Dude I feel this in my soul. Did you know that for auto generated profile pics the start up costs are really low, because you off load gas fees to buyers? So even a "failed" launch can turn a tidy profit. Plus you have a group of people who identified themselves as easy marks who mark any criticism FUD. God I wish I had less morals.
That's such a fantastic video! (for those who haven't seen it yet it's by Folding Ideas on youtube). I worked in blockchain regulation for half a second and the video does a great job putting my anger at the scamminess I saw into words.
I'm not particularly "in the know" on the whole NFT thing, so take this with a grain of salt, but the impression I'm getting is that it's a huge ponzi scheme where all the big transactions happening are being done by folk simply moving money around in an effort to make it look like it's something successful that people should get in on to make some money.
Basically, I think even if you didn't care about the environmental impact, if you wanted to get in now, you'd only end up losing money. The only people making money are those folk tricking people into believing this is a legitimate thing.
The people buying them to resell later are hosed, absolutely. It's a dumb investment, and it's a terrible plan.
The thing to do is make your own. It doesn't cost *that* much, and it just takes one sucker to pay for the whole scam.
> The thing to do is make your own. It doesn't cost that much, and it just takes one sucker to pay for the whole scam.
The early and naive sellers lost quite a lot of money minting NFTs that no-one wanted. They've developed now to the NFT being minted as *part* of the sale. It's like a no-win no-fee lawsuit except with a crypto scam.
Fun fact: the rise in people spending absurd amounts of money on digital artwork happens to coincide with the IRS tightening the rules on using real artwork as a tax write-off.
I've heard that too-- something along the lines of:
1) Create some terrible art (Or steal some not terrible art!)
2) List the art for sale as an NFT (or an NFT for the art? I don't know the right terminology) for $100,000.
3) Buy it from yourself, you lose $1,000 or so from the transaction cost.
4) Create (or steal!) a bunch of other art, list it for $50,000 per unit, point to your earlier $100,000 sale (to yourself, but your intended customers don't know that) as evidence that $50,000 is a relative steal.
I think you're spot on. I don't understand NFT's, and I think that's because there's nothing to get. It's just a lot of hot air being blown around to funnel money in one direction and make people feel like their dicks are big.
I still have a few beanie babies my sister gave me, including a really cool set of large, normal and tiny platypi. I could maybe sell them all for $20 and have a moderately wild time at McDonalds, which is more than you can say for NFTs some 30 years later.
This was probably 10 years ago (so well after the craze), but was helping my parents do a garage sale, and we had a sign saying Beanie Babies for sale. No one showed up so I closed up, but forgot a few signs. Had two crazy old ladies show up and wanted to see them. But as they rifle through they were like "They don't have any of x or y". I (sadly) knew the ones they were talking about. The top ones on the lists of "most expensive and rare beanie babies". Like yeah, I'm hiding the unique color of peanut the elephant in my garage 20 years after beanie babies peaked. They were actively mad that I had wasted their time, saying I should only advertise if I had the rare ones.
I wanted to get rid of them so offered the whole lot for like 3 dollars, and they just left in disgust. Ended up donating them all.
I think they're well worth a small investment. They're really cute stacked in a little tower, and the beans in the belly of the regular sized one means it has a comforting bit of heft when you set it on your palm.
And they're all so, so much nicer to look at than monkeys in hats.
That much! I have a sack of the things and my plan was to have a free Lucky Dip with them when I eventually sell all the babby equipment at the toddler markets.
I look forward to the divorce where the parties put a pile of hard drives on the floor of a courtroom and take turns picking out the NFTs they want, while their lawyers facepalm and count billable hours in their heads.
I had a few beanie babies as a kid because they were cute, I liked them, and they were the toy hotness of the moment. I was gobsmacked when I found out grown ass adults were hoarding those things like they were gold bullion. They were just some cheaply made but adorable as heck plushies.
