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NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money

188 points by CynicusRex 6y ago

sschueller 6y ago
Can we stop with the environmental impact complaints of ethereum. ETH2 (Proof of Stake) is running and will be merged very very soon.
- ohgodplsno 6y ago
  things_that_have_been_said_since_2017_but_have_not_happened.txt
  - capableweb 6y ago
    Sorry, can't find that. Eth2.0 is actually filed under things_that_are_very_hard_to_research_develop_and_deploy_to_production_as_they_are_currently_supporting_a_200_billion_market.txt
    - dorkwood 6y ago
      I found one with a quick Google search (actually even earlier, 2016). Excerpts from the comment thread [0]: > Ethereum hopes to do away with mining by early 2017. > They're switching to proof of stake. Early PoS designs have some issues, like the infamous "nothing at stake" problem, but theirs addresses those. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12128406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12128406
- gifnamething 6y ago
  The article complains about gas fees, how will they change after ETH2?
  - rcxdude 6y ago
    eth2 (which is more than just proof of stake) aims to substantially reduce the fees by allowing the network to scale up (I think the current target is 100,000 transactions a second). This is partly enabled by proof of stake and partly enabled by other stuff like sharding.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
niahmiah 6y ago
It's stupid at face value. No pyramid required. You cannot intrinsically link real world items to tokens. The source of truth is the real world, not the token. Add an unlimited supply of unique things, and how could anyone expect to make money from this?
- spacemanmatt 6y ago
  Beeple did pretty well
  - graeme 6y ago
    Beeple’s business partner bought the NFT. We have no idea how much went to Beeple. All we know if Christie’s got $9 million.
    - CryptoPunk 6y ago
      Source on Beeple's business partner buying it?
      - y-satellite 6y ago
        https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beeple-art-buyer-and-his-nft-defi-scheme/ https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beepl... Particularly the "Number Go Up" section, which shows that the buyer also runs (and owns a majority of) a crypto token called "B20", which curiously enough, Beeple also has a 2% stake in.
        CryptoPunk 6y ago
        That's not proof of them being business partners.
- smitty1e 6y ago
  Mostly agree, but 'value' is a social construct, and as long as there is a subsequent rube, then NFTs will be NiFTy.
herodotus 6y ago
I wrote my first Fortran program in 1969. I have been active in the field of computing since then, both as an academic and as a programmer in industry. During this time, there have been several times when I first heard about something new, something potentially game changing. I remember some of them very clearly: 1. Around 1971: a Wang desktop computer. Imagine: a computer that fit on a desk! 2. Visicalc (spreadsheet). Wow! I remember thinking finally, a breakthrough for non-programmers. 3. Relational databases. 4. UUCP - a way to talk to remote computers. 5. HTML/HTTP - we knew from the start that this was big And then there were many that were hyped but which I rejected as hype. Even when I was wrong, I still felt that there was something intrinsically wrong about this category of things. These things either vanished, limped along (and still do), or which I rejected out of hand, but actually succeeded. Like Virtual Reality (back in about 1984), Fuzzy Logic, Proving programs correct, and, of course Bitcoin. The latest in this category are NFTs which my intuition tells me is rubbish on so many levels. However, I think they will have some success, although I will never have anything to do with them (or Bitcoin for that matter).
- pilingual 6y ago
  What is the primary point for which you believe NFTs to be rubbish?
  - tupshin 6y ago
    In what way do you think they have any intrinsic value?
    - capableweb 6y ago
      In what way do you think that you think about intrinsic value?
