From millions of dollars to under a grand: The dramatic fall of the NFT
https://english.elpais.com/culture/2026-03-10/from-millions-of-dollars-to-under-a-grand-the-dramatic-fall-of-the-nft.htmlOpen linkView original on feddit.uk586
Comments226https://english.elpais.com/culture/2026-03-10/from-millions-of-dollars-to-under-a-grand-the-dramatic-fall-of-the-nft.htmlOpen linkView original on feddit.uk
That's easy to say with the benefit of hindsight in 2026. However, back in 2021, it was easy to say without the benefit of hindsight.
Had me in the first half, not gonna lie.
I think it was even easier to say in 2021, because more people knew about it and the scam was even more obvious. Now, in 2026, most people's hindsight doesn't go back that far, it was quickly forgotten as it should be, and people are like "huh? NFT?"
The only good thing out of NFTs was that I learned what fungible means.
Is a thing with null value fungible?
Only to people with brains.
If it wasn't in the beginning, it was after Folding Ideas/Dan Olson released "Line Goes Up".
Nah, A large portion of it was idiots attempting to lose money as quickly as possible.
Walking up to a game of Three Card Monte and saying "It's pretty obvious he's palmed the Queen" mostly just gets you heckled and chased away.
Part of the problem with digital spaces is that you've got your person setting up the scam, and then you've got your layer of people marketing the scam, and then you've got your first layer of suckers who think they are coming out ahead on the scam, and then you've got the second layer of suckers who all know a tier-one sucker who just got rich. And then you've got the bots and the ideologues and the contrarians and the know-it-alls, all repeating the line that the person who set up the scam encourages them to say.
And it's over all that cacophony that you announce "It's obviously a scam". Then Reddit boots you for violating terms and conditions of the platform.
Everyone comment how much did they lose on NFTs.
I will start: $0.
I found value in shitting on people buying them. $0 monetary gain, but at least $10 in schadenfreude.
I trolled people by setting their NFT as my avatar in the chat rooms they were in. Im going to value that at $100.
Better hope they don’t sue you for copyright infringement.
/s
My favorite bit was how basically none of the NFTs included copyright ownership. Like, if it was a quick and easy way to publicly deal in copyright ownership, maybe pointing to a .gov site showing the transfer of ownership to the holder of that specific nft then it would actually be useful and maybe even worth something. But nah, they were treating digital assets like physical paintings and hoping rarity of an infinitely copiable object was value.
Best use of an NFT I've ever heard of!
I've been watching a lot of Antiques Roadshow clips and I imagined one of the appraisers doing a valuation of your shenanigans.
"You bought this magnificent piece sillyness when and for how much?"
"oh I just copypasted it to my profile for no money at all"
"Well that was very good deal indeed, because on in todays money the entertainment value alone is in the hundreds of pounds."
Putting a dollar figure on your schadenfreude? Do you want a block chain based "prediction market" for schadenfreude? That's how you get a block chain based "prediction market" for schadenfreude.
Yes, as long as I'm on the receiving end of the pump and dump. In the end, I'll only be taking money from people that clearly have too much. I'll donate some to some good charity so it's not a bad thing
Damn, I lost twice as much as you did.
I actually got a free NFT in some kind of sweepstakes. It's probably worth negative money now.
It did get me 3 free drinks at a music festival so there's like +50 bucks in value right there.
I actually made money from NOT putting any of my investment money in NFTs and instead putting it somewhere else.
Then again, from the very start the NFT mania looked like a more obvious and dumb version of the Tulip Bulb mania, so I can hardly claim great wisdom from not having put a cent in it.
$0
Under a grand. Is there anyone really stupid enough to think this is still worth anything at all?
I would actually pay like $100 to say I own the EFT some moron paid millions of dollars for. I've bought dumber things. I paid real money for a 100 trillion dollar zimbabwe bill that is completely worthless. Great for cocaine! I've also paid hundreds of dollars for 1 night of cocaine, dozens of times, and have nothing to show for any of them.
Pro tip: don't do cocaine while you still can choose.
The dude literally has a 100 trillion dollars, it's fine
Tell that to Whitney Houston.
Great advice, but I've been doing cocaine rarely for decades. Think I'll be right thanks.
Yeah i was thinking that the other day when they were talking about an 11 million dollar EFT now valued at 100 USD.
I was like, shit, I'd pay 100 USD for that one.
Plus imagine if another bubble came and some donkey was willing to pay a ton for it again for some dumb reason.
A 100 dollar meme like that would be worth it IMO.
feels akin to my GME shares, I just wanted to be included in the fun LOL.
BRB gonna go buy all the rump coins from the bag holders.
T'would be funny if this kind of demand drove the prices back up. Not to money laundering levels, but like to like $180 or something.
You can just say you did that without having to pay the money, the only thing you’d be missing is a website (that probably won’t be around much longer) confirming you did that. That’s kinda why NFTs didn’t work.
Pro tip: lie to the people around you about stupid stuff.
The real LPT is always in the comments.
The existence of people stupid enough to pay for them is what makes NFTs worth something in the first place
What? You mean digital art that infinitely reproducible, can't actually be owned, WASN'T the next big thing? Oh jeez. I hope the metaverse succeeds and if not then AI surely will RIGHT?!?!
