Art my fans already own has increased in value 1–100x because I connected it to the blockchain as NFTs

Plus a thought experiment: Could you increase the value of NFTs by burning the physical art?

Adrian Hanft
9 min readSep 26, 2021

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Hello, friends. I have a thought experiment for you today. About 97 of you received a postcard in the mail from me. I am going to try to increase the value of that art from hundreds of miles away through the power of ideas…

100 postcards were sent to friends and fans earlier this year

(The art I am talking about is an art project I call Postcard Zero. I made 100 cards, but I still have three left. You can see all 100 postcards here, if you are curious: adrian3.com/postcards/ If you didn’t receive one, hunt me down and get your name on my mailing list. I’ll have more postcards in the future, so you might want to get on the list, anyway, before the next batch goes out.)

What’s a postcard like this worth? You could say that it’s only worth the paper it’s printed on. It’s a ten cent card, a 3 cent label, and if you give me credit for the stamp you are in the $0.50-$0.75 range. Hopefully it’s worth more than that, but who knows? Maybe it’s priceless!

Piece of advice: If somebody says they gave you a priceless piece of artwork, maybe don’t take their word for it. How do you trust someone anyway?

As I was saying, each of my postcards are one-of-a-kind. There are only 100 of them and each one is a signed original. It’s a stretch to say they are priceless, after all if they were I would have seen them being resold on Ebay. All we can say is that the art’s value is somewhere on the spectrum from worthless to priceless. How do you evaluate that?

The thought experiment is to see if I can double, triple, or 100x the value of those postcards. But before I get to that, I need to back up. Would you agree that the more authentic something is, the more value it has? If I were to duplicate my artwork, every time I reprint it the value would go down. In other words, as supply increases, demand would decrease and so would the value. By extension, objects that are hard to forge are inherently more authentic because the difficulty to reproduce something ensures that what you have is original.

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Adrian Hanft

Author of User Zero: Inside the Tool that is Reshaping Dystopia