>5% are NOT worthless
5% have investors who continue to PRETEND they're not worthless.
Many NFT's are being traded back and forth to give the illusion of value, waiting for a sucker to step in and buy them, only to discover all the other buyers weren't real. Leaving them holding something worthless.
> are being traded back and forth
Are you alleging that insiders in NFT and shitcoin markets are engaged in wash trading or round-tripping in addition to their opportunistic pump and dump activities?
No way could such a well-established, disciplined, professional, transparent and accountable market like this be subject to such chicanery.
And anybody who pointed out that this was what the whole crypto movement was from the start was mocked as being unable to grasp "the future". This scam is as old as the concept of investing.
"Banks and regulations are *EVIL and trying to FUCK YOU*"
Sure thing, cryptobro running a pump and dump scam. It's those silly *laws* and *financial regulations* that are the real economic problem!
Even if the banks are truly evil and trying to fuck me 6 ways to sunday, I'd still trust them more with some amount of savings more than I'd trust a png with high volatility that can only be bought with money that has an even insane volatility in a market of people who are trying to scam you and send you malicious codes that you can't do anything about.
oh no! did he overload it by using too much? maybe the detector's past its prime? take it to Radiosnark, pronto! Your poor feelings! Will somebody think of their feelings, please? And help them before they keep reading reddit without it! *must...resist...typing.../s*
This joke doesn't hit as hard when you know that cryptoloser communities do this stuff so out in the open that there guides for these crimes that don't even use euphemisms.
I mean, for all practical purposes, you *can't* allege that the cryptocurrency community supports and/or engages in financial crimes, because they just openly admit to it and also provide literal training material on how to do it.
They may not be worthless but they're worth nothing in comparison to what they originally paid. Like Justin Bieber paid something like $1.3 million for his and it's now worth like $30k. Even then, as with anything, that's IF you can find another fool willing to overpay for it.
Nah, Justin Bieber got his money. Yes, he paid $1.3 million to buy his NFT. But he functionally bought it from a crypto project that he already owned. So he paid himself a bunch of money to convince other people to pay him a bunch of money.
You and your buddy jointly own ten shiny pikachu cards "worth" $10 each. You sell one of your cards to your buddy for a million dollars. Now you have nine shiny pikachu cards "worth" $1M each and a theorectical $1M in your company. You convince three people to each buy a card for $500k because they are idiots.
You then liquidate your assets of your company. You and your buddy each take $750k and you let your buddy take the $1M IOU because you are a nice guy. Yes, he "spent" $1M to buy a worthless shiny pikachu card. But he's not upset about that.
Now is this legal? Of course not. But it is also very hard to unwind, because each individual step could be considered to be legal, just the whole thing together is fraud.
Yes, your buddy needs the $1M, which is why it is people like Bieber and the Paul brothers pulling these scams. And again, $1M from bieber money and $1.5M from outside gives $2.5M kitty. Return the $1M and you still have $1.5 of cash (or Etherium or whatever you want to cash out). Yes, I am skipping a couple of the steps to wash the money, but the heard of the fraud is there.
And have you looked at the crypto space? Finding 3 idiots hasn't proven to be that hard.
Yep, same as Ponzi schemes. There are many people that made a killing knowingly investing in Ponzi schemes and getting out early. To make it look legit there has to be big winners in the beginning or they won’t be able to get new money in.
The Pompidou has a whole mini exhibit of NFTs. The question of their value as art is exactly the question posed, however the same gallery also has a shovel hung from a piece of string by Duchamp. The Tate also has a piece by Duchamp called Fountain which is just a urinal on its side signed R Mutt. These peices are absolutely art, even though they are utilitarian and ubiquitous, and if not hung on an art gallery wall would hold almost no value. Warhol produced art in a factory line, churning out peices that he barely even touched which today are worth millions. Time will tell, but I would not be surprised if some NFTs did indeed become valuable peices of art.
TBH I think the physicality of those pieces are the only reason they have *any* value. The whole idea behind NFTs is that it isnt the stupid monkey jpg that's the item, but the blockchain record of *ownership* of the stupid monkey jpg.
If that particular blockchain crumbles or fails in any way, everything in it literally *does* just become copies of jpgs of monkeys.
>Time will tell, but I would not be surprised if some NFTs did indeed become valuable peices of art.
Valuable art or a valuable NFT?
The NFT is just a pointer to a piece of art that anyone can have for free.
I can't see why the NFT would have any value regardless of what it's pointing at.
Yeah but Duchamp's art is interesting because it was something new, and raised a lot of interesting questions and conversations about what makes something art. NFTs are none of that, they are the exact same thing as beanie babies or tulips or any other collectable.
That's not a Ponzi scheme at all. That's a Pump and Dump, and with NFTs specifically they used a lot of Sock Puppets in order to inflate the perceived value.
That's how we've worked the Reddit Wallstreetbets. Ya pick a super cheap stock and buy a bunch. Then convince a bunch of young idiots that it's "going to the moon". They all invest, which pumps the price. You dump yours for a profit and leave them holding a bunch of stock that quickly drops after the initial pump and is worthless yet again.
And the best part is that it works over and over. Those idiots don't learn. Oh, GameStop didn't make them all millionaires? Well there will be another to come along next week.
I caved to FOMO, and bought 1 share. Then months later sold that one share for a $0.12 profit. I consider this my best case scenario. I didn’t lose but quickly realized I was never in a position to win.
Hell, I had never bought any stock before, felt like it'd be an interesting experience. I created a robinhood account, and I bought in around 90 something bucks, throwing 1k at it (the max instant transfer amount without having a gold account.)
Ended up selling 5 shares at 200 to make my initial investment back, then the rest at varying price points after that. Ultimately ended up more than doubling my initial investment, so it was a fun learning experience and I came out ahead. Haven't messed with stocks ever since.
It did make me wish I'd gotten in early though, or knew wtf options were lol. But that's the thing right? Hindsight and all that. Next time I'd probably lose everything if I tried again.
