Digital ownership tokens could work if there legal framework imbuing digital property with the same attributes as physical property, i.e. legal ownership and the right to sell, trade, donate, loan or destroy it just as with a real thing. And tokens would have to be maintained by a single platform with legal weight behind it. If there were such a thing and platforms were compelled to support it, then it could work.
But NFTs were not that. They were a scam from the get go. I truly wonder how anybody could be stupid enough to believe a URL pointing at a machine generated picture would ever be worth something let alone appreciate in value. Or buying content in dogshit NFT based games like Legacy or Earth 2. Or that scam game Logan Paul endorsed. Or buying real plots of land such as on “Satoshi” (Lataroa) Island - a malaria riddled jungle that was sold as libertarian asshole utopia before it flopped. But people did. Because people are stupid.
NFT just served as a training opportunity for the people behind it to learn how to get away with legally scamming people, not surprised the Reddit admin was all in on it when it came out.
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.
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”.
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.
Only to people with brains.
Nah, A large portion of it was idiots attempting to lose money as quickly as possible.
Etherium was run out of the offices of JP Morgan Chase and NFTs were a gimmick to boost the deal flow of their then-underperforming crypto offering.
It was, by and large, an enormous investment in sales and marketing on top of a ton of insanely shady business practices. Case in point, the infamous Beeple NFT that sold for $69.3M was purchased with Etherium to showcase Christie’s auction house accepting cryptocurrency for auction bids. The winning bidder for artwork was an early crypto adopter and marketer named Vignesh Sundaresan who was flush with these tokens, but lacked any kind of liquid market to sell them into yet. That’s before you get into the Congo Line of largely clueless celebrities going on Late Night comedy shows to plug their online pogs.
It’s trite to say that the whole thing was a scam because… duh. But I think people read this as “just dumb people being stupid with their stupid dumb money” and ignore the layer upon layer of market manipulation and con-artistry that went into making cryptocurrencies what they are today.
The fact that Donald Trump is using them to launder bribes from Middle Eastern dictators and East Asian kleptocrats should illustrate how deep these rabbit holes can go. It’s so much more than just peddling bad clipart to dumb bros.
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
If you weren’t using them to launder money for a criminal enterprise, then you were doing them wrong.
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.
I would replace “dramatic” with “predictable”. Everybody knew it was bullshit. It was like tulip mania, but without actual tulips.
This is the least surprising thing ever
That’s why I divested to Labubu dolls and TSLA
The whole NFT thing was one giant pump and dump.
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?
Hey! You be fair to the NFT owners.
They never owned digital art, just a link to a specific instance of one!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
