Let me start by saying that I am only vaguely familiar with punks on other blockchains. I knew that they existed and that people apparently pay a lot for them. That's about all I knew. Oh, the other thing I had was my opinion that they just sorta look like lazy, bad art.
I don't really mess with many other blockchains all that much, though. Hive was my introduction to blockchains and crypto, really, and it's never been topped. Hive got everything right, even if there are hiccups here and there. The regular usernames are convenient, but also secure in that you can check it character by character much easier than a long string of characters. The multiple keys and user passwords just make sense, too. Don't give someone the skeleton key to your house just to deliver a package in your porch.
Over the two days it was possible to buy them, I got 30 of them. None of them are extremely rare, and that's a little bit of a bummer, but if everyone got extremely rare ones, there wouldn't be any extremely rare ones. The highest rarity score on any of mine as of right now is 892.
What is it? Is it the rarity? I think that's part of it. It's exciting. Minting one has the same excitement as those bubble/egg vending machines many of us liked as children. You never knew what you were going to get, and that was definitely most of the thrill, because you never really got anything good. The same excitement as opening packs of trading cards back in the day, or packs of Splinterlands cards in this day and age.
To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are. It's freedom. - Patti Smith
And that's another appeal. Nothing makes sense anymore, but most of it doesn't benefit people like you and me. I used to think "why the hell would anyone pay that much money for an image like that?!"
Will punk rock ever die? Pal, if you have to ask it's dead to you. - Henry Rollins
It never really made sense to me that it was so simple for people with tons of money to turn that into more money without having to break a sweat. I'm not saying it's wrong or that they shouldn't be able to do it. The injustice was that only they could do it, at least to the ridiculous extent that they did.
I see things like these punks as a way for regular people to invest little and come out on top. 20 Hive was pretty cheap for these, and some of them will be selling for thousands of Hive. Who knows... maybe some of the rarest ones will sell for millions someday. That sounds ridiculous, but not impossible.
Some people are just born into their wealth, and you could say they lucked out. Assets like these silly punks may just be a way for people who weren't born with silver spoons a chance to luck out.
The difference between these punks and something like a lottery is that the purchase and sale of these punks benefits the community, not just the governing body that controls the lottery. Lottery is just a tax on poor people, really. Only one or several people ever win, and desperate people who are unfortunately very bad at math will spend a lot more money than they can afford to lose just to have a one in a million chance. Literally... buy 150 lottery tickets, and your chances are still basically one in a million. That's a phrase people use metaphorically to indicate that something is never going to happen.
Well, I do plan to sell them. I'm not going to HODL them longterm like Splinterlands assets. I'm not going to do it immediately, though. The original sale was 10k packs and they sold out in two days. I want to let the dust settle. A lot of people who are going to buy some of these punks later haven't even heard of them yet.
I spent 600 Hive on them and my hope is to get several/many times that in Hive, and power it up. I want these punks to be how I got to 100k+ Hive Power. That'll be a cool part of my story and I'll be very thankful that I was able to take part in this project and use it to improve my standing on the blockchain and in life.
If I end up selling these for only 601 Hive, it will have been worth it, so I'm not super worried. I like thinking that maybe some of them will be worth thousands of Hive someday, but I'll be okay if it doesn't happen.