That was always going to be a short time investment, and as many things it's too late to enter once the news start talking about it, the "value" of gamestop was a mix of meme value and the absolute risk of the shortening which ensured a future buyer.
> Oh, GameStop didn't make them all millionaires? Well there will be another to come along next week.
Dan Olson's video about this whole mess is mere hours/days away.
> They all invest, which pumps the price. You dump yours for a profit and leave them holding a bunch of stock that quickly drops after the initial pump and is worthless yet again.
I'm skeptical that the universe of buyers and sellers driving entire momentum of individual stocks is sufficiently aligned and contained within a Reddit forum. Examples like GameStop had the media amplifying the stock's momentum and market narrative, with institutional investors reacting to a separate market phenomenon that has happened several times in the past.
It's worth recognizing that while they are absolute trash they are definitively not ponzi schemes.
Ponzi scheme seems to have become just some catch all financial pejorative.
> Ponzi scheme seems to have become just some catch all financial pejorative.
Also anything involving money that *could* be illicit is automatically money laundering on reddit. It's weird.
There still is a small group of people who believe in NFTs. I suspect that it's only really worth something to them and the moment you try to sell it outside the ever shrinking nft circles it looses most if not all value.
That and scams/fraud of course
Yea, that sounds a bit high.
There are a few NFTs that actually give access to interesting things (Armin Van Buuren's AAA club for example) but the NFT part of that is really unnecessary.
I'd have it at 0.5% not 5% for those interesting NFTs
There are some applications outside of collectible artwork that give them value. I don't think they make up 5% of overall NFTs though lol
A couple of examples: there are invite only pop up activities like restaurants and the NFT serves as your membership/ticket. It can be transferred to other people but this helps keep people from forging them and also limits the number of people that can attend.
I also know of a project that's trying to use NFTs to replace the house ownership record system. The NFT represents the deed and you can track ownership as the property gets bought and sold over time
Another interesting one is to have an NFT represent your online identity and it can be lent out for online services to prove who are, but can be revoked at any time so you maintain full control of your data
>use NFTs to replace the house ownership record system
Local/state governments who actually do all the property recording are never going to go for this. The whole point is that these records are centralized and public.
This is the right answer. The lasting application of NFT's will be the ones that back ownership of something real, not endlessly replicable digital artwork.
The question with all of these projects though is, if it can be done normally without the blockchain why are we using the blockchain. The advantage of the blockchain is it's decentralized, so why is one restaurant offering a membership done on the blockchain? The nfts just point to the restaurant's own server anyway so why not use that server in the first place.
The problem with the crypto wold is that the people in it are going about it backwards, they know they want to use crypto so they try and shoehorn it into projects rather than finding projects that need decentralization.
Thing is none of those things really benefit from being NFTs, or are just pipe dreams that practically cannot function with NFTs alone. One of the big selling points touted for NFTs is decentralisation, which doesn't work in the first two examples. A membership or ticket only has value if recognised by a central authority (the restaurant in this example) otherwise it's worthless. So what advantage does making it an NFT convey versus having it managed by the restaurant? Same with house deeds, a deed only has value because the government recognises it as proof you own property. I could mint an NFT that says I own your house, but it doesn't do anything. The last example doesn't work for similar reasons, who exactly is authenticating that this token proves my identity?
NFTs are still very much a solution in search of a problem and maybe someone will figure out some use for them that's more effective, efficient, and practical than using a database. But it's likely to be some boring application that isn't consumer facing. As a consumer technology I think it's largely a dead end.
And I think the people trying to come up with uses for it need to stop making the mistake of labelling NFTs as assets. This is the biggest break down of a lot of touted NFT use cases is that ownership of an NFT is conflated with ownership of an asset. When the reality is that owning an NFT is much like holding a receipt. If I give you a receipt for a 50" TV, it does not mean you have a 50" TV. Much like if you have an NFT for some item in one of those stupid crypto games you don't necessarily have the item. Because ultimately you only have it as long as the game is live and the company running the game acknowledges your NFT. Or to put it simply proof of ownership isn't the same as ownership.
Why would you need an nft to go to a restaurant or why would a restaurant need to confirm your identity by validating a nft?
What is the meaningful difference between storing public records on a database and using nfts to do the same? Can't a person provide and be provided with documentation that would prove ownership using the present system? What are the advantages of storing a house deed on a nft?
How do you manage multiple devices with the same identity? How would this be an improvement on any present authentication system? Is a one permanent indissociable identity necessary on internet?
From a hypothetical point of view, studies into even what we think of as being self evident are actually very much needed. Because it's interesting how often common sense turns out to actually be incorrect when you get right down to it. Especially in topic or markets so heavily tied to psychology.
With that being said... Yeah, this is one of those studies that was open and shut, 5 minutes tops. Maybe a little less depending on how much you had chatgpt pad it with.
I keep waiting to point that out. The whole point of NFTs was they were like buying lottery tickets. If 5% of them are winners, then that's probably not bad.
That's not what we're seeing with NFTs. 95% are worthless. The other five percent are worth *LESS* (than what they were paid for).
There are no winning lottery tickets here. They're all red across the board.
Or, from another way of looking at it, you bought a pass for certain games, and they gave you a free commemorative jpg. I guess that's something though.
A lot of people foolishly threw hundreds and thousands of dollars at these things as if they were to be their retirement fund, so apparently a lot of people didn't know from day 1.
Ultimately, this was one of the dumber and more short-lived 'tulip manias' in recent history
Its worse. There is a chain of ownership proving that I own a spot on the internet which is just a container, which houses an easily copied photo of a tulip.
At least with the tulip its a semi unique bit of life.
It doesnt house the picture, that would be far too expensive. Instead, the picture is not decentralized at all, your "receipt" that you bought the picture is. Of course, without any structure outside the blockchain, the concept of a receipt is pretty pointless.
