As with all things, complacency will spell the death of a career. I always keep my eye open to new options even when I’m not looking for a change because you never know when the perfect opportunity might come along.

Today, I was sent a job description by a recruiter for a Product Manager at a new media company. One of the requirements was experience with Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). Honestly, I don’t know much about NFTs other than it’s typically an image that’s cryptographically protected by being “tokenized” using blockchain.

But seriously, what’s the point? For instance, Tom Anderson, who is better known to the world as MySpace Tom, created NFTs of his profile picture from MySpace. There are multiple versions of this that all look the same. Additionally, there are millions of copies of this image floating around the internet. So what’s the point of buying it as an NFT other than the “pride” of saying I own it? I’m not really sure. I’ve been to an art gallery displaying NFTs on large monitors and I walked away feeling beyond underwhelmed. At the height of their value, the NFT economy was valued somewhere around $22 billion. Yes, that’s right, billion. However, that was short lived as the market spoke and the correction decimated NFTs, reducing their market value to around $500 million. I’m sure those that bought NFTs saw the purchase as an investment, but you literally own nothing. It’s just like the concept of digital currency.

Digital currency, in my opinion, is one of the greatest scams of my generation. I understand the desire to have a currency that’s not managed by a government. I would love this. It fits strongly with my ideas as a center-right libertarian. Unfortunately, the federal governments all over the world already have their fingers in every single digital currency. Digital currency is also subject to data loss. I understand we have backups and backups of backups, but let me tell you, unless you have your backups in an underground bunker complete with a Faraday cage, your backups are worthless against an EMP. Eventually a bad actor, probably a foreign government, or our beloved sun that provides us with warmth and energy, will produce an EMP large enough to wipe our digital footprint. This may happen next week, next month, next year, next century, or next millennia, but it will eventually happen. When the ones and zeros are gone, so will be the NFTs and cryptocurrencies. Even fiat currency at that point will likely have no value. If you’re looking to invest money into something that will grow in value, there are always traditional stocks and bonds. I would also highly recommend precious metals and jewels as they always have value, even in a society with no currency. Firearms and tools, which not of much value in our current economy, would have immense value in a non-digital society. I’m not saying you should start hording these things, but a diverse portfolio is always a good idea.