If anyone has been out in the world of stamp collecting lately, you’ll know that there’s been a lot of talk about modern post offices putting out NFTs of their stamps. It’s very limited at the moment and thankfully so, it’s desperately trying to make money by doing anything but the actual job that the post offices exist to do.

What else is new, right? But here’s why this isn’t a part of philately, even though there are a few voices that are adamant that it is. Here is why they are simply wrong.

James Gavin, the Digital Philatelist, has been one of the leading proponents in recent months. He tends to show up in the comments of any video made about NFTs and stamps, declaring that everyone is wrong but him and, frankly, he’s just making himself look like a fool, at least in my opinion. He is, of course, welcome to his opinion but his opinion doesn’t make any rational, defensible sense and I wanted to take some time to explain why he’s so completely off-base.

I’m also going to touch on a video put out by Bob, over at Bob Collects Stamps, even though it’s a minor quibble, because I think it plays into the same fallacy. Feel free to go look at these videos if you wish, just to see the issue in context. Regardless, Bob argued that you don’t even have to collect stamps to be a stamp collector and that’s absolutely false. You do. Granted, there are people out there who collect digital images of stamps, but that’s no more a stamp collection than a picture of a $100 bill will get you anything at the grocery store. A picture of a stamp is not the same thing as the stamp itself. That’s not to say that people can’t collect whatever they want, but in the truest sense of the word, collecting stamps requires actual stamps to be collected. You can’t redefine words at a whim.

Anyhow, back to the point at hand. Gavin often shows up touting philatelic NFTs as though they are identical to the real thing. “But they’re linked to actual postage stamps!” So what? The definition of philately is “the collection and study of postage and imprinted stamps“. There is no way, operating under that definition, that any digital asset can possibly be considered philately because it does nothing, in and of itself, to facilitate moving the mail. If you look at videos like this and this, you can see that I’ve taken him on several times in the comments and he simply refuses to acknowledge where he’s going wrong. In fact, lots of people disagree with him and he simply calls them names, avoids the criticisms and runs away.

So here’s the question that I’ve asked him several times and that he’s entirely failed to answer. The NFT itself, not the stamp that it might be linked to, but the digital asset itself, does absolutely nothing of any kind to facilitate the movement of the mail. Nothing at all. Two stamps, one with an NFT attached and one not, if you stick them both on an envelope and throw them into the mail, they’re both going to get where you want them to go, all things considered. The NFT, the digital asset with no physical form or inherent value, doesn’t help the process one bit. It doesn’t move the mail one millimeter and by the definition provided, that’s not what stamp collecting is.

That’s not to say that people can’t collect anything they want to collect. They are completely free to spend their money any way that they wish and far be it from me to tell them they’re not allowed. However, words mean things and if you showed up at a classic car show with a Matchbox car in  your pocket and demanded that they enter you into the competition, they’d laugh at you and for good reason. That’s not classic car collecting. It’s something different. NFTs are not stamp collecting, they are something different.

Believe it or not, you can collect a lot of different, entirely unrelated things. You can collect things that are tangentially related. That’s entirely for you to decide. I’m not going to tell you what you can and cannot collect, that’s up to you, obviously, but I can and will tell you that you don’t get to redefine words for your own purposes without consequences.

Stamps are physical things. They always have been and they always will be in the realm of philately. NFTs are non-postal items, often made by postal authorities in this instance, as a means to con money out of the general public and collectors alike. They are things, and I use “things” incredibly loosely, with no demonstrable value and no demonstrable usage, separate from the stamp to which they are linked. Therefore, they’re not stamps, they’re just not. I’d really love to see James respond to this but on numerous occasions, when he’s been backed into a corner, instead of just addressing it, he’s run away, screaming “you don’t understand!” behind him. Of course we don’t because you don’t seem capable of making your case.

Maybe you should do something about that.