  - XorNot 6y ago
    What legal force does an NFT bring to what it claims to authenticate? Even a certificate of authenticity for a painting is still notionally a legal contract between the authenticator and buyers: after all, there will be consequences if they cannot show they could reasonably support the identity they establish for something. What does an NFT do? Nothing. There are no consequences in the real world. You can make another blockchain with more NFTs. It doesn't even establish an interesting digital history for an item: they're tied to hashes, not data.
ohgodplsno 6y ago
NFTs are paying for a signature in a blockchain that links to a random URL. If you're lucky, it's IPFS and it'll go down when people stop hosting it. If you're slightly less lucky, it's whatever platform you went through that's operating an IPFS tunnel because cryptobros can't figure it out, and it will go down whenever your flavor or the month NFT site goes out of business, which is any time between six months and 5 years. IF you're even less unlucky, it's just a random link to a website, and I can't wait for people's art to be replaced with penises because that's what happens to hotlinkers.
- antonvs 6y ago
  Is it not possible to put the "owned" data itself on the NFT blockchain? If so, that does seem like a serious flaw.
  - ohgodplsno 6y ago
    It _could_ be possible, although prohibitively expensive. https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1372163423446917122 https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1372163423446917122 for more context.
  - Dma54rhs 6y ago
    Data on blockchain is too expensive. Or to be more exact blockchains people actually use or care about.
    - classified 6y ago
      Are there blockchains that people actually use or care about?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - steveharman 6y ago
    Filecoin is a possibility here (based on and created by the IPFS folks)
draklor40 6y ago
Ironic coming from a website like fstoppers. What exactly is the "value" of fine art photography ? Why do people pay exorbitant amounts for basically a few hours of photos during their wedding, given that a wedding might end up divorce ? People pay for whatever has "intrinsic" value to them. If Digitally generated/cryptographic art is it, so be it.
- coldcode 6y ago
  Everything is valued economically at whatever people will pay for it. But true value is independent of the price. Van Gogh sold almost nothing in his short 10 years of producing and killed himself because he thought he had no value and didn't want to burden his brother (he had some mental issues of course). Now his art is priceless. Value changes over time, things that people truly love will go up over time, things that have no real "value" will go away. Most of the "art" NFT's I've seen have no real appeal beyond a few minutes; I would happily take the money though if people offered it, but not feel any real value was traded for it, so it would seem less than rewarding other than the money.
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  People definitely aren't paying a lot for wedding photography because they think they can resell their wedding photos later for much more than they paid for the photography. And if they were, we'd think they were making a pretty strange mistake. Instead, they actually want the photography to exist that wouldn't otherwise exist if someone didn't make it. Not at all clear that's true with much NFT.
- IshKebab 6y ago
  > Why do people pay exorbitant amounts for basically a few hours of photos during their wedding, given that a wedding might end up divorce? That's about the worst example of people paying more for something than it is intrinsically worth that you could have come up with! People pay lots for wedding photographs because they want good photos, you're paying for an entire day of a skilled person's time - actually more because they usually edit the photos and produce some kind of photo book - and because there's high demand for wedding photographers. People don't pay lots because of price speculation for their wedding photos! A better example would be modern art, or maybe MTG cards.
endisneigh 6y ago
The only situation I see NFTs making sense is if there’s a virtual reality social network bigger than Facebook. In that scenario perhaps. Then again even in that scenario blockchains are unnecessary.
- whateveracct 6y ago
  The virtual reality social network would also need to be decentralized. Otherwise, why use NFTs when the social network host could just manage ownership through traditional means?
luka-birsa 6y ago
So basically: NFTs are a scam since the early adopters are not very good artists. And there is no unique value in them since its just Pepe memes, which are stupid to be NFTed, since it's just Gifs? Oh and let's not forget about the Ethereum fees and how shitty the tech is. This really reminds me on how everybody perceived internet in early noughties, when everybody was telling me it's shit and it will never ammount to anything. Man they were right, there was literally no value, just like there couldn't be value in standardized mode of exchange for digital goods - it doesn't have to be Pepe GIFs only.
