Oceans of Wisdom

even with human experts

other than a handful of collections near the floor

it is really hard to value anything right now

we do hand valuations each january on all 1,000 fund NFTs

it is where others come out

anyway $5B is a reasonable ballpark

flip side is also true

i think they are redoing the whole algorithm in any case

it evens out at this level

$5.5B - this number here is pretty good. it is missing RP, 1/1s, tezos, ordinals so add I dunno $0.5B to $1B to whatever the floating figure is https://nftvaluations.com/

wow

keeping your art allocation in your portfolio equal! smart!

is that worth more or less than what the smithsonian is worth to America over years and decades and centuries

which would be gone, well, instantly

so if we liquidated the smithsonian, we each get $165

Using “all Americans” as the U.S. population/residents denominator, I get 342.68 million from the latest FRED/BEA monthly population series, so each $1 billion of value equals about $2.92 per American. (FRED) The Smithsonian is a weird legal/financial object: Congress created it as a trust of the United States administered by the Board of Regents, and its FY2025 audited financials split assets into Trust and Federal buckets. Audited balance-sheet answer, before valuing the collections Valuation bucket Value Per American Trust net assets without donor restrictions — the narrow “cashable-ish” bucket closest to the “$5 stake” joke $1.819B $5.31 Total net assets without donor restrictions $3.403B $9.93 Total Smithsonian net assets, including donor-restricted assets $6.509B $18.99 Total gross assets before liabilities $7.891B $23.03 Cash/Treasury + investments, gross $4.411B $12.87 So the clean accounting answer is: about $19 per American net, or $23 per American gross, excluding the collections. That exclusion is the whole point. The Smithsonian assigns no balance-sheet value to its collections “in conformity with the practice generally followed by museums”; proceeds from deaccessions are designated for future collection acquisitions, not general cash distribution. Also, some land occupied by Smithsonian buildings is titled in the name of the U.S. government and assigned no financial-statement value. My orderly-sale fair-market-value estimate The IRS-style fair-market-value concept is a willing buyer and willing seller, neither forced, both informed. (IRS) The Smithsonian says its collections are nearly 157 million objects, works of art, and specimens, including nearly 148 million scientific specimens at Natural History. (Smithsonian Institution) That means the value is extremely skewed: most objects have little private-market value, while a small number of icons, art works, gems, aircraft/space artifacts, presidential/historical objects, etc. would carry huge prices if they could legally and ethically be sold. For an orderly sale over years, my working FMV range for the collections alone would be: Hypothetical collection FMV Collection value per American Add audited net assets All-in per American $25B low case $73 $31.5B total $92 $50B base case $146 $56.5B total $165 $75B high case $219 $81.5B total $238 $100B aggressive upper case $292 $106.5B total $311 I would put my single-number estimate around $50B for the collections, making the Smithsonian’s all-in orderly-sale value roughly $56.5B, or about $165 per American. A sanity check: the global art market was about $59.6B in sales in 2025. (Global) A Smithsonian collection sale of $25B–$75B over ten years would equal roughly 4%–13% of one year’s global art-market volume per year, which is large but not impossible if marketed globally and slowly. Much above $100B starts requiring either decades of absorption, exceptional sovereign/mega-collector bidding, or heroic assumptions about the top icons. So: $5 is only defensible for a narrow unrestricted-trust-accounting slice. $19 is the audited net-asset number. $100–$250 per American is the more plausible “orderly-sale including collections” thought-experiment range, with ~$165 as my midpoint. The public-good value is a different question and likely much higher than the sell-the-marble number.

and people in the future have the right to make that decision then

the methods exist

if it is a good idea to fund the museum

and bind people 1, 5, 25 years down the line

i do not want to bake anything into the protocol

but if 'south korea' then a lot

we don't know how many projects we want to do in the end

no need. each project we do like this one, should stand alone; it can submit meme cards or next gen or stream or whatever else

but by Americabeing a more valuable brand, attractive desitnation etc

because most of the value of the statue of liberty is not captured by the ticket sales office

well, you are a moron

and so if you sold it based on a normal business valuation of a multiple of the profit of ticket sales and someone shipped it off to russia or china or qatar

for the united states than the ticket sales to visit it

the statue of liberty creates WAY more value

that it creates value that it cannot capture

but positive externalities

the defining item is not income/not income

where does their money come from otherwise

public goods all have income streams

like barbarians taking down a classical monument for the marble it contains

it is cringe bc the people are missing the point

to treat them as meme coins

that is why it is so cringe AF

they make eveything else more valuable

museums, cultural institutions, parks, marine preserves, in some cases hospitals, universities, armies are public goods

than as a balance sheet asset

as a public good

the smithsonian is much more valuable

$5 for their stake in the Smithsonian

is putting on their net worth statement

and it is not like each American citizen

in practice this would never happen

but only in principle

in some way of course the state owns the smithsonian and in principle could sell it and could then distribute the money as a tax refund or something