, NFTs & The Funding of Communal Institutions (Cafe Society Dinner Discussion #16)

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2021-06-12 19:30:18

Cafe Society is Maxwell Social’s semi-weekly magazine on the intersection of community and society — an anthropological look at the underpinnings of what makes the world tick, written by David Litwak (@dlitwak) and the Maxwell team. Maxwell is building a new type of social club.

A couple months ago I was sitting down with a Maxwell investor when he started talking about NFTs and how I should think about how they applied to bars, restaurants and, potentially, Maxwell. I was skeptical — the digital art cat thing? WTF did that have to do with me?

For those that aren’t familiar, NFTs are “non-fungible tokens” — essentially they are digitally unique pieces of “art” that you can buy and sell. The “piece” above, Nyan Cat, went for $600,000 at auction. Yes, someone paid 600k for a GIF, you read that right. NFTs allow ownership of digital assets — it makes it possible to buy and sell GIFs, JPEGS, digital anything in the same way you would a Monet painting — for 600k you are the owner of this GIF above. The image above that I’m displaying is the digital equivalent of a photo of the Mona Lisa or a really really good fake — it’s not real but a representation of the real thing.

If this seems a bit absurd to you (what’s the point of “owning” the above GIF if I can just post it here for you to see . . . ) you aren’t alone, but blockchain enthusiasts point out that, in the end, how is this really THAT different from how the art world already works, where hundreds of millions of dollars are exchanged for an oil painting that might actually sit in storage to preserve the value and where the original is worth everything while its fraudulent exact replica is worth nothing — our assignment of value to art is already pretty absurd and has very little to do with access to or ability to enjoy the art itself. And in the end, isn’t currency itself a social construct? Our society assigns it value so it has value.

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