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.

  • pavnilschanda@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Does anyone else think that NFTs are an allegory/miniature version of how art is easily commodified by capitalism? IIRC, NFTs were there to help finance artists who work on a purely digital medium, but then grifters coopted the NFT space and try to sell sets of same-looking artwork. Complete with “fandoms” and drama, as well.

    • fubo@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      NFTs are simply a straightforward con, without the financial hullabaloo of cryptocurrency. The con is simple: convince someone that something is valuable when it’s not. Selling a brass ring as gold to a mark too naïve to check, has been around as long as there have been gold rings.

    • aleph@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Nah, NFTs were always about the grift first and the art second.

      After all, all an NFT token is is a digital receipt which links to an image hosted somewhere off-chain, not the image itself. All the “art” does is help to persuade people that the tokens are actually worth something and hype up the price even further.

    • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      It is an allegory for the whole financial system … it’s all made up imaginary money, funds and amounts that don’t exist and never will … it’s all based on trust, faith and belief. If enough people wake up tomorrow and stop believing in a segment of this entire system, it can all quickly collapse.

      I remember reading about ten years ago that if all debt was stopped all over the world and all of it was to be repaid … it would take the world several million years to do so.

      There is wealth in the world but we’ve created very complicated, imaginary ways to make it seem that wealth is worth millions of times more than there actually exists.

      I see it as a modern day religion … it exists because we all believe in it … if the faithful ever lose faith, the religion dies.

      • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        God I cannot wait for the religion of capitalism to die. Markets are rough enough without greedy fucks institutionalizing their greed.

          • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Really, it’s impossible. Most children are very selfish. Only some never grow out of it. Distinguishing between the two would be a very good way to appear to be far worse than a few greedy pieces of sh*t to the uneducated who do not realize the grief greed brings to others.

    • yata
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      1 year ago

      IIRC, NFTs were there to help finance artists who work on a purely digital medium

      That’s not true at all. They were a con from their inception. The “helping artists” bit was something they made up to further that con. Just like when they claim cryptocurrency is an actual viable currency alternative to fiat.

    • Meowoem
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      1 year ago

      Yeah it was huge in the art world, all the art magazines had articles about how it was the next big thing and how to mint your own nfts - which of course all turned out to be ‘pay my buddy $200 and we’ll turn your jpg into an nft!’ which was a scam within a scam.

      Artists generally aren’t tech minded and honestly often pretty surface level in their understanding of things because that’s where their focus is, they’re looking at the visual not the mechanical. There’s nothing wrong in that because life needs a wide range of people.

    • Empricorn@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      NFTs were there to help finance artists who work on a purely digital medium, but then grifters coopted the NFT space and try to sell sets of same-looking artwork.

      I’m curious if you have a source for this. I haven’t heard it anywhere else…