Hey but this cryptographic key says that I own it because I paid made up currency units for it or something
Hey but that made up currency I worked for by burning electricity, I mean MINING it.
Hey, but the recent changes means I earned that made up currency by proving I own more than you!
OH! It's an epeen thing! Got you! All the rich win. Congrats to them.
Does that require proof of wank?
Basically...
My favorite thing is there are certain NFTs that are viruses that as soon as you do ANYTHING with them, they go and transfer all of the contents of your wallet to another wallet. Even deleting them triggers this action. So if you have unknown NFTs in your wallet you can’t touch them lest they trigger this virus.
How could this not be the future of commerce?
WHAT?!? I've never heard of that! That's nefarious! WOW!
I got it from a Folding Ideas video (the problem with nfts one)
But here’s a link actually detailing it https://www.gate.com/learn/articles/beware-of-unexpected-nfts-and-assets-in-your-wallet-they-could-steal-all-your-funds/7682
Edit: for those that haven’t seen the video it’s worth the 2 hour watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
Hey! You be fair to the NFT owners.
They never owned digital art, just a link to a specific instance of one!
If you weren't using them to launder money for a criminal enterprise, then you were doing them wrong.
...
doing them wrongfalling for a scam.The whole NFT thing was one giant pump and dump.
I need to come up with my own scam to rinse rich idiots.
The best scams are either holistic/psychic stuff or Hi-fi Audio.
A good scam is all about finding a way to bypass bs detectors. Appealing to greed or fear while adding a sense of urgency are the classic ones for good reason. But you've got others like appealing to in group/out group dynamics, distrust of institutions, ego, desired self image, laziness, carelessness so much more. You've also got those selecting to trigger anyone with a bs detector to only spend time on those without one.
High Fi audio is actually legit to a point. Over $300 (well, $400 now with tariffs) is when the scam begins
Not necessarily. For headphones it can go higher. I'm currently looking at hifiman unveiled.
This sequence of comments has me cracking up.
“I need a thing to make suckers out of morons”
…
“You should sell them audiophile shit”
…
“Well.. some audiophile shit is ok.. up to point.. after that, you’re def a sucker!”
…
“Actually… you’re not a sucker at all if you spend a bunch of money on this shit. Here, take my money!”
Wanna start a headphone company with me?
I get what you're saying, but there are basically only 3 companies whose headphones are worth 300-600€. Said companies took decades, mountain of innovations and patents to get where they are now.
If you can actually get that kind of immersion and quality cheaper - I'm all ears. Literally
No judgement intended, and I agree! Trust me when I say that I have an unhealthy amount of money “invested” in headphones and amplifiers. I saw way too much of myself in both sides of that comments thread to not laugh.
If you're talking about the Susvara unveiled or whatever they're currently 15k aud. That is fucking wild.
Lol no, that is entirely different category, those are essentially limited edition engineering pieces. The consumer one is Ananda unveiled, which in my local shop goes for €460.
Oh thank goodness. Cool, I'll check those out. I'm interested in getting some audio-cans for my head!
Ok - hear me out.
We get idk 1000 of us poors to buy some cheap land in the Midwest. Up in Appalachia.
We sell “Rapture Survival Communities”
They’re $999/month and you’ll get a hidden bungalow community complete with bunker. We’ll fill it with doctors and pastors and birthing women.
BUT YOU CANT KNOW THE LOCATION UNTIL THE RAPTURE HAPPENS. You don’t want any pesky liberals finding it and gaying up the place with their liberal demonic child sacrifice transness.
We will deliver coordinates via analog radio and Morse code once the rapture has started.
By business plan makes Sam Altman hard in his butt:
When they come screaming for proof and receipts and refunds… Just gaslight them and buy a politician.
If I were an "angel", I'd go with you. I like the cut of your jib. You have what it takes. If only 1) me business angel 2) you pitch-deck. We would clean-up the business space.
Unfortunately for you you don't have what it takes. You need to be a proper psychopath to scam others.
This. The worst thing for any salesman to have is scruples.
Sometimes i observe so many ways to get easy money and don't have to hard work, than i remember than my parents raised my scruples and moral... Would be so easy if i wasn't
I'm working on the grift of all gifts, if you want in, you can buy shares of my grift for $100 each.
Wanna help me convince maga that citrus makes people gay? I think we could solve a lot with that.
And if you don't trust this guy, I offer grift insurance for only 15% of expected value!
Add "AI Agent" to something everyone's doing like "Tooth brushing AI Agent."
but for a brief period of time, some people made some money, while most participants lost
edit: do AI next
This describes our species’ entire existence 👌
we were the bored ape all along
As with everything crypto this was a huge scam. Besides the obvious profiting from gullable idiots, the other use case is to illegally funnel money.
Not absolutely everything in crypto is a scam, though 99% of it is, and I will definitely agree with you there. But there is 1% that is actually trying to do something useful, and you've got to be able to find that 1% and not throw it out with the bath water.
I’d wager even the 1% is the stereotypical “solution in search of a problem”. Seems to be a reoccurring theme as of late in the tech industry.
the 1% is the people who say "well, sure, 99% is a scam, but theres a legit 1% thats totally real!"
Thre might be a recognizable item of food in a turd, but I'm still not going to eat it.
