Etihad Airways Selling NFTs With Elite Status

Oh my…. judging by most of the comments below it is clear the digital asset space (crypto is just a terrible name) is still deeply miss understood. For the record, 90% is noise but 10% will move the world forward. In particular Bitcoin, which has a real chance of resetting the broken monetary system in which we live in. A digital age form of sound, hard money is not something to dismiss lightly. The implications are profound. Be skeptical by all means, but dismiss it only after you understand it. If you have any real interest in the matter, The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous is possibly the best place to start. Regarding the Etihad NFT in particular, it’s just a collectible like any other, in which you may or may not see value. That said, the underlying NFT technology will probably see many real world use applications like IDs, leases, titles, deeds etc. It just happens that it’s first real world use was JPEGs of monkeys over which people lost their marbles.

NFTs have immense value when utilized correctly. There are several use cases that are legitimate and provide a new economy (e.g., an artist in Afghanistan can make money selling her art in web3 and make royalties on secondary sales in perpetuity (when can any artist make commission on secondary sales of art?)). Then there’s the use case of utilizing NFTs for purposes of memberships. One thing that is interesting with this use case is the notion of liquidity. If Eithad’s silver status is worth $349 now, then technically there could be an ecosystem where it’s worth more (or not). Thus, the holder of the NFT could sell the NFT for liquidity purposes. Now, this obviously can be exploited for fraudulent purposes, but that’s why the industry wants to (and should) be regulated. And just like ordinary stocks, it’s on people to become educated on particular NFTs or crypto when considering whether to spend money and invest. There’s a lot of noise/scams in crypto/NFTs. But there also was a lot of noise/scams is 2008 or with Madoff (or any other scams in human history).

I’ve been following you for 10 years, back then half the tech we have now would have seemed impossible, in another 10 years crypto will have a place in society, the biggest banks around the world are investing is blockchain technology, chase bank has created their own private block chain for internal use for example and are working on being able to send 10s of trillions of dollars in assets across the world right now more efficiently… honestly my favorite example of why crypto could help the world once perfected… billions of people on are planet are unbanked because they can’t trust their country or their countries currency…. Crypto could help solve this by eliminating the third party (banks for example) and letting people hold their own money digitally… you’ve travelled around the world you should know this better than anyone…. Tell me how people in countries like Somalia or North Korea can trust their personal fund with their government, but if you hold total control of your assets and can send freely with out restriction, especially across the world with low fees (like Hispanic people working in America sending money back home wouldn’t have to pay those fees to moneygram) makes it much easier to have a globalized fair economy.

Ben I don’t expect you to know anything about NFTs but crypto as a whole uses tremendously less energy than current methods…. Think about energy and manpower it takes to excavate gold and send it vs sending digital money like you send money on Zelle there’s no way there comparable.

Selling NFTs (or any supposed collectable) in limited amounts reminds me of the Franklin Mint (if you have enough gray hairs you remember their ads). They advertised that they were selling only a limited number of whatever crap they were offering -- the joke of course was that the number was limited to the number of suckers who would pay for their wares.