The Nonce Age collapse
Humans like shiny things. We become wowed by anything new or innovative. In our excitement, we tell other people how they should also be thrilled by this thing.
It’s a pattern of behaviour that humans have displayed around technology for millions of years. Fire. Rocks smashed into hand-axes. Bits of flint used as small knives.
There is a social element to these things as well as technological.
You see that social thing develop in the later Stone Age, when people started polishing stone axes. To polish an axe head, you have to tumble it in a leather bag with grit and sand for 400 hours. 400 hours! This makes the axe marginally less prone to fracture, making it stronger, but mostly it turns a dull rock into a shiny object.
As a result, a polished stone axe becomes more tradable. And axe heads from the Lake District were widely distributed.
Now, fast-forward to the Bronze Age. The same thing happens. Bronze is OK for chopping wood, certainly better than stone, but the decoration increases. Archaeologists find plenty of bronze axes that weren’t used. They even find whole hoards of the stuff.
This is a technology imbued with status. Owned purely to say one has it, beyond its function as a tool.
Then, around 800 BC, there was a Bronze Age collapse. No one really knows why but it kind of lost its value. Even though it was still functional. (And they hadn’t invented iron yet.)
What I find interesting about cryptocurrencies and NFTs is that this pattern has played out really quickly. First people got excited about the function of cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Then they became primarily objects of status, particularly NFTs. And now there’s a bit of a collapse happening: a Nonce Age collapse.
But this tweet made it really clear that history was repeating itself.
I’m selling most of my NFTs.
I don’t believe that communities centered primarily around owning an NFT have longevity.
I’m still open to the possibility that communities built around something more meaningful can use NFTs as a tool.1
Wow. A technology as a tool rather than a status object! Imagine that!2