Having a currency not backed by a government or different currency is actually something the world could benefit from. Iranian currency was backed by USD, the US caused a shortage of USD there, and their currency value dropped to under 3% of it's former value. 90 Million people.
That said, I think most of us have only ever used crypto to buy drugs off the internet.
Yeah, but a currency practically needs a military and an economy to back it.
Who is going to stop me from fucking with the bitcoin supply if I own the US economy?
That's the point of crypto - unless you can alter 51% of the blockchain, you can't.
You misunderstand, if I own the GDP of a world power, what's preventing me from buying a ton of Bitcoin and fucking with the supply that way?
Crypto nowadays looks like a pump and dump free for all.
How is buying the asset fucking with the supply?
If you mean hoarding it, that's pretty much all Bitcoin is good for.
Yeah, it also needs to derive its value from somewhere. Any stable nation's fiat derives its value from the fact that the government is believed trustworthy in matters of printing money and that in order to deal with that government you have to use that currency. An Australian could do all their financial life in etherium assuming everyone takes and offers it, right up until tax time where they have to convert a lot of ETH values into AUD, then trade some ETH for AUD in order to pay taxes. And if they receive any money from their government you bet your ass they aren't being given ETH. If they trust the Australian government even a little they're probably not jumping through those hoops.
To preface: I'm not a gold nut and I believe that it's generally wiser for stable developed nations to use fiat currency to enable them to operate in a generally Keynesian approach with controlled inflation.
That said while I agree it's unwise for nations unable to do that themselves to back their currency with a stable fiat currency from a different country, I don't think crypto is the solution. Coinage is. And I'm talking old school coinage where the government isn't backing it with metals, they're making it out of them. Probably something like silver.
A backed currency is because a government can't be trusted not to overinflate. If you want to bypass trust, the answer isn't another currency in which all value is theoretical, it's currency in which the value is in your hand and verifiable, with the government acting as the one setting units, assuring proper valuation, punishing devaluation, and publishing means for institutions and people to confirm valuation, such as physical properties, alloy percentages, and the easiest tests.
The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.
In case anybody sees this and doesn't know the context, this is the note that was published in the Genesis block of the Bitcoin blockchain, Satoshi wanted to engrave forever the fact that at this time the chancellor was on the brink of second bailout for banks. It was a call-out against the fiat system, and it's one of the best call-outs in history. and will be there forever more.
If you happen to have an original copy of this newspaper, it is a genuine artifact, and you can make absolute tons of money on it. No bullshit.
Based on this headline and the fact that Satoshi mentioned digital cash in the white paper as much as he did, you can clearly tell that he was frustrated with the fiat system and all the excesses that came with it and wanted to create a whole different system that was out of the hands of governments and corporations. He came close to succeeding but didn't quite finish the job because he couldn't figure out a way to add privacy into his ledger, which makes the entire thing completely transparent to law enforcement and government crooks.
However, on April 13th, 2014, the final puzzle piece was added with the launch of Monero, which has a fully private blockchain that does not have sender, receiver, or amounts being shown.
If you ever happen to read this comment, Satoshi, thank you for your great work. We will be forever in debt to you.
The fact that there is corruption in the financial system doesn't automatically mean that every other system is honest.
Oh, for sure. I saw another video somewhere yesterday that said you needed like seven pillars for a decentralized society. Decentralized communication, food, contracts, law, physical manufacturing, energy, and money. While I agree with that list, I think that an eighth one should be added, and that would be education. You might be able to fit education under communication, but I feel as though it doesn't properly fit there.
What do you mean by honest in this context? Both Bitcoin and Monero prevent bailouts, they're FOSS, and they've been working smoothly for years.
Ethereum has the potential to carry real world assets on its chain. Why does an share of stock have to go through a clearing house when it could be an L2 on ethereum? A company having a total of 1 million shares is no different from a L2 coin having a total number of 1 million coins. They can even be fractional too.
Literally every cryptocurrency supports this. But if the real world assets can be seized with a court order, then what's the point of a blockchain and not just a legally compliant database?
but like, man, like.. its totally new, like, and like, totally amazing man. you just, like, cant comprehend, man!
It's like, the public record, but without the government to enact or enforce and on your computer
Blcokchains aren't even worth a shit as implementations of a distributed ledger.
Bitcoin doesn't support this. It's what is being mirrored, yes. But, Ethereum is kinda like the distributed operating system/network that could/would allow 24 hour trading without having a clearing-house middleman.
You're talking about real-world assets carried on-chain, right? Bitcoin has supported this for a very very long time.
The true libertarians and anarchists in the room would call out the fact that they are attempting to build a world where governments don't run courts because governments don't exist and that all courts would be arbitration courts and decentralized and run by the community. If I have a problem with you, I tell my arbitrator about it, and my arbitrator tells you that I have a problem with you. If you don't like my arbitrator, then you choose your own arbitrator, and if I don't like the arbitrator you choose, then the arbitrators choose a third party arbitrator that they both agree on, and we agree to be bound by what that arbitrator says.
Edit: If you are willing to watch a 22 minute video, this might be of interest to you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ0Qkhnt6bQ
What's the point of an arbirator when there's no means to enforce compliance with their decision? And what could that system actually be? Functionally, it'd be identical to a government.
I'm assuming you didn't watch the video, because it did discuss that.
