Remember when NFTs sold for millions of dollars? 95% of the digital collectibles are now probably worthless.::NFTs had a huge bull run two years ago, with billions of dollars per month in trading volume, but now most have crashed to zero, a study found.
correction… always were worthless.
It’s always been a con game.
Their so-called “value” was always determined by the ability of the person shilling it to make up bullshit. Literally the definition of a “confidence” game. Same problem as crypto in general. It’s only has value if you have confidence in the person shilling it. The moment that person loses the confidence of their marks, the entire thing crumbles to nothing because it isn’t backed by any real tangible assets.
Also money laundering and tax rebate schemes.
akshuallllyyyyyyyy, monetary value of anything is derivative to someone else’s willingness to purchase the item
untrue.
Real currency is backed by assets. that used to be the “gold standard”, but has become more ephemeral since the end of the first world war.
A government issued currency is backed by that government’s infrastructure, taxes, tariffs, etc… basically how powerful that government is on the world stage.
in contrast, crypto is backed by nothing more than how persuasive the creator is because the creator doesn’t need any assets to create a crypto currency in the first place.
Heck, in one case, some techbro created a crypto currency, and convinced a bunch of people that it would be stable because he was backing it with ANOTHER crypto currency he literally created for that only purpose.
And people FELL FOR IT!
When something can be created out of thin air with no assets needed but a GPU, it’s inherently worthless.
It’s utter insanity.
You can use this logic to explain away any other ponzi scheme too.
It’s not really logic, and I don’t think it’s defending anything, it’s just the definition of monetary worth.
For better or for worse, stuff is always as valuable as people consider it to be. Which may be related to how useful that stuff is, but often is not.
So like art. No tangible assets, but the value is derived by the highest bidder.
The thing with art is that even if the art itself is completely worthless, the materials used are not.
You can sell a “worthless” painting to be used as firewood.
Same with digital assets, they can be sold to be used as templates or even to train an AI.
But a location in some useless database (which is essentially what an NFT is) does not.
Shocking
I’m sure they were a great way to launder money at the time.
Out of the top collections, the most common price for an NFT is now $5-$10.
Still overpriced!
I’m honestly amazed they’re worth anything at all.
We have been attributing a huge value to a metal that’s mostly remarkable for being yellow and shinny for millennia, one of the biggest investment bubbles in history was over a flower, and people thought that using a loophole to profit from the arbitrage of international reply coupons was going to last forever. Hell, people paid for fake property titles for land on the Moon and Mars. It’s not that surprising that some people think that buying a random number in a distributed database is an investment.
Yellow, shiny, and untarnishable/non-poisonous. The latter are very nice properties to have for jewelry, as your skin will eat away most metals over time.
People like looking pretty, that has consistent value other than using it as a medium of exchange/ store of value.
I didn’t get the “arbitrage of international reply coupons” reference. What’s that one?
That’s what Ponzi told people he was doing. And in the beginning he was, and it was working, but then he started paying investors with other investors money.
And in the beginning he was, and it was working
I might be wrong, but to my recollection, he never got it to work; in the beginning, he merely believed that he could eventually get it to work, and that the first fraudulent payouts to early investors were originally intended as a temporary way of buying time without losing investors.
Not my Donald Trump trading cards! Nooo!
My favourite part of NFT/Crypto is all of the creators that outed themselves by pushing for it, taking sponsorships, etc.
Yes, it was lovely. We now have a great list of folks who were either too dumb or too greedy to hold back on scamming their fellow humans.
I won’t lie though, for a little while there I was worried the pumping would continue like it did with bitcoin
Well I am shocked!
No not actually.
“Bull run”
More like Bullshit run. Literally nobody fell for the grift. Celebrities bought into it because it was a pump and dump scheme and they can afford it. There is literally no use case for NFTs and even basic normies saw that.
Maybe now I’ll finally be able to buy the ones I want
(There aren’t any)
Don’t put your reputation on the line to sell links to ugly JPEGs, please.
You wouldn’t right click a car would you…
It was just another form of money laundering though ‘art’.
NFTs are like a ticket roll, they can be quite useful, but that requires having an event or service that those tickets apply to. NFTs so far completely failed to create that. To justify the decentralized nature of NFTs you’d further have to make that ticket apply to multiple different services. That didn’t happen either.
Buying your hats in a game with NFTs is pointless as long as those hats only work in that one singular game, centralized services can handle that better. On the other side, if you’d use NFTs to sell the digital games themselves, they could be quite useful and breaks through established online-store monopolies. But that of course would require different online shops to accept the same NFT, e.g. buy NFT for a game on Steam, but download it through EPIC. That’s something NFTs could allow, but it would require the whole industry to play along, which due to everybody competing against each other is rather unlikely.
But NFTs are not necessary to make that work. The reason it has never been done wasn’t technical, it was that it simply wasn’t a good idea.
It might be overkill, but the whole point is that you want to have a distributed record of ownership. Something that no single company can control and that can survive companies going out of business and disappearing. There aren’t very many alternatives that can accomplish that and even less that are ready to use right now and not just hypothetical.
Why distributed? Ownership is ultimately up to governments, as it’s something that would be decided in a court. So, what’s the advantage to having distributed records instead of just a government database?
That distributed database exists and has been up and running for years. That government database is purely hypothetical. There would also be the question of which government is going to run it? Does each government run their own? Does one get exclusive control over the database that contains all digital purchases?
That distributed database exists and has been up and running for years.
But is an environmental catastrophe and has no legal value.
There would also be the question of which government is going to run it?
Every government would have to run their own, because every government gets to decide ownership within their own borders. Think of patents. Who owns the worldwide international patent database? Nobody, there is no such thing because each country decides on the validity of patents within their own borders. Now, there are patent treaties and things, but fundamentally if a patent dispute happens in France, it’s the French courts who decide using the French patents database.
Oh man. I remember getting downvoted to hell for stating that they were a scam and provided no actual value or true, to technical “non-fungibility”.
Well, NTF is based upon the Greater Fool Theory.
So if those with invested interests are unable to find a bigger fool to sell them to, those NFT become worthless.
You got downvoted because you were interfering with money from the NFT investors.
Dot com boom in the 90s, NFT boom in the 20s.