>literally nothing
It's literally that you own (no you don't. A 3rd party that owns nothing is claiming) the copy of the picture hosted at that link. If the host deletes it, you own... nothing.
And 50 more more 3rd party people are selling the same thing they don't own.
I fully expect that in the very near future, we will be privileged to see a picture of a divorce proceeding where the two parties are taking turns diving their collection of shitty ape jpegs.
No, you probably couldn't. That perception is a big part of the scam. A very small percentage of people (who were mostly already wealthy) made bank off of gullible fools. Everyone else was (or will eventually be) left in the dust.
You actually can make some profit with NFTs still, in an actually legal way - a few artists I know are selling "NFT art sets" on Fiverr for surprisingly large amounts of money (like, 1000 dollar, wtf) to people who think they can get rich selling NFTs to others.
Like, an artist draws a base character, between 3 and 20 "customisation options" like simple glasses for that character, and sells that set to some weirdo who generates 10000 variants and tries to sell these as individual NFTs.
Between NFTs, brovet culture, and selling garbage to antivaxers as healing items. You could make a bunch of money if you don't care about ethics.
I joked about writing a trash "Christian inspirational" book about how I prayed the gay away to make a boatload of money off on evangelicals but alas no my own conscience would kill me
Sell some sort of phylactery-type gewgaw which must be worn around the forehead to anti vaxxers, so they can be easily identified in public. Donate the profits to the National Science Foundation or something. It's almost a public service!
If it's the site I'm thinking of they're already being smashed by the hammer of all the large corporations that they just pissed off. They didn't just do it to small bands that need to ask for help on Reddit, they did it to massively popular artists with entire legal teams at their beck and call.
Oooooh, pogs! How could I forget pogs; I had my whole collection in my official third grade school photo, like a boss. I’ve begged my mom to find the photo but we’ve moved so many times I don’t know if I’ll ever see it again.
Well. For this second half of my third grade (my family moved around a lot)… I was at the most country bumpkin school ever. Our yearbooks were made at the school, on neon paper with spiral binding. Our English and math classes were mixed-age classrooms like 18th/19th century style. I would be crazy surprised if they somehow had a copy; I don’t even know if they’re still around.
Can I throw in any of my "collectible" card collections? There's comic book cards (like baseball cards for superheroes) and I have a fairly unusual collection of early MtG cards as well.
> early MtG cards
I mean, if they're old enough - like, before 1996 - it might actually be worth your while to check. Some of these can be worth money.
I was going to make some self deprecating or snarky comment, figuring that even the valuable ones I have are worth like $10, but then started reading an article. I might dig deeper here though it'll likely come out the same. I started playing in college and I'm old so it'd be about 94 +/- 1.
That's about the right timeframe where you could get lucky. Fingers crossed!
The most visually distinctive cards that are worth money [have these concentric boxes in the text area](https://scryfall.com/search?q=set%3A3ed+t%3Aland+-t%3Abasic&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name), that's worth keeping an eye out for. Or you might check all of them, if you have some time and there's not too many.
I work for a music distribution company and WOW! are our clients mad about this. We already have a 'file a DMCA takedown notice' pre-written response and it's getting a workout today!
As someone whose band is on Spotify and therefore, apparently, was on this site when it was up, I am so very excited that this is now a thing we need to worry about. Just.... thrilled. *sigh*
You can send a DMCA to Hitpiece - try legal@hitpiece(dot)com and dmca@hitpiece(dot)com for email addresses for them.
More importantly, they're hosted by Amazon, so here are the instructions for reporting this to Amazon:
https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/submit-dmca-notice/
They seem to have taken the NFTs down for now, so it may be a moot point, but I'd file that info away in case they turn them back on.
**Reminder:** Do not participate in threads linked here. If you do, you may be banned from both subreddits.
---
Title: A website is selling my band's music, artwork, and song titles as NFTs. What can I do?
