Disagree, it’s one of the best. Community access is the primary value of the “prestige nfts”. Do you think people like ape jpegs?

It’s membership cards.

Augusta hosts The Masters. It's the most prestigious golf club in the world. And you also get to actually play golf for your money. It's worlds away from owning a useless picture of a monkey.

Why do you think it is the most prestigious golf club in the world? What makes it different from my local golf club?

I just mentioned it's because they host The Masters. Basically the Super Bowl of golf.

They host the masters because they are most prestigious, not the other way around.

Any golf club can host the masters, all you need is some well-maintained grass. but Augusta will always be exclusive to the power brokers of society.

Augusta, like NFT is an exclusionary club only meant for rich people. Both are useless, and probably harmful to society at large, but fulfill a basic human need.

Sorry but no. Augusta was created specifically for the Masters. And I'm pretty sure the people who play golf on the course don't find it useless, weird power broker rant aside.

Once again, you can actually play golf there. It's not useless. NFTs are useless. Bad analogy.

I don’t love NFTs but I think it’s an apt analogy. Augusta membership card is useless, I can play golf at the public park.

How does owning an NFT that is similar to someone else’s give access to that person or community? Do you have examples?

It doesn’t matter if you have one of the many copies of the Bored Ape jpeg NFTs others have made, what matters is you have an NFT provided by contract 0xaba7161a7fb69c88e16ed9f455ce62b791ee4d03 . The jpeg is irrelevant even. If you have an NFT from this contract you are in the club.

If the jpeg is irrelevant, shouldn’t all NFTs from the same contract cost the same? If it’s just a club membership, why would people buy multiple NFTs from the same contract?

Broadly, because there are multiple tiers of status at play.

1) "I was rich enough to buy a Bored Ape NFT". This is for status relative to people outside the club.

2) "I was rich enough to buy a super-expensive Bored Ape NFT". This is for status within the club, it lets them all know how rich you are.

It's all yuck to me, but people have different motivations.

Onchain metadata, the ERC721Metadata standard allows key value pairs associated with the NFT, this is where well the hyperlink to the jpeg is stored. These further allow non-fungible properties to the individual token, and where the rarity is derived (eg: hat: red, which 5/10k tokens have).

I think they were alluding to the Bored Apes Yacht Club, one of the most popular "profile picture" NFT collections.