Cole West

“Undervalued or just unwanted?” @punk9059 breaks down why valuing NFTs is so difficult, and why market dynamics, collector behavior and attention matter more than traditional valuation models. What actually makes an NFT valuable?

One of the biggest killers of innovation is being blinded by hypothetical downsides. It’s easy to raise concerns about why something might be risky. It's much harder to consider the potential harm of putting too many restrictions in place. Consider the de facto ban on nuclear with the establishment of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Today we'd have a modern, robust electric grid, and much higher economic growth, if we had kept building nuclear power plants. All around us we see systems that were well-intentioned when they were introduced, but had unintended consequences. How things fail: - Asymmetric error costs - approve a bad reactor or drug and you’re famous. Yet if you block a good one, no one ever knows. - Process as a veto - hourly fees, multi-step license applications, EPA reviews. Endless delays erode capital. - Worst-case models treated as fact - LNT radiation, any sonic boom is unacceptable, etc. - Rules written for the last accident, applied to the next design - we see this in everything from nuclear to financial services. Change is uncomfortable, but if we stop progress, we do a disservice to our ancestors who tolerated discomfort to bring us the modern age. We owe it to them to continue making progress. Keep building.