Charlie Lee weighs in on the recent NFT craze

According to Litecoin’s creator Charlie Lee, most NFTs are not as valuable as most people assume. Lee expressed his opinions on non-fungible tokens, aka NFTs, in a series of tweets last week.

An NFT is a digital certificate to a collectable that can be easily, cheaply, and perfectly duplicated.

🧵👇

— Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) March 4, 2021

The Litecoin boss started by defining what NFTs are. For clarity, OpenSea’s NFT Bible defines these classes of assets as “unique, digital items with blockchain-managed ownership.” Some examples of NTFs include “collectibles, game items, digital art, event tickets, domain names, and even ownership records for physical assets.”

According to Lee, an NFT of say a song or any other digital item is simply a certificate of authenticity. However, he opines that while the certificate may be worth something, “the majority of the value of owning a collectible is lost by switching the ownership from the actual collectible to its certificate of authenticity.”

Lee is not the only person with sentiments against NFTs. Bitcoin developer Jimmy Song recently published an article detailing why he sees no sense in NFTs. He wrote:

[NFTs] are tokens on some blockchain (usually ETH) that purports to represent a piece of art. This could be a video, picture, song, or anything else. The idea is that this mp4, jpg, mp3, or txt file can be made scarce by associating it with a token. Nothing associates the two except by convention. The token has no ability to unlock anything, it’s a representation, only because the artist declares that it does.

He went further to liken the recent craze to the ICO boom of 2017.