- jimhi 6y ago
  Critical thinking says NFTs could work for say reselling tickets or something where you need to transfer the proof of ownership. The NFT Art market as it is seems to be about equivalent to the real world autograph market. It is likely vastly overvalued and the current sales are just people buying and hoping they can sell for more later like a Beanie Baby
- benrbray 6y ago
  ELI5: What can NFT achieve that a combination of Twitter + public key cryptography cannot achieve? As far as I can tell the only benefit is "decentralization" and just like BTC, the average user is beholden to bank-like entities for all their transactions anyway, so you get all the cons of existing monetary systems without the insurance.
  - olouv 6y ago
    trading?
    - benrbray 6y ago
      generate new keys and announce it on Twitter
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- 6y ago
Havoc 6y ago
I would have thought that is obvious to all. It still has a place in the world - a bit like fortnite skins or something. Bit of harmless fun. What I don't get is the insane amount of money people are willing to pay. $5 here or there I could understand but thousands??
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  The answer to your final question is that it isn't in fact obvious to all, right?
- itomato 6y ago
  I stumbled across a pair of socks that were selling for converted 160MM USD worth of Ethereum.
Zealotux 6y ago
An acquaintance of mine made 15k euros in 6 days with auto-generated artworks, he even made it to the local newspaper. I don't even know why I bother learning new frameworks and languages anymore.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  Is your friend making that money on a regular basis? Or just once during a market mania?
  - Zealotux 6y ago
    Just in the last week, he started 2-3 weeks back I believe. I doubt the mania is going to last but this is a very low risk high reward market for artists.
    - tasuki 6y ago
      As per the article, not necessarily "low risk" for artists - they pay real money to mint the NFTs.
- volkk 6y ago
  i feel like everyday at this point (at least from the time i've noticed which started with the GME craze) there's some get rich quick scheme happening and i keep missing out. i'm still happy in life but there's a not so small part of me that is very FOMO-ey and disappointed/jealous with the concept of doing almost nothing and making a lot of money on what essentially just boils down to hype. the other part of me is a bit intrigued/excited because there seems to be some amount of wealth transfer happening here. whether it is from richer to rich or rich to poor or poor to poorer is the primary question for me and what will define this movement to be dangerous (i.e poor to rich) or the start of something new and great
  - tasuki 6y ago
    >there's some get rich quick scheme happening and i keep missing out I had similar feelings. An acquiantance told me he didn't mind missing out on Bitcoin: he has all he needs, and he's happy to earn his money by solving people's problems. Actually, so do I! Perhaps there isn't much to be jealous of... > there seems to be some amount of wealth transfer happening here Yes, from poor artists to the people operating the NFT marketplaces? I'm generally for people losing money on their dumb decisions, as it's the best way to learn, but I can't help feeling sorry for them.
santiagobasulto 6y ago
Let people do whatever the F they wanna do with their money. If they lose it, shrug, it’s their money. I hate this idea of people telling other people what to do or what’s good for them.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  Ain't that the bitch of freedom? You have to put up with what other people do with it.
- __s 6y ago
  This was my advice to someone: don't expect any returns. Do it as a fun experiment, not an investment People piss away plenty going to casinos or clubs or amusement parks. So buy in with your for-fun budget, not your savings. Quit when it stops being fun
- XorNot 6y ago
  > I hate this idea of people telling other people what to do or what’s good for them. What if that's what I want to do?
- simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  It's called "Lassez-faire" [0], from French "let do". Take a look at the "criticism" section of the linked wikipedia source. Besides that: I think that some form of laws and regulation is necessary to prevent bad actors from taking advantage of people. In that sense, I strongly disagree with your approach. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laissez-faire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laissez-faire
- francoi8 6y ago
  Except they're shitting on our planet in the process!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- CynicusRex 6y ago
  Just as we ban or should ban completely rigged televised gambling games, we should ban pyramid schemes such as bitcoin. It's not because people like the rush and addiction of gambling that we should just leave it be. People are being taken advantage of and doing nothing about it is immoral. To advance as a human species, there needs to be an environment of equal opportunities (not equal outcomes) where everyone can lead a fruitful and satisfying life, devoid of pyramid schemes preying on the hopes of someday making it. In that sense, cryptocurrencies are not helping but exacerbating the problem.
