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
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.
Sure, but some systems are way more stable since they are established and have the general trust of a lot of people. And others simply don’t have that wide ranging trust and as such aren’t stable.
That’s why I trust money issued by a government. Because even if individual politicians are evil and useless, the money is still backed by bombs and bullets a huge amount of infrastructure and tangible assets.
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.
This was the comment I came here to make. “They were always worthless.”
So like art. No tangible assets, but the value is derived by the highest bidder.
No, because with art, there’s still a literal piece of art.
With NFTs, it’s just a shitty jpeg some tech bro photoshopped up in five minutes.
With NFTs there aren’t even any art. The NFT is a receipt for the art, not the art itself. You didn’t buy the copyright for the actual art with an NFT, you bought a link to a specific copy of the art.
I mean, there are ways to tie them together, though the point still stands that NFTs add nothing to art. Copyright works fine without an overly complicated digital receipt.
Not even photoshopped, that would be too much effort. Nah, the most infamous NFTs are a few different elements (different mouths, eyes, accessories, etc) and then a whole bunch of permutations generated from those elements. For a technology with a supposed selling point of scarcity, you’d think they’d try to make the art special instead of procedurally-generated trash, but of course the real purposes were scams and money laundering.
Actually you’re still a bit overestimating it.
Most NFT’s are literally just hyperlinks, where the hyperlink could suffer link rot and stop working OR the image on the other side of the hyperlink could be changed.
And as LegalEagle had pointed out “You can’t own that”
Yea, it’s truly amazing anyone fell for those stupid things… Sooo little effort was supposed to magically generate real value!? Give me a break… It was sooo obviously just a way to get people to pool money in an unsafe way so it could be pocketed.
Who ever donated to those scams didn’t deserve the money, as much as their losses are still a tragedy. Still, the scammers deserve that money even less. Bunch of idiots all around.
What about regular digital art?
It is art and doesn’t need NFTs to give it value. People comission digital pieces all the time and don’t need NFTs to get it done.
…is not an NFT
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.
Sounds a lot like the banking system today lol.
Edit: Idk why all yall turds down voted me. The u.s. dollar is literally not backed by any physical asset… look up fiat money and do research on the dollar.
Yes it is. It’s backed by the US’s economic power on the world stage. That’s how economies function.
Crypto can be created or of thin air by literally any tech bro with a GPU. By definition that is literally worthless
The u.s. dollar is literally not backed by any physical asset
It doesn’t need to be, it’s backed by the need to pay taxes in USD.
Well I am shocked!
No not actually.
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.
Don’t forget the beanie babies, which just like NFTs were created to be scarce and be seen as an investment.
Turned out the same as well.
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.
The OG ponzi
Yeah, the really smart people bought whole stars!
True, but to be fair, them shiny metals for the longest time were reasonably rare and couldn’t be made, and served well for a means of currency. NFTs are pretty ridiculous all things considered. People also “bought” stars too, so yeah, many will buy dumb shit.
remarkable for being yellow and [shiny]
Yes, but also very rare, and effectively impossible to create or destroy.
They’re still not
I’d pay $10 to clown on some tech bro if I cared enough. $10 doesn’t even buy you a sandwich these days
It’s just a “Save picture as…” with extra steps, and money!
Things only have a price when two people are willing to do the transaction.
Say 99% of NFT owners have given up and mentally written off their NFTs as a complete loss. If the remaining 1% are selling at a 90% loss and some sucker is still buying at that 90% discount, the “average price” will be whatever those two agree on.
This is a bit different from physical goods because those can’t just be deleted out of existence. If someone had a warehouse of beanie babies they might choose to give them away (setting the price at zero) or maybe there’s some tiny value of the cloth so they sell them for a few cents per kg.
If you want to give me an NFT, I won’t accept it unless you sweeten the deal with an additional 20 €.
You mean to tell me that purchasing what is essentially a URL hosted on someone else’s server is a poor investment?