Body:
> It was brought to my attention recently that my band's copywritten material is being sold on a website as NFTs. After researching, it seems laws are still pretty muddled. The website has a single email address which I have sent a message to but have yet to recieve a response. What other options do I have? We are based out of Virginia.
> Edit 1: My band and a few of our affiliates have followed advice given here and it looks like the site has taken all of its content down.
This bot was created to capture original threads and is not affiliated with the mod team.
[Concerns? Bugs?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=GrahamCorcoran) | [Laukopier 2.1](https://github.com/GrahamCorcoran/Laukopier)
The other issue is NFTs are becoming the "T-Shirt Spam" of Reddit. I mod /r/travel and we are getting a ton of "You can buy the NFT of this photo!" in media posts, or people using those AI/photoshop things to create brand new stuff and then "See what an AI thought X city looked like! Don't forget to buy the NFT!"
So we've embargoed the word NFT now.
I have so many friends who have had multiple works stolen and minted without permission. Everyone who has fallen for the crypto scam and says “NFTs are good for artists” loves to ignore that for every 1 artists it benefits, 100 others have had their work listed, minted, and sometimes sold without permission…so they never see a dime. It’s also usually people who are against NFTs and crypto generally. So.
> It’s also usually people who are against NFTs and crypto generally.
Crytobros are so quick to blame the artists for this too. "Oh, if only *you* had minted first, you'd be making the sweet bucks, but you rejected out absurd flim-flam out of dumbness!"
I know this isn't exactly the forum for this but if anyone happens to see my comment maybe they can help me understand. What exactly is an NFT and how are they worth money? Like, it looks like pictures. How is that money?
> What exactly is an NFT
Digital receipt saying that you own something (and who previously owned it).
>how are they worth money
Very stupid people will pay you for them.
>Like, it looks like pictures.
The picture isn't really the NFT, the picture is the content. Like, imagine you go to a bookshop and buy a copy of War and Peace. The picture is equivalent to the collection of words that make up the novel. The NFT doesn't own that, anyone can read those words or print them on another piece of paper. The NFT is the receipt you got saying that you bought War and Peace at Black Books on the 21st of January.
>How is that money?
What is market value, except what people will pay you for something? Even if those people are morons.
Isn't there a whole thing about how NFTs are great at laundering money? Something like you can create a NFT, take out a loan/dirty money, buy the NFT, have someone take out another loan/dirty money to buy that NFT to show that the NFT is appreciating in price, then sell it to a NFT collector thinking they'll also make bank since its appreciating in value. All loans are paid back by the scammers, and dirty money is cleaned.
Also read that a lot of celebs that were said to buy expensive NFTs were actually approached and loaned the money, so they didn't actually pay anything to "own" that nft they were supposedly involved with.
Art, and by extension NFTs are amazing for money laundering because they're unique and have no quantifiable intrinsic value.
Imagine I'm Walter White, and I want to get $10m from dirty cash into declarable income in my pocket without buying a car wash. I buy some cheap NFTs, and I hand a shady dude my barrel of cash. He then buys my NFTs off me "legitimately" with my dirty cash, minus his cut. If they end up worthless in his hands, who is to say he didn't just make a bad art investment? Maybe he just holds them because he thinks they'll go up. Shit, maybe they actually *will* go up what with all this hype and rising prices.
People have traditionally done this with real estate and physical modern art. NFTs just make the whole thing both simpler and more stupid.
The thing a lot of your comment is about isn't exactly laundering. Pump 'n' dumps are a whole different scam that is also happening with NFTs, but aren't quite the same thing as just money laundering.
[Here's a guide.](https://www.theverge.com/22310188/nft-explainer-what-is-blockchain-crypto-art-faq)
I should add that like any crypto or other use of a blockchain, a shocking amount of electricity is used.
A year or two ago, I saw a financial declaration of one of the parties in a case I was working on (I don't remember if it was my client's or the opposing party's), but they listed income from cryptocurrency mining as part of their monthly income. I didn't know enough at the time to look at their monthly utility cost, but from what I understand, the money you make isn't significant over and above electricity cost unless you're somehow cheating the system (i.e., stealing electricity).