yrgulation 6y ago
Suppose I was someone with money to launder. I'd draw a cat's arse, and buy it with my anonymous BTC wallet "money". No one would ever know where the money come from, especially if I anonymise transactions with one of the many services (e.g.: from what i read, some buy mining services, pay with the dirty money and viola, "clean" coin, while other services just make thousands of transactions to distribute payments and lose one's trace). If I wanted to be real clever, I'd buy Elon Musk's or Jack's NFT, and sell it for more because hey "it's made by someone popular" so its more credible. That's one explanation I have for the crazy amount of money moving around NFTs. Sure there are naive people, or some genuine traders, swapping NFT but those are a small percentage, and as the quote goes: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?". Literally 90% of the coins and NFT's i dug into have no application and look at least dodgy if not outright scammy. I have no proof other than my observations, just adding my thoughts to the conversation. The "it's rare" and "non fungible" arguments don't really stand in my view. There is a ton of rare stuff out in the real world that's simply useless.
- skyzadev 6y ago
  Seems plausible if you can cover all traces of where your crypto came from, and considering NFTs stay unregulated by legislation/governments. If NFTs remain a thing after all the hype & fake demand fades then I am sure regulation for NFT purchases will come into effect to combat such practices.
  - CryptoPunk 6y ago
    Letting people in law enforcement, and the banks deputized by the AML enforcement agencies, monitor all private financial interactions, in a warrantless dragnet manner, to make a 1% dent in crime [1], is a terrible trade-off. [1] https://www.ledgerinsights.com/anti-money-laundering-has-less-than-1-impact-on-crime-at-what-cost/ https://www.ledgerinsights.com/anti-money-laundering-has-les...
    - skyzadev 6y ago
      Today it's really hard to exchange crypto for fiat without proving your identity first. Seeing as NFTs are in the same space, I can imagine similar regulations will get enforced for NFC market places. As for the effectiveness of such measures, well, that is another discussion for another time!
rognjen 6y ago
*Cryptocurrencies
SkipperCat 6y ago
At first I thought Bitcoin and crypto currencies were bunk. Totally useless compared to USD or any other national currency. Although I still believe I'm correct, I've pretty much been shown that a lot of other people disagree with that premise because I've seen Bitcoin go from about $10 to $60,000. I still think it's a total bubble but have to admin there's a lot of other people who disagree. The one thing we can agree is that people who want to own Bitcoin do own Bitcoin and those that don't want to spend $60k on a coin dont. But with NFT.... You don't have to spend any money at all. You can just download the item. Why would you pay any money at all. If Van Gough painted two "starry night" painting and sold the 1st for $10MM but offered me the 2nd one for free, I'd take the free one. Why would anyone pay money for something that you can get for free? I think its because we're in a time of massive inflation of assets, probably brought on my the Fed's policies. We've inflated housing with low interest rates, stocks with QE and salaries for the lucky few in certain industries have risen much faster than the rest. This has lead to a group of people with excess cash chasing return. Once all the low hanging fruit has become out of reach in terms of value (ie: TLSA), money is seeking any other place to get returns - Crypto, penny stocks, SPAC's and now NFTs.
- capableweb 6y ago
  > The one thing we can agree is that people who want to own Bitcoin do own Bitcoin and those that don't want to spend $60k on a coin dont. Almost right. Yes, the ones that wanted to own Bitcoin badly enough have Bitcoins by now. The ones that want Bitcoin but not badly enough don't. The ones that don't want to have Bitcoins don't have Bitcoins. The error in your statement is within "those that don't want to spend $60k on a coin dont" because you don't need to spend $60k minimum to buy Bitcoin, that's the price of a full Bitcoin, which you don't need to buy. > But with NFT.... You don't have to spend any money at all. You can just download the item. That's not how NFTs work. Yeah, sure, you can download the NFT metadata, or the multimedia that the NFT links to, but that's not "ownership" as defined by blockchains, where the owner is the one the blockchain consensus has said is the owner. A bit like saying is the same to own the hosting of a SaaS landing page if you download the HTML file. Sure, now you have a copy of it, but that's the limit of your ownership there. Disclaimer: I'm myself not into NFTs because it mostly seems like hype at this point, I own zero NFTs myself and have no interest in buying. But I also care about accuracy.