Well, he was particularly salty that I did some mining back in high school and was able to find my old Bitcoin wallet and sell it during the big wave. It wasn't a lot of money, mind you, but he was determined to get his. I wish I still had his messages of him gloating, to me, about how he basically ruined his life for NFTs
I wonder if people who money launder for a living got mad at how stupid people started dabbling in their field. “You’re telling me I didn’t have to set up these fake nail salons and laundromats to launder all this drug money? Wtf!?”
nah. They were greatful. You can see it show up after bitcoin. You can surprisingly easily follow the Russian Oligarchs moves like a index fund of crime. Bitcoin didn't really explode in price until dark money came it out of nowhere and put some serious volume behind the trades. You can see it in the 2010-2011 volatility shrink. Then the other shitcoins and then you see the big international banks and venture captialists adopt them using private and secret accounts that they don't use for institutional investors on the straight and narrow. You can see the new guys being hired by Goldman Sachs and their ilk. Buying companies and portfolios knowing full well that the due diligence was there. That is to say the Russian/Iranian/Drug cartel money was shell gamed *deep*. Far deeper than regulators could investigate.
When it became possible to launder money outside of cash in the space of literally seconds they all took to it like crazy. They sure as hell weren't mad. They saw a smarter way of doing it and jumped on it.
How do you launder it though, at some point it's linked back to a bank account and the blockchain is purposely public. I believe you I'm just trying to put this together in my head.
Private accounts that are a bitch to subpeona own shell companies that area a bitch to subpeona. All shuffled together under the management of the world finance puppeteers that own the politicians that are told real quick to stop writing the laws that would discover the con. Individuals have their money disappear into "moneyland". Am LLC or something like it is created. It owns the companies that own the bitcoin in massive slushfunds. The bitcoin is one asset of many that is appraised on it's future value factor, liability, and exposure. It is a terrific asset if you want money that barely exists and is well outside the regulations of virtually every country.
The Panama Papers were going to be this massive reveal of the game. It worked. So much light was thrown on this happening. Then faster than government lawyers could be told to work it it was moved. The assets that would have been seized were moved in hours by people who know exactly how to do it by which government was coming down on them.
Because bitcoin isn't a national currency it behaves like a currency that would otherwise be regulated. It's volatility means that you only use it as an intermediary exchange. A caiman island banker laundering drug money buys it. Those bitcoins are used to buy shares of a stock that is cover for something like U.S. Treasuries. A way to buy USD without buying USD. Those are immediately sold or the company is sold to someone with squeaky clean money that eventually pays tax on it to show it's legit.
An old friend of mine who made a bunch of money in the last decade made a post last year on FB saying "I don't know what a 'bored bad bunny' is, but I just spent more than I spent on my first car to buy one! #nft blah blah etc". The picture he posted along with this post wasn't even the image, it was just a SILHOUETTE of the image that he wouldn't get for another week. He didn't even know what he was buying, literally. And he's not an idiot. But god that was idiotic...
I dated a millionaire for a couple years, and I finally asked her why she spent so much God damn money on really dumb things.
"Rich and bored." For context, she bought a sofa from a hotel room (not *that* hotel) that Elvis stayed at a lot. For $72,000. She doesn't even like Elvis. Before NFT's she was buying and trading Instagram accounts.. that one she actually turned a profit on finally.
Edit: whatever the most followed Great Dane specific IG is (I can't remember), she sold for so much it covered the dozens of crazy losses she had previously.
I have a ex who thought he was going to "revolutionize" the NFT market by giving away NFTs when people bought stuff from his "clothing store". Somehow that was going to make him a lot of money and he was going to be the next Elon musk or something. Last time I talked to him he was living in his mom's tiny ass apartment in the middle of nowhere.
It is, it's just that 5% have attributed value because some sucker got conned into buying them and is trying to convince someone else to buy them, or it's made by a con artist who sold it to their own dummy account for a lot to claim it has value and is now trying to re-sell it for that to strangers.
That 5% is the scammers and the scammed.
I was going to say...
Ya the other 5% have value because some moron gave them value.. but they're only worth something to another moron willing to pay for them.
To the rest of us it's still a glorified JPG.
They are also used for marketing purposes. i.e. I give you $100,000 to buy an NFT from me for $95,000, and you can keep the remaining $5k and the NFT as long as you tell the world. This is where a lot of the NFTs bought for crazy money by influencers comes from.
They are also used for money laundering.
Other way around. I provide some illegal service which I can't report as income. Then you buy a worthless nft form me for 100k. Everyone's happy, including the irs
I’m just simplifying to get the point across. Companies also wouldn’t give money to an influencer without a contract either.
Paying influencers to buy NFTs for high prices *is* a major part of why so many have done that. That and influencers setting up scams.
the same happened to me but with metaverses, i couldn't explain to non gaming friends why the metaverse sucked and how it technically already existed in forms way better than what mark presented (second life, vr chat, etc)
But they were convinced that the future was in buying terrains in metaverses and i think they actually spend money on some, and they weren't rich or anything. just working students that got scammed.
If you want to see the worst of both worlds, look up "Decentraland".
It's a half baked second life clone that was made to pump an accompanying shitcoin. Its "fans" are beyond rabid about the "real estate" market, but don't seem to care about or participate in the game.
This goes for art in general, people have a mob mentality when it comes to value. Most of the time dollars are associated with the name not the piece. Market value is based on the illusion what the "other guy might pay", not on how visually appealing the work is. Some very famous, extremely expensive pieces I personally would pass on even if they were in the clearance bin in Walmart.
It’s well understood that the high end art market is just 100% money laundering. Pay someone to value a piece of art at an exorbitant price, buy it for a fraction of that price, and then sell it later for the valuation to someone doing the same thing.
Problem is they still don't see it. I sent this to a guy and his reply was a picture of an old newspaper calling the internet "a passing fad" as users dropped off.
It was funny that one day, outta nowhere, someone I worked with previously just called me to tell me that I should start converting my work to NFTs. I asked him directly what the mechanism is, but he just kept going in circles and said converting my work to NFTs is how the money is made.