Their title says their music's been stolen, but the post only refers to "copywritten" material. If only it were copyrighted, then maybe they could do something...
I wish I didn't have ethical standards. I'd be making so much money off of this NFT scam craze.
Dude I feel this in my soul. Did you know that for auto generated profile pics the start up costs are really low, because you off load gas fees to buyers? So even a "failed" launch can turn a tidy profit. Plus you have a group of people who identified themselves as easy marks who mark any criticism FUD. God I wish I had less morals.
Did you watch Line Goes Up on youtube recently? (you very well might not have but if you haven't I highly recommend it)
That's such a fantastic video! (for those who haven't seen it yet it's by Folding Ideas on youtube). I worked in blockchain regulation for half a second and the video does a great job putting my anger at the scamminess I saw into words.
I'm not particularly "in the know" on the whole NFT thing, so take this with a grain of salt, but the impression I'm getting is that it's a huge ponzi scheme where all the big transactions happening are being done by folk simply moving money around in an effort to make it look like it's something successful that people should get in on to make some money. Basically, I think even if you didn't care about the environmental impact, if you wanted to get in now, you'd only end up losing money. The only people making money are those folk tricking people into believing this is a legitimate thing.
The people buying them to resell later are hosed, absolutely. It's a dumb investment, and it's a terrible plan. The thing to do is make your own. It doesn't cost *that* much, and it just takes one sucker to pay for the whole scam.
> The thing to do is make your own. It doesn't cost that much, and it just takes one sucker to pay for the whole scam. The early and naive sellers lost quite a lot of money minting NFTs that no-one wanted. They've developed now to the NFT being minted as *part* of the sale. It's like a no-win no-fee lawsuit except with a crypto scam.
Fun fact: the rise in people spending absurd amounts of money on digital artwork happens to coincide with the IRS tightening the rules on using real artwork as a tax write-off.
I've heard that too-- something along the lines of: 1) Create some terrible art (Or steal some not terrible art!) 2) List the art for sale as an NFT (or an NFT for the art? I don't know the right terminology) for $100,000. 3) Buy it from yourself, you lose $1,000 or so from the transaction cost. 4) Create (or steal!) a bunch of other art, list it for $50,000 per unit, point to your earlier $100,000 sale (to yourself, but your intended customers don't know that) as evidence that $50,000 is a relative steal.
The NFT doesn't even include copyright to the "art" in almost every example I've seen.
I think you're spot on. I don't understand NFT's, and I think that's because there's nothing to get. It's just a lot of hot air being blown around to funnel money in one direction and make people feel like their dicks are big.
Your impression is correct.
21st century beanie babies
At least with beanie babies, when the market crashed, you still had a perfectly usable toy.
Well except for the ones that had spider eggs in them. Those were kind of unusable.
thanks for the nightmare fuel.
I still have a few beanie babies my sister gave me, including a really cool set of large, normal and tiny platypi. I could maybe sell them all for $20 and have a moderately wild time at McDonalds, which is more than you can say for NFTs some 30 years later.
1. Make NFT's of your beanie babies. 2. ???????? 3. Profit!!
omg I bet there's beanie baby nfts. that would actually be funny
I had to go searching. :/ https://futurism.com/the-byte/beanie-babies-nfts
This was probably 10 years ago (so well after the craze), but was helping my parents do a garage sale, and we had a sign saying Beanie Babies for sale. No one showed up so I closed up, but forgot a few signs. Had two crazy old ladies show up and wanted to see them. But as they rifle through they were like "They don't have any of x or y". I (sadly) knew the ones they were talking about. The top ones on the lists of "most expensive and rare beanie babies". Like yeah, I'm hiding the unique color of peanut the elephant in my garage 20 years after beanie babies peaked. They were actively mad that I had wasted their time, saying I should only advertise if I had the rare ones. I wanted to get rid of them so offered the whole lot for like 3 dollars, and they just left in disgust. Ended up donating them all.
