• @[email protected]
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        211 year ago

        No one will convince me that there isn’t money laundering going on there. There’s just no way an actual person looked at that and thought it is worth that kind of money

      • @[email protected]
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        41 year ago

        Well, no piece of art has an intrinsic value. And auction houses exist to make money, not because of some divine purpose to connect true art to its worthy new owner. Of course they’re going to jump on the hype train if they think it’s worth it. I fully agree that NFTs are a scam, like almost all crypto crap. But so is the current art market. Money laundering and investments for the rich.

        • @Astroturfed
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          21 year ago

          It’s crazy how interlinked black market dealings and money laundering have been to the art world. I shudder to think the amount of artists careers that were made because a couple guys needs to pay each other millions of dollars for something worthless to easily make some clean money on illicit exchanges.

      • @Astroturfed
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        11 year ago

        I’d love to print out that shitty pixel art and wave it at the person who spent $17M on that garbage… Unfortunately I’m sure it’s someone $17M doesn’t mean much to.

    • @[email protected]
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      141 year ago

      A better question would be, did anyone ever even buy them to begin with?

      This means that 79% of all NFT collections – otherwise known as almost 4 out of every 5 – have remained unsold.

      That is, most of the NFTs included in the OP statistic were listed for sale by their creators, and never recorded a sale. Another important detail is that even for the ones that did record sales, there’s no real way of knowing if those sales were real. You can easily make another crypto wallet and buy an NFT from yourself. For more elaborate wash trading, you can find someone with an established wallet to collude with. There are obvious reasons to do this too; building up a history of increasing sale prices could potentially dupe someone into thinking an NFT is a good investment, or you could launder money by selling an NFT to a ‘dirty’ wallet you also control.

      Probably some portion of the market was “real”, but the volume is almost certainly much lower than anyone is reporting. Statistics like what the OP article is quoting are just about totally meaningless.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        I knew people (well one person; in my developer meetup group) that went deep on the NTF craze, like has an spe avatar unironically, spent a bunch on NFTs, and if they’re telling the truth made bank off of them.

        It’s pretty disappointing. I wonder whose money they took.

        • @[email protected]
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          21 year ago

          Again, probably some of it is real, and that’s the segment people who made money dealt with. I think of it as a sort of gambling; your acquaintance won a gambling game, someone else lost. Possibly there were some overly wealthy people buying them for status, or maybe that’s just a myth. But the point is, most NFTs themselves aren’t part of that at all, were never a part of any real market, so doing analysis on them is going to be misleading.

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      Hundreds of millions collectively, when people were dumb enough to buy them. The problem is that eventually dumb people ran out of money and the worth plummeted to zero.

      • @Sterile_Technique
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        41 year ago

        Cost vs worth. Their pricetag may vary; but they’ve been worth nothing since their inception.

  • Em Adespoton
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    281 year ago

    Just because something is unique doesn’t mean it’s valuable.

    Some people are just discovering this.

    • @[email protected]
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      161 year ago

      It’s not even that it’s unique. It’s just one particular system associates you with something. It’s basically those star registry scams. Except you’re not associated with a star by one particular scam organization. You associated with an image of a cartoon ape by a scam organization! But there’s a trendy technology involved so idiots think that makes it somehow legit.

    • @[email protected]
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      51 year ago

      6444&'"_@@¶&5tyj7tfsdyoohoof

      Behold my one of a kind unique string of characters. Me I own this tangible property. But lo! For only 0.42069lol “BTC-lts33” (a REAL and stable currency that is NOT speculative AT ALL) I will maintain a CSV on my server (192.168.6.9/wp-admin/test/test2/myPage.php) I will serve you a guaranteed locally unique identifier (starting at “3” (I’m holding on to the other two strings for a rainy day)) that points to the row with this string, so you can show off that YOU are the sole owner of this totally unique investment property.

      This server is guaranteed up, with 100.00000% uptime since this morning

    • @[email protected]
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      21 year ago

      Try telling that to sports memorabilia collectors though.

      “Look at my hockey jersey!” “Yeah, so? I have the same one.” “Yeah but you’re wasn’t signed by Wayne Gretsky.”

      Or even trading cards, or comics. Or hell, even plain w-shirts with a brand logo on it for $250. People assign arbitrary values to stuff all the time. I don’t understand it at all, but there’s a whole ton of people that just eat that shit up like it’s candy.

      • @[email protected]
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        21 year ago

        That arises at least somewhat more organically around a real interest that millions of people have been enjoying and obsessing over for generations. So it’s not fair to say it’s totally arbitrary.

        The logo stuff is weird though. That’s definitely more “Veblen” like the high price point is itself a flex and desire for, if not true luxury, then the appearance of opulence.

        • @[email protected]
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          21 year ago

          Well no, in my example the shirt is the image and the signature on it is the NFT bit. Physically, it’s just a bit of ink, but the shirt itself is no different than one you can go pickup at the store.