Shocked Pikachu Face
I like how the url could also have the picture changed if someone wanted to lol. You don’t even own the picture that the url points to, you just have a receipt that says “this url is my url, no I don’t own the url, because someone can change what’s on that. No I also don’t own whatever is hosted on that url either”
And the receipt isn’t necessarily unique. The centralized world of Web 3 decided mostly to use Opensea(?) for NFTs, but it isn’t the authority on who owns URLs. It’s just the biggest, most commonly used “star registry” that let people claim that they owned certain stars. But, the same “stars” could be sold by other people on other platforms too.
Some had ipfs links. In that case they couldn’t be changed.
Everything we create can be changed. Just because it may be difficult doesn’t mean it is impossible, no matter what those tech bros tell you.
Same with any blockchain. Nothing is secure, everything can be hacked.
In a matter of fact, it already has happened.
You do know the hash of the file part of the address, right? Any different file would by definition be a different address.
There could be an undiscovered bug in ipfs, but then that bug would be highlighted and fixed, and you could find a way to break the hashing algorithms, but then we’d have far bigger problems than an NFT being changed.
Also, the article you linked to lists no attacks on the blockchain, only theft of bitcoins using normal blockchain operations. That’s like saying someone hacked the US dollar when doing a bank robbery.
Small correction: Even though some NFTs sold for millions, the NFTs have always been worthless.
They literally provide no value. I don’t see how people didn’t get that.
It’s a link, you bought a link. If the power goes out at the server hosting it, you can’t even access it anymore.
If I told you I had a magic box, and for a million dollars you could look inside whenever you wanted, you’d tell me to go fuck myself. But do it on the Internet and it’s beanie babies all over again. But at least THOSE were tangible.
Never work in tech, friend. It is an endless parade of buzzwords. Idiots will think it is a revolution, people who put even the smallest amount of effort into understanding it will know it isn’t. Sadly, the idiots tend to be the ones making the decisions. So you get to spin your wheels on a fool’s errand until their surprisingly lengthy attention span moves to the next buzzword. As the parade continues you just lose more and more faith in humanity.
I wish I had an answer for you other than some people are really fucking stupid.
I work in manufacturing, I came from an office setting for a national Internet provider. At first it was refreshing, all of the bullshit was gone, and it was just about getting shit done.
But then a tech bro got his teeth in to our CEO and the company has gone to shit. They’ve tried desperately to placate people but the attrition here is harder now than it was during COVID, when we literally begged people to go home. People are leaving for lower paying, non union jobs it’s gotten so bad. I think the only reason I’m still here is I know how much worse it could be.
Sigh. How eager our boss was to make all our products “AI powered” as soon as he heard about ChatGPT, even though the techies had all tried it and knew it wasn’t appropriate for what we do. We’re still adding “AI power” to things, because he already put it in all the marketing.
You’re saying all this like people aren’t fucking stupid. They are.
Billions of dollars have been laundered, so they served their purpose I guess
So it was like we thought all along, cool.
Depends what they are. I have a bunch of NFTS and they have all mostly held their value or increased. The difference is they are all related to games, and the most I have ever paid for one was probably like $15, with the average being like 50 cents. This only seems to be looking mostly at art NFTs on ethereum networks. I don’t have a single NFT that uses ethereum, although I know that was the craze, especially for “investments”. Which anyone with half a brain should have been able to tell someone an NFT is not a good investment plan.
Frankly that says more about the gullibility of gamers than the legitimacy of NFT. Gamers will pay for the chance of getting access a fictional character in a game that will eventually close its servers and take everything down with it. They can’t seem to differentiate the value of something within the fictional ludic context and the value of something as a piece of media or an entertainment product, and gaming/tech businessmen these days take full advantage of that oversight.
What about the enjoyment they get before the game indeed does shut down? That’s gotta be worth at least something right?
Definitely less than it would be from having a game which they can keep playing, and getting that content permanently.