Alice, who is a subscriber of Dawn Defense, was murdered by Bill, who is a subscriber of Tanner Justice. Dawn Defense is pro-death penalty for murderers and Tanner Justice is not. Therefore, each company does a calculation to figure out how many users and how much revenue they will lose if their side is not upheld and the side that is likely to lose more pays the other side to stand down. In the case of the video, the assumption is that if Dawn Defense loses, they will lose one million currency units worth of customers, where if Tanner Justice loses, they will lose 500,000 currency units. So, Dawn Defense pays Tanner Justice 800,000 currency units to stand down, which is more than the 500,000 they would have lost, and less than the 1 million that Dawn would lose if they weren't able to enforce the death penalty on Bill.
These stand-down arrangements would be known beforehand, and therefore, when Bill subscribes to Tanner Justice, he would be informed that if he murders a client of dawn defense, that he will not be protected from the death penalty.
If your organization is decentralized, then its assets can't be seized by a court order. For example, darknet market admins (arbitrators) and their drug dealers don't even know who each other are. They've had a polycentric legal system for years.
But corporate stock remains centralized. They have a known headquarters with a known board of trustees. Their assets aren't carried on-chain; only some guy's promise to those assets.
My point is that an anarchist economy needs to be built from the ground up, circumventing the state's legal system. Slapping a blockchain on top of an already centralized system won't make it decentralized and thus provides no benefit.
Yeah, blockchain adds nothing to an existing economy. It could be useful as a means of distributed public records between anarchist communities, but it is documentation, not ownership. Ownership is an extension of political power and grows from the same barrel of a gun
Oh, absolutely. But that's because the way we've always done the stock market is through centralized systems. If a company were to be formed today and only ever issue their stock tokens on a decentralized system such as Ethereum, then the Ethereum system would be the final arbiter of who does and does not have shares in that company.
There is no provable way to show that any claim of ownership on Ethereum is legitimate, unless that person has some real-world proof of ownership, in which case the Ethereum link adds no value. It's just another step with another middleman.
In today's world, we are moving from analog systems to digital systems, and therefore, physical proof of ownership supersedes electronic proof of ownership.
If a company is digital native and issues their shares on a blockchain without ever issuing any kind of analog shares, then the electronic proof would supersede the physical proof, no matter what happened.
Say Alice has a hair salon that's called Alice's hair salon, and she issues one million tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, and each token represents one one millionth of the company, Alice's hair salon. Well, since she never issued any stock on the analog systems, the Ethereum system would be the final arbiter of who does and does not own any of those Alice's hair salon tokens.
The silver lining is that after the obligatory exploitation by grifters, every new technology of this caliber finally gets a more positive use in our lifes. Maybe somewhat naive, but I think we (ie. our societies) have payed ~50% of the tuition fee as far as crypto is concerned. So hopefully we'll be able to absorb the tech in our collective lives soon.
Ps: Different topic, but using the same metaphor for AI, I'm afraid we're just at the begin of its initial fallout.
I think the rise of Monero over Bitcoin is a very positive sign. Since it has privacy, the government absolutely cannot stand the fact that it exists, and therefore, institutions don't want to touch it. This means the "number go up", "to the moon", and "compliance", shmucks are all driven away in horror and you are left with the real core who want to see a better money in a digital world. If that sounds interesting, you might want to listen to "darknet Market Maximalism" a manifesto by xenu. You can listen to the audio version of it on YouTube.
Edit: I'll save you the trouble. Here's the link directly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ogNg20rGTU
Yeah, sure, that's why we're all riding Segways.
The reality is that quite a lot of new technologies have no significant real-life use case and vanish without a trace.
I tried to make clear that I'm talking about tech with potentially significant impact, case in point: blockchain. Are you suggesting that a quirqy twowheeler is somehow on the same level?
Unless trolling is all you're about, I can recommend refraining from such offhand dismissive remarks. Sarcasm has its use, but rin an anonymous online discussion it is easy to misunderstand. It does not contribute to a meaningful exchange of ideas.
There are great uses for crypto, just like there were great uses for Ithica_hours. A place holder for goods and services without physical constraint is a useful idea.
But it wont work. Because people want to leverage that to make fiat. They don't care about usefulness, actually earning it, or trading for it.
They want to get some, hold it, and sell it back for their fiat. Because of that exchanges came into being so they could capture some of the wealth in the process. And from then on it was never going to be useful. Just a way to hope the next sucker would buy what you had.
Since the government hates Monero so much, that's actually not as big of a problem with Monero because people want to earn it and trade it for goods and services in the real world. Also, people who use Monero are incredibly against centralized exchanges and would like to see it banned from every single centralized exchange on Earth so that decentralized exchanges would be the only place you could obtain it or through permissionless atomic swaps and peer to peer. The Monero community also mocks number go up people and calls them state plants.
yeah, the cryptoleftists community has found some decent actual use
Link please! I'm very skeptical but hope to be wrong.
https://bread.coop/
Also worth noting. The Bored Ape Yaht Club NFTs (in the thumbnail) were released by 4chan trolls with Nazi symbolism hidden in some of them. This was the most successful NFT project of them all.
This is the least surprising thing ever
That's why I divested to Labubu dolls and TSLA
A grand is still 1000 dollars too high a price for these things.