simplecto 6y ago
Where our parents would hedge with gold, Gen-x and younger who got a foothold on finance are hedging with digital. Consider this: We have 2 generations who are digital native. They have digital relationships. They buy digital. They consume digital. The missing part has been to earn and spend digital. No that digital natives have been handed $$$ in govt handouts which has caused an explosion of economic activity in crypto. Now they can and will speculate in markets with digital. And do it with provable scarcity They are discovering scarcity
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
Don’t forget the wash trading aspect: Since this occurs on the blockchain, it’s trivially easy for someone to create two wallets and then “sell” an NFT to themself for whatever amount of money they have. If you have $10K in ETH, you can buy a $1 NFT and then trade it among your own wallets for increasing amounts of ETH up to $10K. Now your $1 NFT is “worth” $10K and you only spent as much money as the gas costs at the time. Use that momentum to flip the NFT to an unsuspecting buyer who sees the value skyrocketing, and you’ve made a huge return by selling nothing at all. Or simply show your friends that you have an expensive NFT as a way to flex. Or talk to a reporter who wants to write a story on how people are getting rich with NFTs. Amazing. Contrast this with something like eBay where the buyer would lose 10-20% on each sham transaction, limiting the profits. With NFTs, the transaction costs (gas) are fixed so the more money you wash trade, the lower percentage you lose. Some NFTs are designed to kick money back to the artist with each transaction, but curiously those aren’t trading at exorbitant prices in most cases. Of course, there’s nothing stopping the artist themself from using this scheme to pump up the price of their own artwork.
- capableweb 6y ago
  Sure you can do this. But keep in mind that "wash trading" is illegal, and you still need to declare where the money comes from when you want to cash out. Yeah, any asset that can artificially propped up. Cryptocurrencies doesn't make this harder nor easier, they simply make it possible to do without a central authority. We still have laws people need to follow in their countries, and up to government to act against people who break the law. If anything, blockchains makes it easier for local governments to spot things like this, because the centralized exchanges need to corporate, and all the transactions are stored forever. So if you have a IT department with even a small amount of IT knowledge, it'll be easy to setup a system to spot things like this and tie the data to actual individuals via the exchanges.
  - sillysaurusx 6y ago
    Illegal or not, it seems to be happening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26530373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26530373
sillysaurusx 6y ago
I've been watching the @cryptopunksbot Twitter account: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1373488203785629698 https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1373488203785629698 It's a bot that tweets whenever someone "buys" a cryptopunk, which is apparently a pixel artwork of a face. These have supposedly been being sold at a rate of around one per hour, for around 20 ETH each ($35k). I could see a rich person buying one of these out of boredom. But it seems certain that insiders must be buying these to create a false sense of demand. It's probably time for some sort of awareness campaign (which this article is doing).
junon 6y ago
The fact not a single person can explain it in simple terms to me is a huge red flag on its own.
- teraflop 6y ago
  The technology isn't complicated, if you already know what a cryptocurrency is. An NFT is a "bespoke" currency that anyone can create, each instance of which has a single indivisible "coin" with an embedded URL that points to some kind of content. This coin can be traded, bought or sold for other kinds of currencies. The baffling part is that people are willing to pay thousands or even millions of dollars for these things.
- EMM_386 6y ago
  Beeple was just on a US Sunday morning political talk show "explaining" it. One of his examples was that you can now go to an electronic dance festival, record it, and sell that as an NFT. The fact that his NFT was sold to a business partner, this seems like a classic pump and dump. Hyping anything and everything NFT to pump blockchain tokens.