Is the enjoyment of getting a single instance of a single character, sometimes not even having full access of their abilities, worth as much as an entire other game? Maybe even a console or more, as the price surpasses hundreds of dollars? Not to mention any other practical things that they could use that money for.
However much one might argue that value is subjective, what isn’t subjective are the conditioning tactics being used. Habit-forming mission and reward structures, content being put in gambling formats to incentive compulsive spending. The fact that the game is bound to private servers is itself generally only done to enable monetization, and even more cynically, to force players to move to the next thing once that one ceases being sufficiently profitable.
I see enough people ultimately regretting how much they spent to question if they ever got that value out of it.
I don’t disagree, there is a lot of shady shit going on, but the state of gaming is what you’re describing. I’m having a lot of fun with BF2042, but it’s a live service game with servers provided by EA. It will get shut down, which is retarded, but I’m still enjoying it while I can.
There are of course exceptions, like Baldur’s Gate, but overall, not a good vibe unfortunately
For all my criticism, I do enjoy some live service games too, but I’m of the opinion that any live service game would have been better off without those conditioning tactics, without a balance marred by Pay2Win and power creep, and if it was hostable by any player. Not all them are fundamentally bad, but they are made worse by these elements.
But unfortunately, games keep being made that way because it’s more profitable.
It is worth something… a refund.
Have you ever ate something enjoyable? Absolutely worthless
Honestly these games are so crude that most regular gamers would never even think of them as games. There are a lot of failed projects, that really just did become click and play, but there are a couple good ones on WAX. MoM is a part of WAX and has turned into something interesting, albeit they had to add extra revenue models, although I think the Devs are mostly Ukrainian… so they are likely going through some shit.
(The easiest way to describe MoM, is as a trading and crafting game. It’s definitely not for most, but I enjoy playing around in the real life economical ecosystem thay has developed. There are arguably other points to it, but I think those arguments are weak…)
At first I thought you were a clever advertisment for that game, but as it turns out searching “mom wax” does not garner any results about games at all, so if you’re not pulling our legs and they game actually exists could you post the full name? It sounds interesting
Are we talking about CS:GO skins? Because I never got a knife.
Why did you even buy them though? Surely you could have just downloaded them for free?
Because they are tied into the game. The NFTs contain information about the game asset. And a lot of the NFTs weren’t bought, they were generated from aspects of the game. I don’t know how else to explain it, without detailing the entire game or subset of games this falls into.
I will say, that I am lucky, picked a good project and didn’t spend too much.
Yeah same here. I’m a Solana dev and have collected a handful. I’ve spent maybe $50 total the last two years and all together probably worth $3k or so
That’s actually one chain I have some NFTs on. One of the games uses a dual Wax/Solana system for it’s NFTs.
You keep talking about the games, which games?
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.
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.
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.
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.
God I cannot wait for the religion of capitalism to die. Markets are rough enough without greedy fucks institutionalizing their greed.
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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.
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.
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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.
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…
The whole point was to get dollars into crypto so the holders could cash out. The value was never meant to stay.
Not my Donald Trump trading cards! Nooo!
Weren’t those not even nfts? I believe I remember reading that they were basically just jpegs or something to that effect. Makes sense though, better return of investment on that scam.
95% seems a little low. I assume that it’s closer to 99.9%.
💯
Even at the hype max there was already a lot of worthless NFTs, so it can easily be even less than 95%.
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I’m sure they were a great way to launder money at the time.
That’s why it’s at the time. I made a quick $600 and never looked back cuz I knew it was unstable, but I wasn’t ignorant to the idea like many people who just wanted to bandwagon hate.
Ignorant to the idea? The idea was basically a spreadsheet with links to PNGs and “”““owner””“” of that PNG. Blockchain only means nobody owns the sheet itself, but that doesn’t make it any less ridiculous.
And money still went up for a quick amount of time. I knew what I was getting into, but I also knew it was a quick cash grab. A lot of people online just wanted to hate crypto to hate crypto. My friend has been spreading news about Bitcoin since 2011 and he had a hard drive that sold for $10k at one of its peaks. Quick cash grab and never look back.