I'll see your grand and say 950 is still too high.
I think most people don't understand cryptocurrencies. On one side it's all hyperbolic about being your own bank and financial freedom and new tech, on the other side it's hyperbolic about how there is no underlying value, it's all going to 0, scams, drugs, terrorism, money laundering,...
But the fact is that crypto does have an underlying value. It's gambling. Gambling is a huge industry.
Also drugs.
I always said as long as crypto can be used to buy drugs, it will have value.
When everything we know in the world is gone and we're using rocks to make spears again, people will still want drugs, the value is eternal.
I mean it’s also really really good at money laundering and other financial securities scams that are otherwise illegal in real currency. IDK why OP is being so dismissive of that.
As long as the gov refuses to regulate it, it’s going to be useful for crimes. On the off chance we ever get a government willing to actually do anything but war crimes and graft, regulating it would destroy a lot of its utility and value.
I think it's an exaggeration of its crime utility. Normal money is king for crime.
Normal money can get you a visit from the SEC when you do securities fraud with it. Has that ever happened with a crypto pump and dump?
Yes.
SBF wasn't doing securities fraud with only crypto, if that's what you're thinking of. Also it was a pyramid scheme and not a pump and dump.
Congrats, now you understand fiat currency. It only has value because we agree on it.
No. I mean you can get all philosophical and say that everything has value only because that's a human concept, but thats not really something I would answer to.
Fiat has value because it's enforced. Because we have institutions that enforce it and because all of our lives are intertwined with it. We buy food with it and we are paid with it. It's everywhere. It doesn't make it immune to manipulation and fraud and crime, but we can take legal action because law is also intertwined with the same system.
Crypto is , with a couple of exceptions, a really terrible casino.
Fiat has value because the government demands taxes in it. If you don't pay your taxes, they put you in jail.
As opposed to the USD, which is backed by nothing, and therefore has no underlying value, but is not gambling for some reason?
The USD is backed by a state who demands their taxes be paid in their currency, ensuring there will always be demand for said currency.
This is also why people who complain about how “our tax dollars” are spent are missing the point. Their tax dollars don’t fund the government or any of its activities. Taxes are just an inflationary control measure; money is created when the government spends it.
Also, literally, tons of gold
Speculating on the value of an investment based on an asset that doesn't exist is similar to scammers offering to sell certificates of ownership of dogs' souls.
Capitalism tends over time to create increasingly abstract forms of ownership. And what could be more abstract than ownership of something that isn't there at all? They're selling GUIDs that point to nothing.
They can be used to launder money though.
That's why art is so inflated. It's used as a means to launder, because it's the value is so arbitrary.
This was never anything aside from a scam designed to separate the tech illiterate from their money.
How could it possibly be worth more than pennies?
This is the question!
Who could have predicted this? Literally impossible without hindsight and that's the revisionist history I'm sticking to.
Who could have thought it?
Etherium was run out of the offices of JP Morgan Chase and NFTs were a gimmick to boost the deal flow of their then-underperforming crypto offering.
It was, by and large, an enormous investment in sales and marketing on top of a ton of insanely shady business practices. Case in point, the infamous Beeple NFT that sold for $69.3M was purchased with Etherium to showcase Christie’s auction house accepting cryptocurrency for auction bids. The winning bidder for artwork was an early crypto adopter and marketer named Vignesh Sundaresan who was flush with these tokens, but lacked any kind of liquid market to sell them into yet. That's before you get into the Congo Line of largely clueless celebrities going on Late Night comedy shows to plug their online pogs.
It's trite to say that the whole thing was a scam because... duh. But I think people read this as "just dumb people being stupid with their stupid dumb money" and ignore the layer upon layer of market manipulation and con-artistry that went into making cryptocurrencies what they are today.
The fact that Donald Trump is using them to launder bribes from Middle Eastern dictators and East Asian kleptocrats should illustrate how deep these rabbit holes can go. It's so much more than just peddling bad clipart to dumb bros.
Anyone with the most basic common sense knew it was going to end up like this.
I remember playing with Stable Diffusion in 2022, and thinking "Oh. That's the end of NFTs."
NFT art was stupid to begin with, of course, but SD was such a blatent, extreme inverse of the "artifical digital scarcity" angle. If I wanted a shitty, albeit "unique" and deterministically reproducible digital image, I could just make it in 30 seconds on a desktop. If I wanted a certain look, I could use img2img or eventually controlnet and all sorts of augmentations.
Yes, junky AI was junky AI, but ironically it was the antithesis of everything NFTs stood for. Instead of "digital information is worth commodifying at great expense," it was "digital information is basically free." And I still find it amusing that Tech Bros and con artists jumped from one ship to the other so quickly, or somehow have feet in both.
AI wasn't the NFT killer, right click > saveas killed it at the very moment of conception.
Digital scarcity is a complete joke.
Sure you can copy the image, but you can't have the same machine-readable hash indicating ownership in my private system!
In hindsight, the monkey NFT thing was a "good" idea but poorly implemented. It was an attempt to create a digital version of beanie babies or baseball cards.
I mean "good" if you consider beanie babies and baseball card collecting and the value speculation a good thing. (I don't.)
