Isn’t it pretty obvious this was 99% a money laundering scheme?
If it wasn’t in the beginning, it was after Folding Ideas/Dan Olson released “Line Goes Up”.
Only to people with brains.
Walking up to a game of Three Card Monte and saying “It’s pretty obvious he’s palmed the Queen” mostly just gets you heckled and chased away.
Part of the problem with digital spaces is that you’ve got your person setting up the scam, and then you’ve got your layer of people marketing the scam, and then you’ve got your first layer of suckers who think they are coming out ahead on the scam, and then you’ve got the second layer of suckers who all know a tier-one sucker who just got rich. And then you’ve got the bots and the ideologues and the contrarians and the know-it-alls, all repeating the line that the person who set up the scam encourages them to say.
And it’s over all that cacophony that you announce “It’s obviously a scam”. Then Reddit boots you for violating terms and conditions of the platform.
Nah, A large portion of it was idiots attempting to lose money as quickly as possible.
Everyone comment how much did they lose on NFTs.
I will start: $0.
Also I made: 0$
I found value in shitting on people buying them. $0 monetary gain, but at least $10 in schadenfreude.
I trolled people by setting their NFT as my avatar in the chat rooms they were in. Im going to value that at $100.
Better hope they don’t sue you for copyright infringement.
/s
My favorite bit was how basically none of the NFTs included copyright ownership. Like, if it was a quick and easy way to publicly deal in copyright ownership, maybe pointing to a .gov site showing the transfer of ownership to the holder of that specific nft then it would actually be useful and maybe even worth something. But nah, they were treating digital assets like physical paintings and hoping rarity of an infinitely copiable object was value.
Best use of an NFT I’ve ever heard of!
I’ve been watching a lot of Antiques Roadshow clips and I imagined one of the appraisers doing a valuation of your shenanigans.
“You bought this magnificent piece sillyness when and for how much?”
“oh I just copypasted it to my profile for no money at all”
“Well that was very good deal indeed, because on in todays money the entertainment value alone is in the hundreds of pounds.”
Putting a dollar figure on your schadenfreude? Do you want a block chain based “prediction market” for schadenfreude? That’s how you get a block chain based “prediction market” for schadenfreude.
Yes, as long as I’m on the receiving end of the pump and dump. In the end, I’ll only be taking money from people that clearly have too much. I’ll donate some to some good charity so it’s not a bad thing
Damn, I lost twice as much as you did.
I actually got a free NFT in some kind of sweepstakes. It’s probably worth negative money now.
It did get me 3 free drinks at a music festival so there’s like +50 bucks in value right there.
$0
Under a grand. Is there anyone really stupid enough to think this is still worth anything at all?
I would actually pay like $100 to say I own the EFT some moron paid millions of dollars for. I’ve bought dumber things. I paid real money for a 100 trillion dollar zimbabwe bill that is completely worthless. Great for cocaine! I’ve also paid hundreds of dollars for 1 night of cocaine, dozens of times, and have nothing to show for any of them.
Yeah i was thinking that the other day when they were talking about an 11 million dollar EFT now valued at 100 USD.
I was like, shit, I’d pay 100 USD for that one.
Plus imagine if another bubble came and some donkey was willing to pay a ton for it again for some dumb reason.
A 100 dollar meme like that would be worth it IMO.
feels akin to my GME shares, I just wanted to be included in the fun LOL.
BRB gonna go buy all the rump coins from the bag holders.
T’would be funny if this kind of demand drove the prices back up. Not to money laundering levels, but like to like $180 or something.
You can just say you did that without having to pay the money, the only thing you’d be missing is a website (that probably won’t be around much longer) confirming you did that. That’s kinda why NFTs didn’t work.
Pro tip: lie to the people around you about stupid stuff.
The real LPT is always in the comments.
The existence of people stupid enough to pay for them is what makes NFTs worth something in the first place
What? You mean digital art that infinitely reproducible, can’t actually be owned, WASN’T the next big thing? Oh jeez. I hope the metaverse succeeds and if not then AI surely will RIGHT?!?!
Hey but this cryptographic key says that I own it because I paid made up currency units for it or something
Hey but that made up currency I worked for by burning electricity, I mean MINING it.
Hey, but the recent changes means I earned that made up currency by proving I own more than you!
OH! It’s an epeen thing! Got you! All the rich win. Congrats to them.
It’s an epeen thing!
Does that require proof of wank?
All the rich win.
Basically…
My favorite thing is there are certain NFTs that are viruses that as soon as you do ANYTHING with them, they go and transfer all of the contents of your wallet to another wallet. Even deleting them triggers this action. So if you have unknown NFTs in your wallet you can’t touch them lest they trigger this virus.
How could this not be the future of commerce?
WHAT?!? I’ve never heard of that! That’s nefarious! WOW!
I got it from a Folding Ideas video (the problem with nfts one)
But here’s a link actually detailing it https://www.gate.com/learn/articles/beware-of-unexpected-nfts-and-assets-in-your-wallet-they-could-steal-all-your-funds/7682
Edit: for those that haven’t seen the video it’s worth the 2 hour watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
Hey! You be fair to the NFT owners.
They never owned digital art, just a link to a specific instance of one!
If you weren’t using them to launder money for a criminal enterprise, then you were doing them wrong.
The whole NFT thing was one giant pump and dump.
but for a brief period of time, some people made some money, while most participants lost
edit: do AI next
This describes our species’ entire existence 👌
we were the bored ape all along
As with everything crypto this was a huge scam. Besides the obvious profiting from gullable idiots, the other use case is to illegally funnel money.