Maybe now I’ll finally be able to buy the ones I want
(There aren’t any)
It sounds like you could have always bought the ones that you want!
I find it fascinating that NFTs were supposed to be a proof-of-ownership technology, but because people are stupid & greedy made pictures to sell with it
It always reminds me of those certificates for owning a piece of the moon.
Because it’s pretty much the same.
At the very core ownership that isn’t recognised by the state is meaningless. So that ape picture? No one really cares about some guy claiming to own it because they have control over the token. As long as it’s on the internet everyone can just copy it and there’s no authority caring about it one bit since NFT isn’t recognised as for example copyright is.
Even when it comes to stuff like items in games, these also are only worth anything as long as the publisher of the game recognises your claim to it! And even if they did recognise it, there’s absolutely nothing preventing them from changing their minds later. Simply because they create the game however they like and have 100% control over it’s development.
Except it’s not ownership, it is digital rights management. Right now DRM is handled by private corporations, not the state, and it generally is anti-consumer. NFTs could be used for DRM in a more pro consumer way.
That all hinges on a pretty big “could”.
Absolutely, companies are not going to just decide to implement NFTs in a way that gives more control to users unless it means more money for them. Does change the fact that the technology has that potential, even if it remain unutilized.
NFTs could be used for DRM in a more pro consumer way.
Only if the companies in charge would allow that. And they really have zero incentive to do so. The way it currently is, is way more profitable for them.
What confused the fuck outta me as someone who has been in the crypto space since 2010 is that it wasn’t new or novel in any way. Colored Coins was virtually the same thing and it flopped in a similar fashion and there were several similar projects that did the same or never made it off the ground. Then, some shitty monkey drawings come along, are backed by virtually the same thing I had seen before and suddenly people I knew from my hometown who barely had two brain cells to rub together were claiming to be financial and tech gurus while peppering “block chain” into conversation. The one thing that brings me solace is that they all lost their investments
Right, when NFT’s we’re going crazy, the pictures and shit didn’t make sense to me at all but there’s a huge opportunity for digital ownership of physical materials like cars or houses. It would make private sales/transfers easy. All title information on the house would be recorded and attached in the blockchain so when you go to sell your home, you can prove there aren’t any liens against the home and once financing has been approved, transfer the ownership on the blockchain and done. That’s where I always saw the practical application going but now nobody will take NFT’s seriously until it’s named something else and rolled out with government approval and systems in place or nobody will feel safe transferring such a large investment digitally
All title information on the house would be recorded and attached in the blockchain so when you go to sell your home, you can prove there aren’t any liens against the home
Don’t we already have state or local databases for stuff like houses and cars? How does the blockchain stuff add anything?
The difference is that you can’t retroactively edit the block chain, and the block chain contains all the data in it.
Databases can be edited, deleted, corrupted, poorly maintained, etc.
Think of the block chain like a permanent audit log of all transactions with it.
Edit: the NFT exists as a value in the block chain as the “point of origin”. As this value is carried forward, the blockchain will always point back to the original.
That’s why the whole pictures thing fucked it all up and we missed out on powerful tech. It could have essentially saved lives in critical machines and made PII tracking easier.
Block chains can also be edited, deleted, corrupted.
They aren’t as secure as tech bros claim. Nothing possibly can be.
Blockchains already have been hacked multiple times.
This is the Web3 you are simping for: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
No, they can’t. The article you point to mentioned stolen crypto. Crypto can be stolen if someone has the private keys to a wallet.
A block chain is algorithmically verified by members of the network.
but because people are stupid & greedy made pictures to sell with it
Can you blame them? If I gave someone a photo and then they offered to give me $1,000 if I also would write down a unique number, then I would without hesitation write down a random number and get my grand.
Started laughing when nfts were introduced, still chuckle today.
It’s great. Love it.
Grab the tulips! Grab them!
It is all worthless?
Always has been