It was very well implemented. The people that invented, designed, and minted them made billions of dollars from a bunch of gullible idiots using very little work, and they got away with it too.
Yeah that's true.
NFT just served as a training opportunity for the people behind it to learn how to get away with legally scamming people, not surprised the Reddit admin was all in on it when it came out.
Whoever could have seen this coming
Everyone with eyes.
But Gary Vee told me NFTs would make me rich!
That guy was on one of my favorite podcasts a few months ago, "Are You Garbage?". Granted, part of the podcast is talking about your past, but this guy never stopped talking and it was always about himself and how great he was.
He suffers from some sort of mental health disorder that doesn't allow to smell your own shit. That guy is fucking nuts.
Well what's the answer? Is he garbage?
We don't need a podcast to answer that question
They didn't even really touch on that, because he's not a comedian and wouldn't really be accepting of trash talk, I'm sure. They kind of played it cool, but in the podcasts after that they mentioned how fucking crazy he was.
That was the most goddamn awful thing ever seen. Where are those shitheads who first sold the fucking idea?
Its not worth a single cent in reality
Haven't heard anything in a while. So things aren't going so well? 😂
Dramatic? I found this an entertaining example of dumbness 🍿🍿🍿
For sure. This is comedy, not drama.
Digital ownership tokens could work if there legal framework imbuing digital property with the same attributes as physical property, i.e. legal ownership and the right to sell, trade, donate, loan or destroy it just as with a real thing. And tokens would have to be maintained by a single platform with legal weight behind it. If there were such a thing and platforms were compelled to support it, then it could work.
But NFTs were not that. They were a scam from the get go. I truly wonder how anybody could be stupid enough to believe a URL pointing at a machine generated picture would ever be worth something let alone appreciate in value. Or buying content in dogshit NFT based games like Legacy or Earth 2. Or that scam game Logan Paul endorsed. Or buying real plots of land such as on "Satoshi" (Lataroa) Island - a malaria riddled jungle that was sold as libertarian asshole utopia before it flopped. But people did. Because people are stupid.
These ape NFTs are also the ugliest and dumbest thing ever. Their faces look like hairy testicles. Whoever spent more than like $0.5 for this, fully deserves the outcome.
I purchased a really cheap NFT domain that I can link my cryptocurrency wallet address to so that instead of having to type out the 90 character string and get it right, you can type out a human readable domain. Other than that small use case, I've never had any other reason for it. But hey, it's kind of cool. And I don't see why not keep it since I already have it. And as I said, it wasn't that expensive anyway.
I would replace "dramatic" with "predictable". Everybody knew it was bullshit. It was like tulip mania, but without actual tulips.
Oh, they caught their money laundering scheme!
The way money-laundering works, you take ill-begotten funds and somehow churn it into legal tender in ways that can't be traced back to the source. Another angle is to create corporate entities that show loss against gains, so you can deduct and don't have to pay taxes on your windfall profits.
In the olden days, these were physical, degrading assets. Like strip malls, real-eestate, and dodgy, money-losing businesses that somehow stuck around forever. At the end, you were stuck with physical entities you couldn't unload.
Crypto and NFT were just digital variations of the same financial model, minus the hassle of having to manage the property.
It's not dramatic if it's funny!
Also archive: https://archive.is/Ye6ZL
Just stick that stuff on a canvas next time
a grand for some bits is not bad. its like the high priced works of art where the artist wipes their ass on a canvas.
Silly monkeys.
Oh no! I’m shocked!
I see this and wish I'd taken advantage of it for the exact period of time. I feel like the next UnderArmour/Apple/Google is hidden somewhere in all of this AI development. Just a question of knowing where to place bets.
It’s like bitcoin. A shitty idea I wanted no part of yet I wish I’d been willing to take advantage of at the time it took off.
So many crazy opportunities I passed up. Many of them turned out to be bad. Some, like Bitcoin, if you get out at the right time, you're set for life.
NFTs as a mechanism for exchanging and authenticating contracts is pretty revolutionary. But the only thing that reached public awareness were the dumb NFTs of a single image. The closest breakout was probably the effort for ticket sales and club memberships -- your "ticket" is the NFT itself, and you can move it around (sell, exchange) as you want before the event. There are still human-errors/logistical problems but in the end whomever has the NFT gets the seat. For club memberships, you were a member as long as you held the NFT. If you wanted out, you could sell it to someone else that wanted to join the club.
I could imagine all kinds of interesting use cases. But everything is just dumb about it now. Oh well.
I still don't see how the NFT is a benefit over existing digital ticket platforms.
"Digital ticket platform" is literally the poster boy of middle-man grift. Are you not familiar with Ticketmaster? Even smaller platforms are taking 15-30% fees for very little value-add. They "exist" to reduce the operating expenses of venues, but if there was wider infrastructure of NFTs these venues wouldn't need to contract it out.
Explain how.
It's not that different from how it currently works, but the difference is the platform is distributed and not centralized. NFTs are nonfungible, and the contract process guarantees the NFT can't be owned by multiple wallets. There can be only "one".
A venue generates 5000 NFTs (could be individual seats, could be general ticket) and puts them on an NFT marketplace (e.g. OpenSea) for the ticket price (e.g. $100) + 1% (OpenSea will also charge a fee). I buy one of those tickets for $101. I go to the venue. The ticket scanner sends a challenge to my phone, and my phone generates a signature that proves I have the ticket, and I go in.