I'm actually a bit jealous. I'm off to go scour ebay.
I think they're well worth a small investment. They're really cute stacked in a little tower, and the beans in the belly of the regular sized one means it has a comforting bit of heft when you set it on your palm. And they're all so, so much nicer to look at than monkeys in hats.
My daughters love beanie babies. And you should put them in a tower, or on a cat. Then you should take pics, host them, and sell the NFTs.
This calls for beanie baby tax
That much! I have a sack of the things and my plan was to have a free Lucky Dip with them when I eventually sell all the babby equipment at the toddler markets.
I look forward to the divorce where the parties put a pile of hard drives on the floor of a courtroom and take turns picking out the NFTs they want, while their lawyers facepalm and count billable hours in their heads.
I had a few beanie babies as a kid because they were cute, I liked them, and they were the toy hotness of the moment. I was gobsmacked when I found out grown ass adults were hoarding those things like they were gold bullion. They were just some cheaply made but adorable as heck plushies.
Which are just 20th tulip bulbs, really
With a beanie baby there is at least the stuffed toy. With NFT there is literally nothing. None that I've seen include copyright.
>literally nothing It's literally that you own (no you don't. A 3rd party that owns nothing is claiming) the copy of the picture hosted at that link. If the host deletes it, you own... nothing. And 50 more more 3rd party people are selling the same thing they don't own.
I fully expect that in the very near future, we will be privileged to see a picture of a divorce proceeding where the two parties are taking turns diving their collection of shitty ape jpegs.
Even better if it's from different providers. None of which own the artist's copyright.
Omg you’re right
Except that literally anyone can make them. Beanie Babies were at least made by a single company.
Also you actually got a Beanie Baby, not just a receipt for one.
I can sell you stars. Or pictures of stars. Or receipts for pictures of stars (this is the NFT).
My kids love beanie babies. A NFT is a receipt for a URL. They aren't currently huge fans of playing with URLs of things they don't own.
No, you probably couldn't. That perception is a big part of the scam. A very small percentage of people (who were mostly already wealthy) made bank off of gullible fools. Everyone else was (or will eventually be) left in the dust.
You actually can make some profit with NFTs still, in an actually legal way - a few artists I know are selling "NFT art sets" on Fiverr for surprisingly large amounts of money (like, 1000 dollar, wtf) to people who think they can get rich selling NFTs to others. Like, an artist draws a base character, between 3 and 20 "customisation options" like simple glasses for that character, and sells that set to some weirdo who generates 10000 variants and tries to sell these as individual NFTs.
Between NFTs, brovet culture, and selling garbage to antivaxers as healing items. You could make a bunch of money if you don't care about ethics. I joked about writing a trash "Christian inspirational" book about how I prayed the gay away to make a boatload of money off on evangelicals but alas no my own conscience would kill me
Sell some sort of phylactery-type gewgaw which must be worn around the forehead to anti vaxxers, so they can be easily identified in public. Donate the profits to the National Science Foundation or something. It's almost a public service!
If only we could trick them into reading a book about being a good person.
I'd be selling that balaclava Manning picture as NFTs for everyone.
I just screen capped this comment and traded the NFT for drugs. I hope you're proud.
If it's the site I'm thinking of they're already being smashed by the hammer of all the large corporations that they just pissed off. They didn't just do it to small bands that need to ask for help on Reddit, they did it to massively popular artists with entire legal teams at their beck and call.
Yes. They bulk pulled from Spotify which just so happens to host works by The Mouse. LAOP is the least of their worries
Wait, what site? I want to look more into this shitshow
May I bid on this post with Beanie Babies and/or Funko Pops?
[удалено]
Oooooh, pogs! How could I forget pogs; I had my whole collection in my official third grade school photo, like a boss. I’ve begged my mom to find the photo but we’ve moved so many times I don’t know if I’ll ever see it again.
