I have talked A LOT of trash about NFTs.
On Ethereum, they are only represented by a condensed hash that can't be reverse engineered to create the picture. The picture must be stored (usually on a centralized server) and can be lost. Even if this is not the case, an NFT that is just a picture has no utility and is just pointless.
But apparently that didn't matter.
Because as soon as @themarkymarky / @punksonhive / @blockheadgames launched https://punks.usehive.com/ I went ahead and bought 13 of them regardless of all my previous trash talk.
Side Note... 13 is a sacred number that was demonized by Christianity.
Only 10 of my 13 punks have been minted so far. At 20 Hive a pop that's 260 Hive, which simultaneously is and is not a lot of money. As someone who has bought a lot of Hive at ten cents multiple times it almost feels like $30 instead of the current market price of more like $200. Crypto/abundance is weird like that.
I put my rarest punk on the market because she was a sickly green Alcoholic writer. But as the hours ticked by the rarity of my rarest punk kept diminishing, presumably due to other punks being minted in real time with similar qualities.
These things are weirdly addictive... I can see now why they gained traction on Ethereum. This is very much a "rich man's game", in that novelty NFTs like this with zero utility will become worth more money as people within the ecosystem get richer and richer and they are just looking for somewhere to spend it within the ecosystem.
This is a great example of how anyone can build anything on Hive and as long as it has a bare minimum of "fun factor" to it people in this community will support it.
Looking to the future.
What's the point of HivePunks? There is no point. That's the point! Get it? Got it! Good!
But what if there was a point?
Now that this clone has popped into the Hive universe it gives me that fresh round of ideas I was mulling over in the past. What if you added utility to these Punks? What if someone built a game or another service, and the only way to play the game or use the service was to own a Punk? We can see by extrapolating these concepts that value can be built on top of value within a decentralized ecosystem.
Is... it... decentralized?
I mean no not really. At least not right now. Consider this a testnet on a private server loosely linked to Hive. But just because it's not now doesn't mean it won't be later.
How do I know if something is decentralized?
Within the context of crypto it is quite simple. One must ask a few questions.
- How many nodes/servers are verifying this information.
- If the information is incorrect on one of these nodes, are their mechanics in place to prevent users from being victims of fraud and counterfeiting?
Obviously something like HivePunks is just running on one node controlled by one entity at the moment, but these are certainly ideas and structures we can build off of, as HivePunks are "provably fair" and are still loosely connected to the blockchain with random hashes confirmed by the Hive network.
Rarity
The "rarity" of the Punks is determined by algorithm and don't mean a whole lot in terms of aesthetic or actually enjoying the NFT. Even though my "Delilah Mcdonald" only has an algorithmic rarity of 208, I have yet to see a Punk on the market with pink hair, plus she's a Robotics Engineer which is a way cooler job than 90% of the other jobs assigned to the punks. Bookkeepers and Attorneys need not apply. Clearly drinking the Kool-Aid on this one.
Conclusion
I am surprisingly fascinated by this ridiculous development. Lots of things going down on Hive.
Let's not forget that NFTs and whatever else on Hive don't have the friction of all those $200 Ethereum gas fees. As Hive starts going up in price that zero friction is going to make a big deal going forward.
But most of all, we should be thinking of ways to build utility on top of NFTs like this. Nothing stops us from building on top of NFTs that theoretically have no objective value. Doing so would turn subjective speculation into a real economy.
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