Digital Philately: Collectible Digital Stamps

Digital Collectibles

Stamps and Things

Why do collectors collect? It's a tough question that non-collectors will never truly be able to answer. Those of us who do collect though, know the passion for things most others find, well, strange. For some, it's spoons for others dolls. I once saw a collection of potato crisps that looked like famous people.

Digital collectibles are fairly new but have proven to awaken passions among collectors. Game items like magical artifacts or weapons can fetch high prices and have dedicated marketplaces for buying and trading them. Crypto Kitties have shown that even images of cats can be collected and some of those sold for well over $100,000.

Digital Philately

Stamp collecting hjas been around forever. It even has a cool name, philately. Some people like the pictures, some like imagining where they've been and some, of course, collect for profit.

Digital stamps, like their physical counterparts, are pictures. Ours, made with tools from DigiPhi, also have code that makes each one unique. We use special cryptographic codes so each stamp is not only individually identifiable but also it makes each one impossible to counterfeit. (For those interested we use cryptographic hashing, blockchain, and digital signatures technology).

DigiPhi offers tools allowing anyone to issue their own collectible stamps. Stamps can be designed using elements we provide or you can design your own.

We also have a feature that paper stamps don't share. A Series of stamps can be designed so that there are variations. They can have a few variations so your Series has, let's say, 10 different versions of each stamp, or you can easily create enough so that there are millions of possible versions. Exactly how that looks is up to the designer or artists.

DigiPhi Jargon

Minting The creation of a stamp. This includes assembling visual elements chosen or created by the artist/designer and cryptographic elements that make each stamp a provably unique digital object.
Stamp The most basic unit, the singular artifact. Every stamp is cryptographically unique and can be proven genuine at any time. Furthermore, the date of minting as well as the order (1st or 50th or last minted in a series) a matter of permanent, unalterable, and verifiable record. This makes it possible for an individual stamp to become more valuable than others in the same series.
Sheet A set of 9 stamps in a 3x3 square. When sold the sheet can be identified as a single unit. Stamps can be separated from it, breaking the sheet which then can never be reunited. It's a digital version of a stamps sheet. An unbroken sheet with particularly collectible attributes can become more valuable than a set of 9 loose stamps.
Series A limited set of stamps being sold. The limit is usually time-based with a closing date at which time no new stamps in that Series will be minted and sold (existing stamps can, of course, be sold forever) or, the limit can be a maximum number of stamps regardless of how long it takes to sell them. A series may or may not look visually unique - this is up to the artist who creates them.
Set An informal grouping of related series, for instance, a team may offer a Series per player to form a "set of Series". The set isn't specifically identified when stamps are minted so they can even become so grouped after the Series end. For instance, if all the teams in a given league offer Series per player, as mentioned above, collectors may find that sets of MVP's across all teams may become especially sought after.

Launching Digital Philately

To help create an interest in collecting digital stamps we are creating a sweepstakes. Each stamp sold will have the possibility to win a cash prize for its owner. Also, anyone who buys a stamp can sell stamps to earn commissions and improve the odds of getting cash bonuses. For more info see the links below.

Learn About the Sweepstakes


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