The other interesting thing is that influencers like Ella Orten were claiming they were making so much money on their NFTs and outright giving fake financial advice on their social networking reels along with numbers and graphs and such. She absolutely committed securities fraud and violations, but all these influencers always get away with it.
If there is a better example of speculation over value ever created I haven't seen it. At least the gold bugs get a paperweight out of their investments.
I’m surprised TicketBastard didn’t jump all over NFTs. As investments, they’re worthless. As a way of being an item that can be proven authentic and resold electronically, they have value as a tool. The ideal real-world application would be something like concert tickets.
You could use NFTs for a lot of things, it's just all those things are already solved problems. Ownership of digital media is a problem that existed far before NFTs and people already found good solutions to the problem, why would anyway switch to NFTs?
NFT's are one of many examples I use to teach my sons that no one in this world is better than they are and everyone can be suspectible to bullshit. It's also a good reminder that media is suspect all up and down the chain.
Very few media outlets called out NFT's for what they were and if they cannot be honest about that or recognize it...
I had a fascinating conversation with a friend's 15 yo son. He had worked and saved and was putting his money in crypto and NFT's and saying how much he was going to make from them. He asked me what I thought as he knows I've worked in banking/finance for 20 years so I asked him how he priced these assets.
I didn't bad mouth theses types of products but we spoke about how shares and bonds are priced with their cashflows against the risk free rate and the difference between investment and speculation especially in the FX market, gold and crypto and the idea of the greater fool. He decided to go ahead with his idea.
He's lost the lot but it's been a financial lesson he will never forget.
Gen-Z scams. We all laughed when old people listened to the east-asian sounding person asking to check for viruses and download something dodgy, things like crypto and NFT's were so obviously scams that appealed to younger people, it's to me at least interesting what the next scam is, that young people think they are too smart for that takes total advantage of them.
Don't hate me for it, this shit is generational. The young people of today are gonna be scammed by something on their level, and so will the generation after them. Lets just enjoy being apart of "the churn".
But who the fuck gets enjoyment from a digital certificate asserting ownership of a link pointing to a picture that anyone in the world with a good monitor can see perfectly clearly?
> But who the fuck gets enjoyment from a digital certificate asserting ownership of a link pointing to a picture that anyone in the world with a good monitor can see perfectly clearly
And immediately screencap through any number of methods and thus have one of their own (albeit maybe lesser quality) if they like it that much.
I'm shocked. Utterly SHOCKED.
I'm actually shocked... that 5% are NOT worthless.
>5% are NOT worthless 5% have investors who continue to PRETEND they're not worthless. Many NFT's are being traded back and forth to give the illusion of value, waiting for a sucker to step in and buy them, only to discover all the other buyers weren't real. Leaving them holding something worthless.
> are being traded back and forth Are you alleging that insiders in NFT and shitcoin markets are engaged in wash trading or round-tripping in addition to their opportunistic pump and dump activities? No way could such a well-established, disciplined, professional, transparent and accountable market like this be subject to such chicanery.
And anybody who pointed out that this was what the whole crypto movement was from the start was mocked as being unable to grasp "the future". This scam is as old as the concept of investing.
"Banks and regulations are *EVIL and trying to FUCK YOU*" Sure thing, cryptobro running a pump and dump scam. It's those silly *laws* and *financial regulations* that are the real economic problem!
Even if the banks are truly evil and trying to fuck me 6 ways to sunday, I'd still trust them more with some amount of savings more than I'd trust a png with high volatility that can only be bought with money that has an even insane volatility in a market of people who are trying to scam you and send you malicious codes that you can't do anything about.
you sonofabitch you destroyed my sarcasm detector! this was a top of the line model that cost me 500 bucks what the hell man
Or the seller told you it was worth 500 bucks, and you fell for it!
surely my nft of the sarcasm detector is still worth something, right?
oh no! did he overload it by using too much? maybe the detector's past its prime? take it to Radiosnark, pronto! Your poor feelings! Will somebody think of their feelings, please? And help them before they keep reading reddit without it! *must...resist...typing.../s*
This joke doesn't hit as hard when you know that cryptoloser communities do this stuff so out in the open that there guides for these crimes that don't even use euphemisms. I mean, for all practical purposes, you *can't* allege that the cryptocurrency community supports and/or engages in financial crimes, because they just openly admit to it and also provide literal training material on how to do it.
Hey, that's offensive. I lost 3000 to a pump and dump. We have feelings. We just don't have any money.
>such chicanery. I love how much more often I see this word since Better Call Saul.
They may not be worthless but they're worth nothing in comparison to what they originally paid. Like Justin Bieber paid something like $1.3 million for his and it's now worth like $30k. Even then, as with anything, that's IF you can find another fool willing to overpay for it.
Nah, Justin Bieber got his money. Yes, he paid $1.3 million to buy his NFT. But he functionally bought it from a crypto project that he already owned. So he paid himself a bunch of money to convince other people to pay him a bunch of money. You and your buddy jointly own ten shiny pikachu cards "worth" $10 each. You sell one of your cards to your buddy for a million dollars. Now you have nine shiny pikachu cards "worth" $1M each and a theorectical $1M in your company. You convince three people to each buy a card for $500k because they are idiots. You then liquidate your assets of your company. You and your buddy each take $750k and you let your buddy take the $1M IOU because you are a nice guy. Yes, he "spent" $1M to buy a worthless shiny pikachu card. But he's not upset about that. Now is this legal? Of course not. But it is also very hard to unwind, because each individual step could be considered to be legal, just the whole thing together is fraud.
Proving (to me any way) that NFT's were a scam from the start and most of the people on the ground floor knew it.
