Your money isn’t real

Last week, my spaceship got destroyed, I read about NFTs and I pondered about bitcoin. Allow me to explain how this is all related. As I mentioned in an earlier post, occasionally I play Eve Online, an open world set in space. The most valuable areas in the game in terms of resources and loot are also the places where there are no rules. In this dog-eat-dog world, any player can attack you, kill you and take all your valuables. This is exactly what happened to me – which made me really sad and upset. Until I remembered that we’re talking about a few flipped bits in a computer in, I think, Iceland.

This weekend, I read about NFTs or non-fungible tokens. According to Wikipedia, these are cryptographic tokens that represent a unique digital asset, such as art, digital collectibles and online gaming assets. Who cares, you might ask, but when NFT-based art pieces are starting to get sold by Christie’s to the turn of 3.5 million dollars and NFT sales last year totaled about 250 million (up 300 percent from the year before), it’s obvious that there’s a group of people that considers these NFTs valuable.

Last week, I also read that Tesla has added 1.5 billion dollars in bitcoin to its balance sheet. A decentralized digital cryptocurrency. A bunch of numbers on a computer. Difficult to calculate numbers, admittedly, as it’s cryptographically ensured and hence bitcoin mining, but still. A car company buying some numbers to the tune of 1.5 billion? What the heck’s going on here?