I Remain At Sea

Backed by cryptocurrency and with familiar elements of both “Moneyball” and “Ted Lasso,” a group of American investors say they plan to purchase an English soccer team and rely on advanced analytics and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to create a new model of sports team ownership.

The group, WAGMI United, says it’s in the advanced stages of purchasing an English Football League club. The investors are believed to be the first group to buy a major sports franchise with cryptocurrency serving as a significant funding source.

They declined to identify the club until the sale is complete, which they said could be within the next month. The team competes in the one of the lower two leagues of the English Football League, known as League One and League Two, the investors said. …

Cryptocurrency and NFTs have become increasingly entrenched in the sports world, with athletes, teams and leagues all selling digital offerings and collectibles. The Los Angeles arena shared by the Clippers and Lakers will be renamed Crypto.com Arena. The Sacramento Kings started mining cryptocurrency in their arena three years ago. And an increasing number of organizations have offered limited NFT collections, including the NBA’s Golden State Warriors and Washington Wizards and the NHL’s New Jersey Devils and Washington Capitals.

But WAGMI United is aiming for something more comprehensive, making NFTs a cornerstone of the organizational blueprint around which it hopes to build a vibrant — and financially invested — digital community.[WaPo]

I still don’t see how this ends in anything but tears, though. Look, in the old-fashioned economic world, an economic transaction depended on differing relative values, or desires, to make an economic transaction. One person has a pile of salt, another has a pile of corn. Each needs at least some of what the other has, and thus the makings of a trade are discovered.

And it’s easy to see how NFTs are a desirable instrument for producers of digital goods. They give, at least in my mind, the veneer of ownership of a product which is inherently non-ownable: a digital picture, video, or most anything else residing in computer memory is a sequence of atomic entities (I avoid the term binary bits, as there have been quiet rumblings about systems based on trinary bits, although whether they’ll ever become available, or even common, is a wide open question; and that avoids quantum computing questions entirely, doesn’t it?) which can usually be easily copied. But by permitting the transfer of “ownership”, value can then be imputed, and things representing value exchanged for the “ownership” of the digital artifact.

But the buyer? One buys a digital picture, someone else copies it. The thrill of “ownership” has usually been based on the tangible attributes of control, whether it be to eat that cup of corn, or appreciate the efforts of the master artist. I don’t see any such attributes for the digital artifact consumer who is spending money on NFTs.

Now if the day comes when proving ownership of a digital entity is a necessity in order to unlock access to certain functionalities, then my thinking will be reordered. But why that’d be different from current security measures is not at all clear to me.