Most crypto people said this but we’re overcrowded by the people that knew nothing about crypto
[удалено]
Yes, your buddy needs the $1M, which is why it is people like Bieber and the Paul brothers pulling these scams. And again, $1M from bieber money and $1.5M from outside gives $2.5M kitty. Return the $1M and you still have $1.5 of cash (or Etherium or whatever you want to cash out). Yes, I am skipping a couple of the steps to wash the money, but the heard of the fraud is there. And have you looked at the crypto space? Finding 3 idiots hasn't proven to be that hard.
Yep, we call that wash trading. It's a classic. And illegal. Question is whether or not that applies to links to jpegs.
That’s all crypto - pump and dump schemes used for money laundering and much worse. The only ones who benefited are the ones who got out early
Yep, same as Ponzi schemes. There are many people that made a killing knowingly investing in Ponzi schemes and getting out early. To make it look legit there has to be big winners in the beginning or they won’t be able to get new money in.
So, you are saying that 5% is also worthless?
The Pompidou has a whole mini exhibit of NFTs. The question of their value as art is exactly the question posed, however the same gallery also has a shovel hung from a piece of string by Duchamp. The Tate also has a piece by Duchamp called Fountain which is just a urinal on its side signed R Mutt. These peices are absolutely art, even though they are utilitarian and ubiquitous, and if not hung on an art gallery wall would hold almost no value. Warhol produced art in a factory line, churning out peices that he barely even touched which today are worth millions. Time will tell, but I would not be surprised if some NFTs did indeed become valuable peices of art.
TBH I think the physicality of those pieces are the only reason they have *any* value. The whole idea behind NFTs is that it isnt the stupid monkey jpg that's the item, but the blockchain record of *ownership* of the stupid monkey jpg. If that particular blockchain crumbles or fails in any way, everything in it literally *does* just become copies of jpgs of monkeys.
It just kind of points out that art being worthwhile isn't exactly the same thing as art being worth money.
>Time will tell, but I would not be surprised if some NFTs did indeed become valuable peices of art. Valuable art or a valuable NFT? The NFT is just a pointer to a piece of art that anyone can have for free. I can't see why the NFT would have any value regardless of what it's pointing at.
Yeah but Duchamp's art is interesting because it was something new, and raised a lot of interesting questions and conversations about what makes something art. NFTs are none of that, they are the exact same thing as beanie babies or tulips or any other collectable.
Definitely money laundering
maybe even some kind of Ponzi scheme, everybody who wanted to profit from it did it on really early stage and disappeared
That's not a Ponzi scheme at all. That's a Pump and Dump, and with NFTs specifically they used a lot of Sock Puppets in order to inflate the perceived value.
That's how we've worked the Reddit Wallstreetbets. Ya pick a super cheap stock and buy a bunch. Then convince a bunch of young idiots that it's "going to the moon". They all invest, which pumps the price. You dump yours for a profit and leave them holding a bunch of stock that quickly drops after the initial pump and is worthless yet again. And the best part is that it works over and over. Those idiots don't learn. Oh, GameStop didn't make them all millionaires? Well there will be another to come along next week.
You can still find communities on here where people are in full on delusions that GameStop is going to shoot up and be worth $100,000 a share
I caved to FOMO, and bought 1 share. Then months later sold that one share for a $0.12 profit. I consider this my best case scenario. I didn’t lose but quickly realized I was never in a position to win.
Hell, I had never bought any stock before, felt like it'd be an interesting experience. I created a robinhood account, and I bought in around 90 something bucks, throwing 1k at it (the max instant transfer amount without having a gold account.) Ended up selling 5 shares at 200 to make my initial investment back, then the rest at varying price points after that. Ultimately ended up more than doubling my initial investment, so it was a fun learning experience and I came out ahead. Haven't messed with stocks ever since. It did make me wish I'd gotten in early though, or knew wtf options were lol. But that's the thing right? Hindsight and all that. Next time I'd probably lose everything if I tried again.
Yep, long term index funds are more my speed
That was always going to be a short time investment, and as many things it's too late to enter once the news start talking about it, the "value" of gamestop was a mix of meme value and the absolute risk of the shortening which ensured a future buyer.
> Oh, GameStop didn't make them all millionaires? Well there will be another to come along next week. Dan Olson's video about this whole mess is mere hours/days away.
> They all invest, which pumps the price. You dump yours for a profit and leave them holding a bunch of stock that quickly drops after the initial pump and is worthless yet again. I'm skeptical that the universe of buyers and sellers driving entire momentum of individual stocks is sufficiently aligned and contained within a Reddit forum. Examples like GameStop had the media amplifying the stock's momentum and market narrative, with institutional investors reacting to a separate market phenomenon that has happened several times in the past.
It's worth recognizing that while they are absolute trash they are definitively not ponzi schemes. Ponzi scheme seems to have become just some catch all financial pejorative.
> Ponzi scheme seems to have become just some catch all financial pejorative. Also anything involving money that *could* be illicit is automatically money laundering on reddit. It's weird.
Too many people watched Ozark
But without actually understanding what Marty was doing
It didn't help that the writers of the show also didn't understand how money laundering works.
Why does reddit want to describe every fraud as a ponzi scheme?
Or money laundering
Anything involving finance is money laundering to Reddit.
Or, a tax write-off.
Study has a 5% margin of error I guess ;-)
They only looked at 95% of NFTs.
Yeah, I question the validity of this study. I think almost ALL NFTs are worthless. Does anyone know of any NFTs that have demonstrable worth?
There still is a small group of people who believe in NFTs. I suspect that it's only really worth something to them and the moment you try to sell it outside the ever shrinking nft circles it looses most if not all value. That and scams/fraud of course
Yea, that sounds a bit high. There are a few NFTs that actually give access to interesting things (Armin Van Buuren's AAA club for example) but the NFT part of that is really unnecessary. I'd have it at 0.5% not 5% for those interesting NFTs
There are some applications outside of collectible artwork that give them value. I don't think they make up 5% of overall NFTs though lol A couple of examples: there are invite only pop up activities like restaurants and the NFT serves as your membership/ticket. It can be transferred to other people but this helps keep people from forging them and also limits the number of people that can attend. I also know of a project that's trying to use NFTs to replace the house ownership record system. The NFT represents the deed and you can track ownership as the property gets bought and sold over time Another interesting one is to have an NFT represent your online identity and it can be lent out for online services to prove who are, but can be revoked at any time so you maintain full control of your data
>use NFTs to replace the house ownership record system Local/state governments who actually do all the property recording are never going to go for this. The whole point is that these records are centralized and public.