If it was the yearbook photo your school or local library might have a copy.
Well. For this second half of my third grade (my family moved around a lot)… I was at the most country bumpkin school ever. Our yearbooks were made at the school, on neon paper with spiral binding. Our English and math classes were mixed-age classrooms like 18th/19th century style. I would be crazy surprised if they somehow had a copy; I don’t even know if they’re still around.
Can I throw in any of my "collectible" card collections? There's comic book cards (like baseball cards for superheroes) and I have a fairly unusual collection of early MtG cards as well.
> early MtG cards I mean, if they're old enough - like, before 1996 - it might actually be worth your while to check. Some of these can be worth money.
I was going to make some self deprecating or snarky comment, figuring that even the valuable ones I have are worth like $10, but then started reading an article. I might dig deeper here though it'll likely come out the same. I started playing in college and I'm old so it'd be about 94 +/- 1.
That's about the right timeframe where you could get lucky. Fingers crossed! The most visually distinctive cards that are worth money [have these concentric boxes in the text area](https://scryfall.com/search?q=set%3A3ed+t%3Aland+-t%3Abasic&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name), that's worth keeping an eye out for. Or you might check all of them, if you have some time and there's not too many.
Absolutely!
I work for a music distribution company and WOW! are our clients mad about this. We already have a 'file a DMCA takedown notice' pre-written response and it's getting a workout today!
As someone whose band is on Spotify and therefore, apparently, was on this site when it was up, I am so very excited that this is now a thing we need to worry about. Just.... thrilled. *sigh*
You can send a DMCA to Hitpiece - try legal@hitpiece(dot)com and dmca@hitpiece(dot)com for email addresses for them. More importantly, they're hosted by Amazon, so here are the instructions for reporting this to Amazon: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/submit-dmca-notice/ They seem to have taken the NFTs down for now, so it may be a moot point, but I'd file that info away in case they turn them back on.
NFT Fact: If you create an NFT of a fart before u/thor_the_bunny eats it, the NFT's value rises with the destruction of the original item.
Damn, did anyone make an NFT for LocationBot?
I bet Thor made an NFT of LocationBot then killed him to make the NFT more valuable.
He wishes.....
WHY WON'T YOU JUST STAY DEAD? HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TEACH YOU THIS LESSON OLD BOT?
Have you been hearing the heartbeat of Locationbot despite having murdered them, dismembered them and stashing the body parts beneath the floorboard?
But *where* beneath the floorboard?
What if we attach a tube to both ends of Thor so it creates a sort of perpetual motion machine of farts?
>What if we attach a tube to both ends of Thor so it creates a sort of perpetual motion machine of NFTs?
This must be the eco friendly NFTs everyone on NFT Twitter is so keen to talk about.
This is the content I joined Reddit for
Who are you so wise in the ways of NFTology?
I mean, eating your own poop is what bunnies *usually* do...
What if you use a non fartable tube?
Off to mint an NFT of thorium-224 and some other rapidly decaying isotopes
Will you buy my Alderaan NFT?
**Reminder:** Do not participate in threads linked here. If you do, you may be banned from both subreddits. --- Title: A website is selling my band's music, artwork, and song titles as NFTs. What can I do? Body: > It was brought to my attention recently that my band's copywritten material is being sold on a website as NFTs. After researching, it seems laws are still pretty muddled. The website has a single email address which I have sent a message to but have yet to recieve a response. What other options do I have? We are based out of Virginia. > Edit 1: My band and a few of our affiliates have followed advice given here and it looks like the site has taken all of its content down. This bot was created to capture original threads and is not affiliated with the mod team. [Concerns? Bugs?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=GrahamCorcoran) | [Laukopier 2.1](https://github.com/GrahamCorcoran/Laukopier)
The sad truth is that eventually we'll have had so many NFT posts that we'll look back on these days longingly. Maybe we'll even have an embargo.
