TRON’s Justin Sun offers $2m for Jack Dorsey tweet NFT – silly or visionary?
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey made his very first tweet, sent on 21 March 2006, an NFT by saying “just setting up my twttr”.
That tweet is now a token on Ethereum (“Ethereum bought for $22 million”), so people can buy and sell the token.
The token itself is nothing more than a unique number that corresponds to that specific NFT tweet.
Jack Dorsey linked it, so we can be sure it’s his NFT – but why on earth would anyone want it?
Well, Justin’s Sun wants it because it gets him this article and keeps his Tron (to the 2021 Tron buy guide) in the Bitcoin Investor review atmosphere – but there were plenty of people bidding before him too.
You can check out the tweet and the bids on it here: https://v.cent.co/tweet/20
The current bid is $2.5 million. Now the initial reaction from everyone is that this is silly. Just billionaires playing with new toys while the plebs watch.
A fad that will have passed in a few moons. And that’s our first reaction too, so we’re going to try very hard to see how any of this isn’t silly.
If this tweet is on the blockchain and we colonise Venus and then Alpha Centuri, this will be one of the very few tweets that survive, assuming Twitter has been forgotten or overtaken by something cooler by then.
There have been some very rare cases, and we are probably completely wrong, but in some very rare cases the Internet Archive has not been reliable or there has been a basis, however small, for believing that.
The archive is obviously a website, a database server with an admin who can do whatever he wants, including changing the archive
So if we think in a long enough time frame and assume that the Ethereum Blockchain will survive, then this NFT could well be some kind of artefact, you know, like that Roman chariot that was found.
If that chariot were to be auctioned off, it would have immense value because it’s pretty cool to have something like that in your palace, and it’s cool because it’s a 2000 year old fact.
There aren’t many of them because like human memory tends to discard a lot of things, the collective memory discarded chariots completely for unknown reasons, but eventually we got cars and so what was so common in Rome became something that nobody wants – and then because it’s so unusual now, it’s something that people would like because it speaks of the times that were.
So far, so good.
So the Associated Press starts its experiment in owning NFT facts, that can get interesting over the years – but what does it mean to own facts?
Why is this chariot so valuable, but an identical replica of it is probably still valuable, but not nearly at the same level? What makes the original so special?
Well, none of us were in ancient Rome, so who’s to say it’s not because someone with a big imagination made up this whole Rome thing in the 17th century and people thought it was cool, or fell for it, or eventually forgot that it was just some guy’s imagination, what we now think of as real?
The chariot of course, and the many artifacts like it, are what says that’s not the case, that there was a Rome – and they had chariots.
Because the forgery doesn’t reveal nearly as much as the original, the forgery is not worth nearly as much as the original.
So the original is worth what it is because of what it reveals. The rarer and the more important that revelation is, the more it should be worth.
But a silly tweet from Jack Dorsey is not a 2000-year-old chariot. So how on earth is this thing worth a luxury mansion – or anything at all?
The answer probably lies in the fact that we may be at a stage where we’ve discovered something – and we largely have no idea what we’ve discovered or whether it’s even useful. And so somehow everyone throws (monetary) spaghetti at the wall. Somebody will stick.