- Have you ever wanted to buy a tweet? Crypto startup Valuables lets you do that, via the medium of NFTs
- Valuables lets you buy a “digital certificate” of a tweet as an NFT on the Ethereum network
- You don’t own the tweet or the rights to the content, making it more of a digital trinket than a money making opportunity
Would you buy a tweet? That’s the concept created by Valuables, a project that offers individuals the chance to buy a “digital certificate” of a tweet via a non-fungible token (NFT) that they can…not do much with. It’s more complicated than that of course, but why on Earth should you buy a tweet, and what do you get for your money? Our guide answers all.
How do you buy a tweet through Valuables?
You can buy a tweet easily through the Valuables platform. Just paste the link to the tweet into their site along with your bid in ETH and it gets sent to the author. If they accept your bid, congratulations – you own the tweet!
The tweet itself is signed cryptographically and turned into an NFT, which is sent to your Ethereum address.
So what are you actually buying?
According to Valuables you have bought “a digital certificate of the tweet” which is “unique because it has been signed and verified by the creator.” They liken it to an autographed baseball card – there may be thousands of the same card out there, but yours is special because it’s been signed by the author.
And thanks to blockchain, there will only ever be one signed tweet – yours.
Why would I want to spend money on a tweet?
There are various reasons why you might want to buy a tweet, just as there are many reasons you might want to buy any collectible. The tweet may have special meaning to you personally, given who wrote it or what the subject matter is. This may sound silly, but think of it this way – how much would you like to own the NFT of Hal Finney’s ‘running Bitcoin’ tweet? Yeah, that got you thinking didn’t it?
This leads to another consideration – the NFT could increase in value over time. Just as an artist’s work typically increases in value after they have passed away, so the same could be with tweet NFTs. Consider if you had bought Hal Finney’s ‘running Bitcoin’ tweet back when it was posted in 2009. It would certainly be worth more now than it was then.
What are the downsides?
The biggest downside to buying a tweet is that the author can delete the tweet at any time, meaning that your investment might literally disappear overnight. This is one reason why tweet NFTs might increase in value after the individual passes away – they can no longer be deleted.
Then there’s the consideration of what you can actually do with a tweet NFT. You can look at it online, you can use it as a desktop screensaver, you could print it out and frame it, or you could put it in a digital photo frame…in fact, all the things anyone can do with any tweet, including the one you’ve just bought.
As with all art, the value of tweet NFTs is what they mean to you and represent intrinsically, not how they are extrinsically perceived.
Will You Funge Your Way to a Special Tweet?
So should you buy a tweet? Of course the simple answer is that it is up to you. If there is a tweet that resonates particularly strongly with you then it might be nice to know that the author, who could be someone you admire, has ‘signed’ the tweet and that this signed version can only ever belong to you, unless you sell it.
Valuables has created a great platform that expands the NFT offering into interesting new areas, which, after all, is what blockchain technology and cryptocurrency is all about.
