Collecting crypto stamps may never catch on.
My father is a stamp collector. Last month he expanded his stamp collection with something new: an NFT stamp, issued by the Austrian Post Office.
For those who don’t know, stamp collecting is a serious hobby. The most expensive stamp ever was issued in British Guiana in 1857 and sold at Sotheby’s for almost $9.5 million. The cheapest and easiest stamps to purchase are available at your local post office for around $0.60. Somewhere in the middle are Crypto Stamps (from cryptostamp.com), which cost 9.90 euros ($10.82) each.
The website for Crypto Stamps, published by the real Austrian Post Office, looks like the lowest level NFT scam site ever, with strange capitalization, bad English and all.
In this example, below their roadmap for the Crypto Stamp bear my dad bought, it says:
This is a real screenshot from the Austrian Post Office’s Crypto Stamp website (auto translated)
Whatever it looks like, the Crypto Stamp really did arrive in the mail – a physical “twin” stamp to the NFT stamp that would live on the blockchain. Maybe you’re reading this and thinking: nice! This is a real-world example of an NFT use case, combining collecting with the blockchain to add value and leverage the immutability of blockchain to improve a well-known hobby.
Some stamp collectors or philatelists feel the same way. One stamp blog I found wrote the following:
“One fact we must face is that physical stamps will soon be limited to the same domains as LPs, books and DVDs. […] If that happens, crypto stamps could hold the key to the future of philately.”
But after setting up my dad’s Crypto Stamp with him, I’m convinced this is all just nonsense.
The process for activating your Crypto Stamp leaves a lot to be desired. Despite the fact that my father had printed out and stapled together the five pages of instructions from the website (how Web1 of him), the instructions for turning the cardboard stamp (and the safe that evolves the stamp) which he received in the mail in a blockchain-based NFT was nonsensical.
My plan had been to sit back and watch an avid stamp collector collect his new NFT stamp.
The complexity of the process meant I had to jump in – and even my five years of experience in crypto journalism plus the various NFTs in my MetaMask weren’t enough to actually get my dad his Crypto stamp.
The first hurdle was realizing that my father didn’t know what private keys were. Luckily, I was around to stop him from uploading his Crypto Stamp private keys to the cloud for anyone to steal.
The second and biggest hurdle was realizing that cryptostamp.com assumed you already had a MetaMask wallet. No problem, we simply downloaded the browser version.
The third hurdle was that we had to open both the Crypto Stamp Safe and Stamp at the same time and then click “morph” to change the NFT from a baby bear to a baby bear with a pacifier. (What this has to do with the Austrian Post Office, who knows.)
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Unfortunately, after an hour and a half of playing with the website, it turned out to be absolutely impossible to get the baby bear Crypto Stamp to appear in MetaMask. At first I thought the delay was due to slow block times on Polygon’s network – or as my dad put it, “Are crypto miners in Mongolia, hmmmm, time to make Zuckerman’s NFT stamp?”
Eventually I realized that this was because the website itself must be broken in some fundamental way. Or they didn’t give us enough information to get the job done. Or we didn’t use MetaMask correctly. Who knows.
While I am a true and proud crypto skeptic, I have always thought that NFTs would have some value if they were used by industries they would fit well into – like collecting Pokemon cards… or stamps.
The main takeaway from this playful experiment from a stamp collector trying to collect an NFT stamp is not only that the entire process was prohibitively confusing, but that the NFT stamp itself didn’t seem to spark as much joy as a regular stamp. for a true philatelist.
And while not all stamps are used to send letters — as my dad told me, some post offices release specially collectible Elvis or Princess Di stamps to collect that pure profit — an NFT collectible stamp seems to be even less useful than a real collector’s stamp. . Not only can you not send a letter if you want to, you also spend hours on a computer trying to understand switching between Ethereum and Polygon on MetaMask.
Both types of stamps were never intended to be mailed, but the NFT version sucked all the fun out of stamp collecting. Adding a digital baby bear stamp to your collection shouldn’t be forever more difficult than sticking a physical stamp into a book.
Later that evening we checked MetaMask again to see if the baby bear had already reached the Web3 radio waves, or was somehow “stuck in Web2,” as my father said. Nothing.
My stamp collecting father’s final words on this issue are reminiscent of how many NFT collectors are probably feeling now that the market has so thoroughly bottomed: “I had a lot of fun with you, but what did I get in the end?”
Still nothing.
I don’t care much about technology, I don’t care much about finance either. I like writing stories and seeing strange things happen. And that’s why I got into crypto.
But because I lack that passion for what crypto and blockchain are all about – finance, technology, privacy, yadda yadda – I’m going to write about what I’m actually interested in instead. Everything about crypto that has very little to do with crypto.
That’s what this column is about. All the tangential stories coming out of the blockchain and crypto space, what I think about them, and how I navigate them as a skeptical former Russian Literature major.
It is precisely my position as an outsider that allows me to do what I do: give an opinion from all sides on every crypto issue, without obligations, without any involvement.
If you want to talk crypto with me, let’s go off-topic.