Celtic Should Steer Well Clear Of The Whole “Digital Collectibles” Ponzi Scheme.

This is a subject I’ve not written about here in a long time. It’s a subject I didn’t think I’d write about again.

But this was one of the questions that came up yesterday in the Celtic Fan Survey, which makes me wonder if there aren’t people in some corner of the club who think that there is life in an idea which should have been killed in the crib.

The question was about whether fans would buy so-called “digital collectibles.”

Whatever way they try to dress that up what they mean are NFT’s – non fungible tokens.

A fungible is an item which can be easily replaced, because there are lots of them out there. If you buy a World’s Sexiest Blogger Mug (I swear, that’s not sitting on my desk right now) and it breaks, you can go online and order up a new one, or six, and line them up where you can see them every day.

(I bet you’re picturing that, aren’t you?)

But something non-fungible is different. Imagine your World’s Sexiest Blogger mug had been painted by Tracey Emin, and it looked all artsy and beautiful.

That would be one of a kind. That would be irreplaceable.

A non-fungible token is a “digital collectible” – a one off thing – which has its own serial number and is thereby unique. You may have seen these things on TV. A lot of footballers and celebrities got into this stuff. A lot of them launched their own.

Back in the sands of time, in the 1600’s, Dutch high society was obsessed by rare and beautiful tulip bulbs, and this led to the price and value of them soaring. Ordinary people made fortunes selling them, and rich people hoarded them as “investments.” Almost overnight the “market” collapsed as people came to their senses and realised how mad it was. Fortunes were lost in the blink of an eye. It was the first example of a “bubble.”

But if you had a tulip bulb you had something that you can plant and grow. You can do literally nothing with an NFT except boast about it to your friends, who might think you have more money than sense. They have no “value” because they don’t do anything.

If you buy a painting, you can hang it on your wall. If it’s an original by someone famous you might even have an appreciating asset. You could also buy a poster of your favourite painting and hang that on the wall. But you will never be able to pass that version of “Sunflowers” off as the original.

On the other hand, if you “copied” an NFT – and almost all of them have been copied and people even take great pleasure in doing so and openly boasting about it – people could very well pass that off as an original because it would indistinguishable from one.

In short, it is essentially worthless unless you are trading it to another buyer who is even dafter than you. I have looked into this stuff. It is the silliest thing you could spend money on. Literally.

The NFT market is a racket. The NFT market is a con. It’s been compared to a Ponzi scheme, which is exactly right.

A handful of people at the top of the pyramid make a lot of money. Everyone else finds themselves with nothing, or at least nothing you want to admit to your friends. NFT-mania is a bubble just like the tulips. It is a form of madness.

Ibrox has flirted with this. They had two separate NFT deals. Back in 2022 anyway.

You know why you never hear about them now? One of them collapsed because the company running it collapsed. That’s common with NFT’s. A lot of the schemes which sell them are pump-and-dumps, a classic fraudulent strategy. I’m not saying that’s what happened, but it fit the pattern of one.

They used the surviving one to opt-out of the an SPFL contract promoting their own version … you know why you never hear about that? Because it’s a ridiculous concept. To the best of my knowledge the SPFL never even offered its NFT’s, and if it did it was so low key they may as well not have bothered to. I’ve barely heard a word about the Ibrox one either.

This is something we’re well shot of. I know we signed a deal to partner up with one of these firms but once again I heard nothing beyond that, which leads me to suspect that the whole idea is very low on the list of our priorities.

Good. I hope we have nothing more to do with it.

They whole market is based on selling worthless junk, mostly to people who believe that they are buying something of value.

Our club shouldn’t be near anything this tawdry.

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