Gee, if only there was some way to have seen this coming before hand...
this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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Yup.
Could have put the money in stock instead and they'd likely have made a profit since then.
Hell, they could have stuffed it into their mattress and it would have been a better investment lol.
Inflation can't even lose this much money is such a short time
The first tweet nft sold for $2.9mil and is now "worth" less than $4.
Like it was worth anything at all in the beginning anyways
Edit: Spleling
Beautiful edit.
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Actually I didn't have many hopes in humanity when it started to happen. It's a bit comforting, not much though with other things around.
🌍👨🚀🔫👨🚀
Were they worth anything to begin with?
They have no intrinsic value, but they're worth what people will pay for them I guess. The only problem is that entire thing was a hype bubble conjured up scammers. The insane thing is that for a brief moment they even had famous auction houses buying into the scam.
That shitty set of randomized pixel art sold for more than anything else in that particular show, aside from a Basquiat.
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Just because something is unique doesn’t mean it’s valuable.
Some people are just discovering this.
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.
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
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🔫️ Always have been
Of no surprise to anyone.
If value is completely dependent on speculation how the fuck do people expect to make money?
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."
That is some high grade cope. Highly refined. 99.99% pure cope.
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NFTs were the perfect technology to identify people who didn't understand crypto. The only reason Bitcoin et al. even almost work is that nearly anything can be a medium of exchange... so long as it's fungible. Which is the F theses Ts are N.
But if all you saw was numbers going up, and you don't know what a Ponzi scheme is, yeah sure it makes total sense to buy a genuine commemorative plate of the Brooklyn Bridge. Why's everyone on your case? It must be worth money! It's (a receipt for a link to a picture of) the Brooklyn Bridge!
Fanbros compare stocks, but stocks are slices of a real company. You control one-zillionth of an actual business. If you own enough, that company will do what you say, because you are literally their boss. No amount of "authentic" Brooklyn Bridge tokens will ever mean you get the bridge.
Everything signifying that the exchange was worth your money is a fiction created by the people who took it. That's how scams work.
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But it was nice while artists were able to sell to profit from rich people
Was that happening? All I ever heard about was people selling artists art that they didn't own the rights to without permission, and getting away with it
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To be real, even cryptobros would tell you the vast majority were useless as soon as they were minted.
It's why they pushed them so hard. They hoped we were stupid enough to buy into it and make them richer.
Pumped, dumped, done.
Perhaps they’d have retained value if they had been attached to quality art rather than awful-looking algorithmically generated complete trash.
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.
The concept of a certificate of authenticity for digital goods that can be traded isn’t inherently terrible.
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.
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.
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Who would have thought?
But y'know, everyone who rightfully decried those fuckin things were just FUDing, right?
Guess not!
Wait. They were actually worth something!?
They always were.
and nothing of value was lost
Well a lot of money transferred to grifters that's for sure.
O rly! 🦉
Now?
Always have been
Grass is green...
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Tens of thousands of NFTs that were once deemed the newest rage in tech and dragged in celebrities, artists and even Melania Trump have now been declared virtually worthless.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are a form of crypto asset that is used to certify ownership and authenticity of a digital file including an image, video or text.
The report comes nearly two years after the craze for NFTs swept up celebrities and artists alike, with many rushing to purchase NFT collections of the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Matrix avatars.
The drastic downward market shift surrounding such crypto assets “underscores the need for careful due diligence before making any purchases, especially one of high value”, the report said.
Researchers identified 195,699 NFT collections with no apparent owners or market share and found that the energy required to mint the NFTs was comparable to 27,789,258 kWh, resulting in an emission of approximately 16,243 metric tons of CO2.
In order to survive market downturns and have lasting value, NFTs need to be either historically relevant such as first-edition Pokémon cards, true art or provide genuine utility, they said in the report.
The original article contains 650 words, the summary contains 189 words. Saved 71%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Given that they can be generated effectively for free, this is hardly surprising or particularly meaningful. I can generate ten thousand new images with my AI art generator for basically zero cost and I don't expect any would be economically valuable, but that doesn't mean there aren't some images that are valuable.
It must have been really hard for the underpaid researcher to put this report together while doubling over in laughter.
I can imagine being desperate to hit it big, but at least but a lottery ticket or something. That way, the school system (or whatever) gets a few bucks, instead of the fucking Trumps.
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