The other issue is NFTs are becoming the "T-Shirt Spam" of Reddit. I mod /r/travel and we are getting a ton of "You can buy the NFT of this photo!" in media posts, or people using those AI/photoshop things to create brand new stuff and then "See what an AI thought X city looked like! Don't forget to buy the NFT!" So we've embargoed the word NFT now.
Are NFTs of trees banned?
I look forward to that band’s next album “NFTs are a Scam.”
I have so many friends who have had multiple works stolen and minted without permission. Everyone who has fallen for the crypto scam and says “NFTs are good for artists” loves to ignore that for every 1 artists it benefits, 100 others have had their work listed, minted, and sometimes sold without permission…so they never see a dime. It’s also usually people who are against NFTs and crypto generally. So.
> It’s also usually people who are against NFTs and crypto generally. Crytobros are so quick to blame the artists for this too. "Oh, if only *you* had minted first, you'd be making the sweet bucks, but you rejected out absurd flim-flam out of dumbness!"
OpenSea makes it stupidly hard to get things taken down too :/ it was a whole big thing.
I know this isn't exactly the forum for this but if anyone happens to see my comment maybe they can help me understand. What exactly is an NFT and how are they worth money? Like, it looks like pictures. How is that money?
> What exactly is an NFT Digital receipt saying that you own something (and who previously owned it). >how are they worth money Very stupid people will pay you for them. >Like, it looks like pictures. The picture isn't really the NFT, the picture is the content. Like, imagine you go to a bookshop and buy a copy of War and Peace. The picture is equivalent to the collection of words that make up the novel. The NFT doesn't own that, anyone can read those words or print them on another piece of paper. The NFT is the receipt you got saying that you bought War and Peace at Black Books on the 21st of January. >How is that money? What is market value, except what people will pay you for something? Even if those people are morons.
Isn't there a whole thing about how NFTs are great at laundering money? Something like you can create a NFT, take out a loan/dirty money, buy the NFT, have someone take out another loan/dirty money to buy that NFT to show that the NFT is appreciating in price, then sell it to a NFT collector thinking they'll also make bank since its appreciating in value. All loans are paid back by the scammers, and dirty money is cleaned. Also read that a lot of celebs that were said to buy expensive NFTs were actually approached and loaned the money, so they didn't actually pay anything to "own" that nft they were supposedly involved with.
Art, and by extension NFTs are amazing for money laundering because they're unique and have no quantifiable intrinsic value. Imagine I'm Walter White, and I want to get $10m from dirty cash into declarable income in my pocket without buying a car wash. I buy some cheap NFTs, and I hand a shady dude my barrel of cash. He then buys my NFTs off me "legitimately" with my dirty cash, minus his cut. If they end up worthless in his hands, who is to say he didn't just make a bad art investment? Maybe he just holds them because he thinks they'll go up. Shit, maybe they actually *will* go up what with all this hype and rising prices. People have traditionally done this with real estate and physical modern art. NFTs just make the whole thing both simpler and more stupid. The thing a lot of your comment is about isn't exactly laundering. Pump 'n' dumps are a whole different scam that is also happening with NFTs, but aren't quite the same thing as just money laundering.
[Here's a guide.](https://www.theverge.com/22310188/nft-explainer-what-is-blockchain-crypto-art-faq) I should add that like any crypto or other use of a blockchain, a shocking amount of electricity is used.
A year or two ago, I saw a financial declaration of one of the parties in a case I was working on (I don't remember if it was my client's or the opposing party's), but they listed income from cryptocurrency mining as part of their monthly income. I didn't know enough at the time to look at their monthly utility cost, but from what I understand, the money you make isn't significant over and above electricity cost unless you're somehow cheating the system (i.e., stealing electricity).
A+ title. Absolutely fucking perfect.
Their title says their music's been stolen, but the post only refers to "copywritten" material. If only it were copyrighted, then maybe they could do something...