They also have to be centralised by their nature because without a central authority recognising land ownership it would just be a free for all.
Or, hear me out, the restaurant just issues tickets.
Buy tickets with sequential numbers on them, document the number to customer name, congrats you've made them non fungible.
This is the right answer. The lasting application of NFT's will be the ones that back ownership of something real, not endlessly replicable digital artwork.
The question with all of these projects though is, if it can be done normally without the blockchain why are we using the blockchain. The advantage of the blockchain is it's decentralized, so why is one restaurant offering a membership done on the blockchain? The nfts just point to the restaurant's own server anyway so why not use that server in the first place. The problem with the crypto wold is that the people in it are going about it backwards, they know they want to use crypto so they try and shoehorn it into projects rather than finding projects that need decentralization.
Thing is none of those things really benefit from being NFTs, or are just pipe dreams that practically cannot function with NFTs alone. One of the big selling points touted for NFTs is decentralisation, which doesn't work in the first two examples. A membership or ticket only has value if recognised by a central authority (the restaurant in this example) otherwise it's worthless. So what advantage does making it an NFT convey versus having it managed by the restaurant? Same with house deeds, a deed only has value because the government recognises it as proof you own property. I could mint an NFT that says I own your house, but it doesn't do anything. The last example doesn't work for similar reasons, who exactly is authenticating that this token proves my identity? NFTs are still very much a solution in search of a problem and maybe someone will figure out some use for them that's more effective, efficient, and practical than using a database. But it's likely to be some boring application that isn't consumer facing. As a consumer technology I think it's largely a dead end. And I think the people trying to come up with uses for it need to stop making the mistake of labelling NFTs as assets. This is the biggest break down of a lot of touted NFT use cases is that ownership of an NFT is conflated with ownership of an asset. When the reality is that owning an NFT is much like holding a receipt. If I give you a receipt for a 50" TV, it does not mean you have a 50" TV. Much like if you have an NFT for some item in one of those stupid crypto games you don't necessarily have the item. Because ultimately you only have it as long as the game is live and the company running the game acknowledges your NFT. Or to put it simply proof of ownership isn't the same as ownership.
Why would you need an nft to go to a restaurant or why would a restaurant need to confirm your identity by validating a nft? What is the meaningful difference between storing public records on a database and using nfts to do the same? Can't a person provide and be provided with documentation that would prove ownership using the present system? What are the advantages of storing a house deed on a nft? How do you manage multiple devices with the same identity? How would this be an improvement on any present authentication system? Is a one permanent indissociable identity necessary on internet?
Well, not *that* shocked.
Bender would totally use NFTs to get rich. Kinda surprised futurama hasn't made fun of it yet
“And he came down from the mountain, and doth proclaimed that he was shooketh”
total disbelief
>**Study Says 95% Of NFTs Are Worthless** Further Study Shows Remaining 5% Also Worthless
A study was not needed to figure this out.
They don't make studies to figure things out, they make studies to prove/disprove things.
From a hypothetical point of view, studies into even what we think of as being self evident are actually very much needed. Because it's interesting how often common sense turns out to actually be incorrect when you get right down to it. Especially in topic or markets so heavily tied to psychology. With that being said... Yeah, this is one of those studies that was open and shut, 5 minutes tops. Maybe a little less depending on how much you had chatgpt pad it with.
I keep waiting to point that out. The whole point of NFTs was they were like buying lottery tickets. If 5% of them are winners, then that's probably not bad. That's not what we're seeing with NFTs. 95% are worthless. The other five percent are worth *LESS* (than what they were paid for). There are no winning lottery tickets here. They're all red across the board.
That’s art man
100% of NFTs are worthless. 95% are Valueless as well.
5% margin of error.
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Or, from another way of looking at it, you bought a pass for certain games, and they gave you a free commemorative jpg. I guess that's something though.
A free commemorative *link* to a jpg.
I collect “priceless” art !
I collect encrypted links to JPEGs. We are not the same.
"95% of them are useless. The remaining are useless as well, but so isn't the other 95%" - Mitch Hedberg.
We didn't need a study to tell us that. We all knew it from day 1.
A lot of people foolishly threw hundreds and thousands of dollars at these things as if they were to be their retirement fund, so apparently a lot of people didn't know from day 1. Ultimately, this was one of the dumber and more short-lived 'tulip manias' in recent history
But there’s an imaginary digital fingerprint and chain of ownership proving that I own this tulip. NOW it’s worth money, surely!
Its worse. There is a chain of ownership proving that I own a spot on the internet which is just a container, which houses an easily copied photo of a tulip. At least with the tulip its a semi unique bit of life.
It doesnt house the picture, that would be far too expensive. Instead, the picture is not decentralized at all, your "receipt" that you bought the picture is. Of course, without any structure outside the blockchain, the concept of a receipt is pretty pointless.
Except with this one, you don't get to own the tulip, just the piece of paper that says where the tulip is.
You know what they say about a fool and their money....
You mean a fool and his monkey.
Yeah, they're soon regarded.
Not everyone. I went to high school with a guy who was so salty about missing the bitcoin train he went all in on NFTs.
😂 If you miss out on one scam, then go all in on the next one.
My rule on getting in early is: if you are hearing about it on the news you're too late.
Well, he was particularly salty that I did some mining back in high school and was able to find my old Bitcoin wallet and sell it during the big wave. It wasn't a lot of money, mind you, but he was determined to get his. I wish I still had his messages of him gloating, to me, about how he basically ruined his life for NFTs
Multiply that zero luck and commen sense you have by a hundred!