Not absolutely everything in crypto is a scam, though 99% of it is, and I will definitely agree with you there. But there is 1% that is actually trying to do something useful, and you’ve got to be able to find that 1% and not throw it out with the bath water.
The silver lining is that after the obligatory exploitation by grifters, every new technology of this caliber finally gets a more positive use in our lifes. Maybe somewhat naive, but I think we (ie. our societies) have payed ~50% of the tuition fee as far as crypto is concerned. So hopefully we’ll be able to absorb the tech in our collective lives soon.
Ps: Different topic, but using the same metaphor for AI, I’m afraid we’re just at the begin of its initial fallout.
I think the rise of Monero over Bitcoin is a very positive sign. Since it has privacy, the government absolutely cannot stand the fact that it exists, and therefore, institutions don’t want to touch it. This means the “number go up”, “to the moon”, and “compliance”, shmucks are all driven away in horror and you are left with the real core who want to see a better money in a digital world. If that sounds interesting, you might want to listen to “darknet Market Maximalism” a manifesto by xenu. You can listen to the audio version of it on YouTube.
Edit: I’ll save you the trouble. Here’s the link directly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ogNg20rGTU
every new technology of this caliber finally gets a more positive use in our lifes
Yeah, sure, that’s why we’re all riding Segways.
The reality is that quite a lot of new technologies have no significant real-life use case and vanish without a trace.
I tried to make clear that I’m talking about tech with potentially significant impact, case in point: blockchain. Are you suggesting that a quirqy twowheeler is somehow on the same level?
Unless trolling is all you’re about, I can recommend refraining from such offhand dismissive remarks. Sarcasm has its use, but rin an anonymous online discussion it is easy to misunderstand. It does not contribute to a meaningful exchange of ideas.
There are great uses for crypto, just like there were great uses for Ithica_hours. A place holder for goods and services without physical constraint is a useful idea.
But it wont work. Because people want to leverage that to make fiat. They don’t care about usefulness, actually earning it, or trading for it.
They want to get some, hold it, and sell it back for their fiat. Because of that exchanges came into being so they could capture some of the wealth in the process. And from then on it was never going to be useful. Just a way to hope the next sucker would buy what you had.
Since the government hates Monero so much, that’s actually not as big of a problem with Monero because people want to earn it and trade it for goods and services in the real world. Also, people who use Monero are incredibly against centralized exchanges and would like to see it banned from every single centralized exchange on Earth so that decentralized exchanges would be the only place you could obtain it or through permissionless atomic swaps and peer to peer. The Monero community also mocks number go up people and calls them state plants.
yeah, the cryptoleftists community has found some decent actual use
Link please! I’m very skeptical but hope to be wrong.
Also worth noting. The Bored Ape Yaht Club NFTs (in the thumbnail) were released by 4chan trolls with Nazi symbolism hidden in some of them. This was the most successful NFT project of them all.
A grand is still 1000 dollars too high a price for these things.
I’ll see your grand and say 950 is still too high.
This is the least surprising thing ever
That’s why I divested to Labubu dolls and TSLA
I think most people don’t understand cryptocurrencies. On one side it’s all hyperbolic about being your own bank and financial freedom and new tech, on the other side it’s hyperbolic about how there is no underlying value, it’s all going to 0, scams, drugs, terrorism, money laundering,…
But the fact is that crypto does have an underlying value. It’s gambling. Gambling is a huge industry.
Also drugs.
I always said as long as crypto can be used to buy drugs, it will have value.
When everything we know in the world is gone and we’re using rocks to make spears again, people will still want drugs, the value is eternal.
I mean it’s also really really good at money laundering and other financial securities scams that are otherwise illegal in real currency. IDK why OP is being so dismissive of that.
As long as the gov refuses to regulate it, it’s going to be useful for crimes. On the off chance we ever get a government willing to actually do anything but war crimes and graft, regulating it would destroy a lot of its utility and value.
I think it’s an exaggeration of its crime utility. Normal money is king for crime.
Normal money can get you a visit from the SEC when you do securities fraud with it. Has that ever happened with a crypto pump and dump?
Yes.
SBF wasn’t doing securities fraud with only crypto, if that’s what you’re thinking of. Also it was a pyramid scheme and not a pump and dump.
Congrats, now you understand fiat currency. It only has value because we agree on it.
No. I mean you can get all philosophical and say that everything has value only because that’s a human concept, but thats not really something I would answer to.
Fiat has value because it’s enforced. Because we have institutions that enforce it and because all of our lives are intertwined with it. We buy food with it and we are paid with it. It’s everywhere. It doesn’t make it immune to manipulation and fraud and crime, but we can take legal action because law is also intertwined with the same system.
Crypto is , with a couple of exceptions, a really terrible casino.
Fiat has value because the government demands taxes in it. If you don’t pay your taxes, they put you in jail.
As opposed to the USD, which is backed by nothing, and therefore has no underlying value, but is not gambling for some reason?
The USD is backed by a state who demands their taxes be paid in their currency, ensuring there will always be demand for said currency.
This is also why people who complain about how “our tax dollars” are spent are missing the point. Their tax dollars don’t fund the government or any of its activities. Taxes are just an inflationary control measure; money is created when the government spends it.
Also, literally, tons of gold
Speculating on the value of an investment based on an asset that doesn’t exist is similar to scammers offering to sell certificates of ownership of dogs’ souls.
Capitalism tends over time to create increasingly abstract forms of ownership. And what could be more abstract than ownership of something that isn’t there at all? They’re selling GUIDs that point to nothing.
They can be used to launder money though.
That’s why art is so inflated. It’s used as a means to launder, because it’s the value is so arbitrary.
This was never anything aside from a scam designed to separate the tech illiterate from their money.