If I can't go for whatever reason I can't go, I can post the NFT to the same or a different marketplace. Note that NFTs don't necessarily prevent ticket scalping, however because it's part of a digital contract you can also code an upper limit for the resale of the NFT which would definitely hurt scalpers. But just eliminating the vendor lock-in of the ticket exchange would cut fees between 95 and 99%.
Logistically, what if I lose my phone, and can't verify the challenge proving I have the NFT at the gate (or whatever similar scenario). The same system intended to prevent fraud also means the system is not flexible for human error. But maybe that's worth it for everyone to not have to pay 15-30% fees by centralized ticket management systems.
I'm still not seeing the difference between this and an entry in a standard SQL database.
I don't see how this is cheaper, either. A venue management company using a separate marketplace adds complexity, instead of managing the ticket in-house. It adds interoperability, sure, but also management and development work. And I certainly wouldn't trust each venue to securely implement it themselves.
You aren't seeing a difference between what I described and a SQL database? I work in IT and I'm not sure of your background. First, nobody opens a SQL database to the public. There's a ton of code surrounding every database. How do you think a SQL database ensures only "one owner" of a ticket? It requires identity tracking and management as the tip of the iceberg. And how do you think a SQL database allows people to exchange ownership of the ticket? It requires creating uniquely identified tokens, and code to bridge across systems and exchange the UIDs around. On and on. Almost no venues are doing this in-house, I am not sure what you mean by that.
You're not thinking of any complicated scenarios if you think ticket sales can be "just a SQL database". Ticketmaster offers a ton of management around tickets specifically because they are not using any generalized exchange platform (e.g. an NFT standard). With NFTs the bar is lowered for venues to manage it themselves. Posting NFTs to a NFT exchange is dead simple. You don't need an IT department, hosting costs, staff, call center, etc. to support it. You need a couple of point of sale devices for verification at the door (something they generally already need).
I feel like you're putting out mixed messages or I'm not understanding your point. You wouldn't trust venues to use NFTs successfully because they need to do something specific? Or you are referring to in-house development not being done securely? My overall point is, NFT exchange becomes a standard around which venues can operate independently with significantly less overhead, is simpler for the consumer, and cuts out predatory centralized ticket services.
Anyways, cheers. I think there's a lot of other interesting cases for NFTs but people tend to focus just on jpeg thumbnails.
Not the person you're talking to, but it seems like a stretch that some little nightclub will want to build and maintain their own smart contract infrastructure. It's not just issuing the tickets, it's also building and distributing the tools to quickly validate the hundreds/thousands of attendees every night.
For example, it's not enough just to validate that everyone at the gate has an NFT. I could enter the venue with a valid token, and then transfer it to my friend still outside once I'm through the door. So now the bouncer needs to track what tickets have already been scanned, and you probably want it to update off-chain (faster and no gas fees).
Not that I can pretend to know what already goes in to a venue supporting TicketMaster, but I figure there's got to be a reason why these middlemen were wanted in the first place. That reason is probably about venues wanting to do music and not tech support.
My thought was concert tickets. An artist could set an absolute maximum for how much a ticket could be resold for, and the energy costs of maintaining the blockchain would be time-limited to after a show or tour completed.
Of course, Ticketmaster would never allow that because it effectively nukes the scalper market, which they also run through stubhub.
this is true about block chain in general. I usually get from folks its a solved issue with databases and its like but its significant that you don't need it and that everyone along the chain has the information they need. Not just the database owners. I would still love a qr code on everything I buy. including fruit. that gives me everything about the item. where grown/manufactured, how its been processed since, what hands it went through to get to me, etc.
Ya'll are fucking stupid. There is no fall of nfts and they aren't useless. If there is an authority who recognizes the nft, then it has the utility value of the authority. End of story. It doesn't matter if some people traded them for outrageous amounts of money and it has nothing to do with the ability to copy a picture. All it does is tie a digital item to a hash to an owner on a ledger, for purposes of authentication. If a hash of a monkey picture gets you on a yacht, then if you don't have one you aren't getting on that yacht. In the future, if the nft of your house deed isn't in your wallet, then if a judge looking at a specific ledger says you don't own your house, you don't own it.
First time bagholding?
Top shelf sarcasm if my pallet is correct
I don't have any nfts as I don't have a personal use-case. If an authority adopts nft for any of my assets however, yeah I'd get one. For instance transacting a deed can cost a lot, but an nft would be 10-100x less.
That feels wildly unlikely. I'll use two transfers of property to argue my point: car titles and house deeds. In both cases it isn't possession alone of the document, including signature of transfer that legitimizes it.
I have to go to a government office in order to complete the transfer a car title. It's not expensive, with the American state I grew up in charging either $100 if you use the fast and privatized version, or $2 if you file through the government office. This can't be replaced by an NFT because it includes government inspections and requires a notary confirm the seller's signature.
House deed transfers on the other hand, are a massive expensive pain in the ass. Why? Protections. Houses are expensive, they're the largest asset that the average person can expect to hold, and in addition they're a residency that can be bad. If you can con someone on either side of that transaction, someone has, and many methods are now protected against. Furthermore, because of this dual nature of a house as a residence and a particularly large financial asset, people not on the deed may have rights to it whether by marriage or through financial vehicles like leins. Additionally, the house sits on land which the government registers ownership of as one of the core duties of governance. The deed transfer is expensive because it has to be audited to ensure you don't find out later that the seller wasn't allowed to sell the house in the first place.