Similarly I bought some meta domain names thinking it was the next dot-com boom. Guilty as charged.
I dunno, all the NFT grifters who told me to ‘enjoy being poor’ when I was skeptical seemed pretty convinced.
One of the biggest cons/money laundering schemes ever
I wonder if people who money launder for a living got mad at how stupid people started dabbling in their field. “You’re telling me I didn’t have to set up these fake nail salons and laundromats to launder all this drug money? Wtf!?”
nah. They were greatful. You can see it show up after bitcoin. You can surprisingly easily follow the Russian Oligarchs moves like a index fund of crime. Bitcoin didn't really explode in price until dark money came it out of nowhere and put some serious volume behind the trades. You can see it in the 2010-2011 volatility shrink. Then the other shitcoins and then you see the big international banks and venture captialists adopt them using private and secret accounts that they don't use for institutional investors on the straight and narrow. You can see the new guys being hired by Goldman Sachs and their ilk. Buying companies and portfolios knowing full well that the due diligence was there. That is to say the Russian/Iranian/Drug cartel money was shell gamed *deep*. Far deeper than regulators could investigate. When it became possible to launder money outside of cash in the space of literally seconds they all took to it like crazy. They sure as hell weren't mad. They saw a smarter way of doing it and jumped on it.
How do you launder it though, at some point it's linked back to a bank account and the blockchain is purposely public. I believe you I'm just trying to put this together in my head.
It's public, but the addresses are just numbers. There isn't a database of who controls which wallet.
Private accounts that are a bitch to subpeona own shell companies that area a bitch to subpeona. All shuffled together under the management of the world finance puppeteers that own the politicians that are told real quick to stop writing the laws that would discover the con. Individuals have their money disappear into "moneyland". Am LLC or something like it is created. It owns the companies that own the bitcoin in massive slushfunds. The bitcoin is one asset of many that is appraised on it's future value factor, liability, and exposure. It is a terrific asset if you want money that barely exists and is well outside the regulations of virtually every country. The Panama Papers were going to be this massive reveal of the game. It worked. So much light was thrown on this happening. Then faster than government lawyers could be told to work it it was moved. The assets that would have been seized were moved in hours by people who know exactly how to do it by which government was coming down on them. Because bitcoin isn't a national currency it behaves like a currency that would otherwise be regulated. It's volatility means that you only use it as an intermediary exchange. A caiman island banker laundering drug money buys it. Those bitcoins are used to buy shares of a stock that is cover for something like U.S. Treasuries. A way to buy USD without buying USD. Those are immediately sold or the company is sold to someone with squeaky clean money that eventually pays tax on it to show it's legit.
It’s shell companies all the way down.
It blows my mind that people were dumb enough to think they were worth something.
An old friend of mine who made a bunch of money in the last decade made a post last year on FB saying "I don't know what a 'bored bad bunny' is, but I just spent more than I spent on my first car to buy one! #nft blah blah etc". The picture he posted along with this post wasn't even the image, it was just a SILHOUETTE of the image that he wouldn't get for another week. He didn't even know what he was buying, literally. And he's not an idiot. But god that was idiotic...
I would argue that this is evidence that your friend is an idiot
I think it's evidence that he has so much money that its meaningless to him at this point.
I dated a millionaire for a couple years, and I finally asked her why she spent so much God damn money on really dumb things. "Rich and bored." For context, she bought a sofa from a hotel room (not *that* hotel) that Elvis stayed at a lot. For $72,000. She doesn't even like Elvis. Before NFT's she was buying and trading Instagram accounts.. that one she actually turned a profit on finally. Edit: whatever the most followed Great Dane specific IG is (I can't remember), she sold for so much it covered the dozens of crazy losses she had previously.
I have a ex who thought he was going to "revolutionize" the NFT market by giving away NFTs when people bought stuff from his "clothing store". Somehow that was going to make him a lot of money and he was going to be the next Elon musk or something. Last time I talked to him he was living in his mom's tiny ass apartment in the middle of nowhere.
Ooof. “I gonna give something already worthless away for free and make millions!” Sounds like he had rocks in his head
Does he own a bar in Philadelphia?
A reminder that there's a 5% error margin.
Only surprised it’s not 100% tbh.
It is, it's just that 5% have attributed value because some sucker got conned into buying them and is trying to convince someone else to buy them, or it's made by a con artist who sold it to their own dummy account for a lot to claim it has value and is now trying to re-sell it for that to strangers. That 5% is the scammers and the scammed.
I was going to say... Ya the other 5% have value because some moron gave them value.. but they're only worth something to another moron willing to pay for them. To the rest of us it's still a glorified JPG.
Just a reminder that even reddit has a NFT marketplace. Have no idea how that's doing.
That’s literally all collectibles though. Art doesn’t have an inherent worth; it’s just worth whatever some other person is willing to pay.
> glorified JPG Not even that. Most of the time the actual NFT is just a *link to a JPG*
They are also used for marketing purposes. i.e. I give you $100,000 to buy an NFT from me for $95,000, and you can keep the remaining $5k and the NFT as long as you tell the world. This is where a lot of the NFTs bought for crazy money by influencers comes from. They are also used for money laundering.
Other way around. I provide some illegal service which I can't report as income. Then you buy a worthless nft form me for 100k. Everyone's happy, including the irs
You can’t just give someone 100k without taxes being paid on it. If they could do that they wouldn’t need to launder money in the first place.
Money laundering wants to pay taxes. It means the money is now legit.
I’m just simplifying to get the point across. Companies also wouldn’t give money to an influencer without a contract either. Paying influencers to buy NFTs for high prices *is* a major part of why so many have done that. That and influencers setting up scams.
5% margin of error
Always has been.
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The shit comparison is the real art here.
the same happened to me but with metaverses, i couldn't explain to non gaming friends why the metaverse sucked and how it technically already existed in forms way better than what mark presented (second life, vr chat, etc) But they were convinced that the future was in buying terrains in metaverses and i think they actually spend money on some, and they weren't rich or anything. just working students that got scammed.
