The Mirage of Money (or, NFTs, WTF?)
Why have NFTs captured the American imagination? What can the recent instability in the NFT market tell us about the history of speculative bubbles?
Heather and Joanne put the NFT craze in context with other American financial booms & busts, from the Panic of 1792, to the 1890s Yukon Gold Rush, to the late 1990s dot-com bubble.
Listen On:
There's a hilarious example of speculation, probably connected to the new US national bank, but written as fiction: The Hunchback, by Paul Feval, 1857, translated unabridged in 2021 by Stuart Gelzer. People of various Parisian classes trade tickets of different colours, in frantic exercises of trying to get rich and successful.
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Hunchback_Unabridged_Translation.html?id=NudXzgEACAAJ