So now, let's compare this to a transfer on a blockchain. The blockchain ensures trustless (except of the system and that the system is acting with authority that extends into meatspace) verification that a transfer occurred from account a to account b. It does not ensure that account a did so willingly. It does not ensure that the legitimate owner of account a is the one to do it. It does not ensure that account a or b are able to ever access their account again. It does not ensure account b consented to receipt. It does not have a means to verify unnamed stakeholders. It does not give half a shit about the law. It does not contain an escrow period in which everyone can walk away. It more or less functions like a notary, but better in some ways (trustlessness) and worse in others (notaries actually check that you are who you say you are).
I guess what I'm really saying here, is that if my government would be so foolish as to make house deeds nfts which contain the full legitimacy of the transfer process, then I'd be demanding my credit union offer a service of taking care of that for me, because the last thing I want is to be hacked out of my house, or lose my right to the land my house sits on in a fire or robbery, or forget the password to owning my house. All of these are ways in which people have lost a huge amount of cryptocurrency.
Probably is, but the concept is sound. The inspections and other things aren't always necessary, but even if they are, an nft transfer can likely be setup to be digitally signed by the recognizing authority. This creates a record on the public ledger rather than a private one, which can be a nice thing. For better or worse nft confers ownership of recognized by such an authority, so there is no concept of not allowed to sell. This is a fundamental feature of blockchain... Enforced control and ownership
Ok I think I need to reframe what authority means here. An authority is a government or an organization or individual that a government authorizes to act on its behalf. It is the decision maker when it comes time to physically remove a claimant from the premises.
A blockchain is a leger, a document. What you're proposing sounds to me like legally defining it as the final say in ownership. To do that is more or less a complete rewrite of property laws in a way that would have far reaching effects, especially on marriage, government enforcement, and lending. On lending this would basically eliminate the capacity to use your house as collateral without a full conditional sale, and in that case I really hope you trust your banking institution. For government enforcement, this would eliminate leins as a means of compelling payment of owed money, which means other methods would be required (this is especially an issue in contexts like child support, where debtors can be particularly hostile). And for marriage this will really screw with inheritance and divorce proceedings. The fact that you can't cash out and sell the house asap when your partner requests a divorce is something I personally think is good.
Additionally, in every democratic nation to my knowledge, the existing registry of land is public. Public of course when referring to ownership by the collective of citizens, something the blockchain is less so. But it's also publicly visible, just like the blockchain, except instead of having to download it you go to the appropriate store of public records and request to see it or to obtain a copy. At the very least in my country there's a ton of information you can get in such places for asking. Property transfers, court records (unless a judge has sealed them, usually because sensitive information is contained within), building and digging permits, birth and death certificates… Most people only get what's relevant to their life, but some people (like investigative journalists) have to look through public records for a living. Could it be valuable to digitize it all and upload it? Yes but not without risks, which also apply to blockchain here.
So yeah. This leads into a famous question: What is Property? And ultimately that's a fairly deep rabbit hole, of its own. So what is ownership? The ability to direct the state to utilize its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence in defense of your right to control something. No ledger can confer that. A state can declare a ledger the ultimate record of ownership, but it can just as easily take it away.
I mean, I definitely agree on this specific use-case that it's problematic. I think some aspects can be resolved with smart contracts or multi-signature requirements, but it really fails here when it comes to compulsion.
If a court cannot compel someone to transfer, because the court doesn't have the keys... Or you lose the keys and cannot... Obviously this falls apart.
There is a reason people deride nfts, mostly it's due to ignorance and spectacle lemming behavior surrounding the ape pictures, but the legitimate criticism is really there aren't many use-cases. But we don't and shouldn't wait to build things until a use-case exists. Nfts could be important eventually for preventing things like naked shorts maybe. There are likely very valuable use-cases.
Yeah I'm totally in favor of inventing things for the hell of it. But i don't think that hating a technology because of how it was pushed on society is necessarily bad until it develops a legitimate use case. I dislike them because I still see people thinking "this cool technology must have a problem that it solves" rather than looking at problems and asking what technology could solve them. But at the same time it's also been a serious case of tech lovers not caring to understand the problems they wish to use tech to solve. That was annoying a long time ago, but now I live in a society that's been made worse and worse by that specific problem over the past 20 years.
So it wasn't sarcasm then?
It's just a technology even though people equate it with wildly overpriced art you can copy and paste, which is naive and reductive.
A yacht full of NFT owners is just about the last place in this universe that I'd want to be.
It's what you'd call a 'target-rich environment'.
Yeah as a record on a ledger it's fine. I think a lot of people wanted them to be more than that though.
Fortunately our unfortunately that's all a blockchain is lol. It's not really different than an exchange pointing to a blockchain and people agreeing 1 bitcoin on that chain is worth X. You always need consensus from multiple entities, but the difference is these ledgers are public, and secured by math. That's it.
My man has been doomed off by the Anarcho-Capitalist fairy and is currently circling the planet Heinlein.