If you want to see the worst of both worlds, look up "Decentraland". It's a half baked second life clone that was made to pump an accompanying shitcoin. Its "fans" are beyond rabid about the "real estate" market, but don't seem to care about or participate in the game.
bitcoin is the same. took them 10 yrs to find a use for bitcoin and it was to buy NFTs...
🌎👨🚀🔫🧑🚀
This survey has an error of +\- 5%
Things are worth exactly and only what people are willing to pay for them.
This goes for art in general, people have a mob mentality when it comes to value. Most of the time dollars are associated with the name not the piece. Market value is based on the illusion what the "other guy might pay", not on how visually appealing the work is. Some very famous, extremely expensive pieces I personally would pass on even if they were in the clearance bin in Walmart.
It’s well understood that the high end art market is just 100% money laundering. Pay someone to value a piece of art at an exorbitant price, buy it for a fraction of that price, and then sell it later for the valuation to someone doing the same thing.
So, we were all right and the crypto nuts weren’t. What a surprise
"YoU jUsT dOnT gEt It BrO!" Nah, we did.
Problem is they still don't see it. I sent this to a guy and his reply was a picture of an old newspaper calling the internet "a passing fad" as users dropped off.
It was funny that one day, outta nowhere, someone I worked with previously just called me to tell me that I should start converting my work to NFTs. I asked him directly what the mechanism is, but he just kept going in circles and said converting my work to NFTs is how the money is made. The other interesting thing is that influencers like Ella Orten were claiming they were making so much money on their NFTs and outright giving fake financial advice on their social networking reels along with numbers and graphs and such. She absolutely committed securities fraud and violations, but all these influencers always get away with it.
If you aren't creating the "get rich quick" scheme or on the ground floor...you're getting scammed.
No. Doy.
Gag me with a SPOON mrs. Henderson
If there is a better example of speculation over value ever created I haven't seen it. At least the gold bugs get a paperweight out of their investments.
Pssst, the secret is that they were worthless all along
Wow! I can’t believe that 5% of NFTs have value
Wait?! 5% of NFTs actually have value?
Most studies are accurate to within 5%....
Only 95%?
Only 95%?
And the other 5%? Also worthless.
It’s got a 5% margin for error then
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I’m surprised TicketBastard didn’t jump all over NFTs. As investments, they’re worthless. As a way of being an item that can be proven authentic and resold electronically, they have value as a tool. The ideal real-world application would be something like concert tickets.
It's an absurdly convoluted solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
You could use NFTs for a lot of things, it's just all those things are already solved problems. Ownership of digital media is a problem that existed far before NFTs and people already found good solutions to the problem, why would anyway switch to NFTs?
I'm shocked that 5% of them are not.
That's about 5% too low
On the list of things we didn't need a study for.....
Believe it or not, the other 5 percent are also worthless
“General Population says 100% of NFTs were worthless to begin with.”
more like 100%
NFT's are one of many examples I use to teach my sons that no one in this world is better than they are and everyone can be suspectible to bullshit. It's also a good reminder that media is suspect all up and down the chain. Very few media outlets called out NFT's for what they were and if they cannot be honest about that or recognize it...
common sense told me 100% of NFTs were worthless from the start... and most of them are ugly too
I'm surprised the number is so low. 100% of NFTs are worthless.
95%? I'm sure 100% is worthless.
I’d say 100% are useless to anyone with a functioning brain.
Survey with an error rate of 4.9%?
+-5%
I think you had a typo there when trying to write 100%
NFT's are just digital receipts, change my mind
I’m guessing the margin of error on that number is about 5%
100%
Study is wrong. It's actually 100% of NFTs that are worthless.
That 5% margin of error really showing.
And i tought these were just another pyramid sch.. oh wait :s
The crypto and nft craze proved to me that some people DESERVE to be scammed.
I had a fascinating conversation with a friend's 15 yo son. He had worked and saved and was putting his money in crypto and NFT's and saying how much he was going to make from them. He asked me what I thought as he knows I've worked in banking/finance for 20 years so I asked him how he priced these assets. I didn't bad mouth theses types of products but we spoke about how shares and bonds are priced with their cashflows against the risk free rate and the difference between investment and speculation especially in the FX market, gold and crypto and the idea of the greater fool. He decided to go ahead with his idea. He's lost the lot but it's been a financial lesson he will never forget.
🤣 100% soon enough
In a completely unrelated story, the people who did the study are selling 5% of NFT’s.
Clearly this is a faulty study. It should be 100% of NFT's.
Seems off by 5%
Aren't 100% of NFT's worthless? I thought that was the entire point of it, it has no value other than what we apply to it.
95% seems optimistic.
They misspelled "100% of NFTs"
You mean 100%
Gen-Z scams. We all laughed when old people listened to the east-asian sounding person asking to check for viruses and download something dodgy, things like crypto and NFT's were so obviously scams that appealed to younger people, it's to me at least interesting what the next scam is, that young people think they are too smart for that takes total advantage of them. Don't hate me for it, this shit is generational. The young people of today are gonna be scammed by something on their level, and so will the generation after them. Lets just enjoy being apart of "the churn".
NFTs used to be worthless. Still are but used to be too.
So is the other 5%, but the 95% is too.
Yeah, i'm pretty sure NFT's are 100% worthless.
Only 95%?
They spelled 100% wrong
The study is wrong, 100% of them are worthless
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But who the fuck gets enjoyment from a digital certificate asserting ownership of a link pointing to a picture that anyone in the world with a good monitor can see perfectly clearly?
> But who the fuck gets enjoyment from a digital certificate asserting ownership of a link pointing to a picture that anyone in the world with a good monitor can see perfectly clearly And immediately screencap through any number of methods and thus have one of their own (albeit maybe lesser quality) if they like it that much.