          • @[email protected]
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            21 year ago

            In your example what happens if the shirt is sold to someone else? In the NFT case the signature changes.

            The shirt analogy doesn’t work well, but NFTs are great for transferable tickets.

    • @Nastybutler
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      01 year ago

      Each one of my shits is unique, but just as valuable as an NFT

      • qyron
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        01 year ago

        It can have real value if you use it to fertilize a square meter of dirt and plant corn on it. Shit + water + seeds = food.

  • @xT1TANx
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    271 year ago

    They were always worthless

  • @pleasemakesense
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    181 year ago

    If value is completely dependent on speculation how the fuck do people expect to make money?

    • BolexForSoup
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      271 year ago

      Crypto Booms: “This is the future of money. You can’t lose.”
      Crypto Busts: “I’m just interested in the tech it’s not about money.”

      • @gndagreborn
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        61 year ago

        That is some high grade cope. Highly refined. 99.99% pure cope.

      • @NightAuthor
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        41 year ago

        Those are two different communities that are interested in crypto. Some of the crypto bros used the pro-decentralized peoples logic to cope… but there are both.

        I’m surprised there aren’t more of the decentralized endorsers here, amongst a community of technically literate people using FOSS software.

        • BolexForSoup
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          11 year ago

          I mined for years, 2011-2014 or so. I don’t need a lecture on crypto culture lol

  • @anon_8675309
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    151 year ago

    Wait. They were actually worth something!?

  • roguetrick
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    151 year ago

    To be real, even cryptobros would tell you the vast majority were useless as soon as they were minted.

    • @[email protected]
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      151 year ago

      It’s why they pushed them so hard. They hoped we were stupid enough to buy into it and make them richer.

      • @[email protected]
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        51 year ago

        God I am not going to miss every art community being flooded with low effort developer art that had no actual artistic merit.

        I mean I do developer art, but I wouldn’t try to sell it, let alone sell it as an investment. Fucking rofl

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        The major nft exchanges paid a portion of each sale to the artists, yes. It was one of the things that NFTs, and blockchain in general, was supposed to help solve for. IMO it’s a good use case for blockchain being used when paired with real world items.

        • @BradleyUffner
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          11 year ago

          The actual artist? The one that created the art? Not the one that stole the artist’s work and turned it into an NFT for a quick buck from something they had no right to?

          • @[email protected]
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            21 year ago

            Yes. The actual artist.

            That was one of the things that was working quite well during the NFT hype.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 year ago

          If you are referring to scam artists, you are 100% right! Also, some actual artists might have got some money out of it, but I suspect the majority of dough that exchanged hands went to the former kind.

          • @[email protected]
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            21 year ago

            I’m sorry you dont have any technically inclined artists in your circle, but I first learned about NFTs from myartists friends.

            Colored coins have been around for a very long time, and NFTs have been an income stream for artists long before the financial elite gave them a bad name.

            History is important

  • squiblet
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    111 year ago

    Perhaps they’d have retained value if they had been attached to quality art rather than awful-looking algorithmically generated complete trash.

    • Dr Cog
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      271 year ago

      No, they wouldn’t have. Because owning a link to a thing doesn’t mean anything, no matter what that thing is. They were only valuable because people didn’t understand NFTs and wanted to get rich quick.

      • squiblet
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        131 year ago

        The concept of a certificate of authenticity for digital goods that can be traded isn’t inherently terrible.

        • Dr Cog
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          141 year ago

          The concept isn’t, I agree. But it also isn’t a useful idea, either. There really doesn’t appear to be any benefit to using NFTs in any meaningful application, or at least nobody has pitched one that isn’t either a grift or a way to appear “trendy” by reinventing the wheel.

          • @[email protected]
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            51 year ago

            The actual infrastructure was horribly inefficient, but that may have improved with ETH’s move to proof of stake.

            There’s other issues, but the idea of using the digital receipt as an “investment” seems fundamentally flawed.

          • squiblet
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            41 year ago

            Some established, legitimate artists have been selling NFTs with their originals. But sure, overall, like crypto in general, the field is filled with scammers and get-rich-quick schemes.
            I know someone who is a painter who for some reason decided to try selling NFTs a couple of months ago (I pointed out it was a bit late…). The only responses on opensea and Instagram she received were from scammers, trying to pull a “my payment didn’t work, you need to manually approve it” scheme to try to steal her credentials.

            • @[email protected]
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              -11 year ago

              She could also simply write down the name of the person who bought the painting from you. And ask them to let her know if they sell it so she could update her records.

              Sure it’s possible someone might not let her know they sold the painting. But it’s equally possible someone sells the painting without transferring the NFT along with it.

              • squiblet
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                31 year ago

                Sure, and instead of credit cards, the store can just write down on an index card that I owe them $60. Anyway, the idea is a level of automation exceeding what they had in Sumeria 7,000 years ago.