- Adrig 6y ago
  It's the Steam community market but on blockchain. It's a platform that allows everyone to issue proofs of ownership and trade them
- koonsolo 6y ago
  digital baseball cards
yonatron 6y ago
Duh!
ses1984 6y ago
Jacob Collier was going to sell an nft that granted lifetime access to any of his concerts. That seemed like a not terrible use case for an nft. He changed his mind when people pointed out the environmental impact of cryptocurrency.
- greenonions 6y ago
  Did anyone point out the environmental impact of concerts?
  - ses1984 6y ago
    I think people are willing to accept the environmental impact of concerts. If you're not, then you'll quickly fall into the "no ethical consumption in a capitalist society" pit of despair. People can see the value created by a concert: the socializing, the experience. And they can take steps to mitigate the impact. How do you mitigate the environmental impact of a proof of work blockchain?
  - yardie 6y ago
    If each concert ticket generated the carbon footprint of a household for an entire month[0] then people may start asking questions if concerts are even worth it. [0] https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption
    - Can_Not 6y ago
      I believe that user meant the environmental impact of 10,000 people showing up to one place.
  - toss1 6y ago
    The actual impact might be surprising Heard about the 1970's gas crisis, that there was a move to ban auto racing, because of the "obvious waste" of racing cars circling tracka at <5miles/gallon, and stadiums full of people. Some studies were done. It turns out that auto racing didn't even make the charts in terms of fuel usage. What had the greatest environmental/fuel impact? Bowling. Yup, bowling. Competition leagues meeting daily in every micro-town and neighborhood, all the driving to & from the lanes... A couple dozen cars driving several hundred miles at 5mpg, once in the nation each week for the top series, even with 10K cars, doesn't make a dent. I'd expect concert tours, with a few big concerts per week, compared to constant heat generation of ETH miners is similarly gnat-on-an-elephant scale.
doodlebugging 6y ago
Someone once said that there's a sucker born every minute. It doesn't matter who said it but if you look back at the time period when it could've been said by the person it was initially attributed to, PT Barnum, then you have an approximate period between 1835 when he began his sideshow of oddities tour and 1850 when he shifted focus to theaters and a new audience. If during that time period it was true that there was a sucker born every minute, then today it is probably reasonable to expect that the number of suckers born every minute is firmly in the double digits and maybe higher when the difference between the number of women of child-bearing age available then versus now is considered.
- koonsolo 6y ago
  Who is the sucker? The one who bought bitcoin years ago, or the one that didn't? Because I'm confused now. I guess it's always "the other person" that is the sucker, as long as you can convince yourself of this fact.
  - doodlebugging 6y ago
    Why did you ask me this question if you already knew the answer?
jrururufuf666 6y ago
this might mark this cycles bubble top
mannykannot 6y ago
This is, very literally, the old scam of selling a bill of goods. The mark has bought just a bill (list) of goods, not the goods themselves. The author appears to be comparing it to a pyramid scheme because artists are being encouraged to buy other artists' NFTs, so earlier entrants into the scheme are being paid by more recent ones.
pabe 6y ago
The problem with NFTs is that they're not linked to any real legal contract. You basically buy a pointer to a file, not the file. Not even usage rights. For NFTs to become more than a Ponzi, they have to be bound to legal contracts.
- Hamuko 6y ago
  >You basically buy a pointer to a file, not the file. AFAIK, you buy a pointer to an URL, not to a file. I imagine a lot of these NFTs are going to be pointing to a bunch of 404s in the upcoming years. https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1372334547455512577 https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1372334547455512577
karaterobot 6y ago
It may be a bad idea, it may be a place for scurrilous people to take advantage of credulous people, but in what sense is it a pyramid scheme exactly?
scotty79 6y ago
This is exactly same as art 99.9% of non-utilitarian art is wothless and people who buy any of it will never see their money again. But 0.1% is fasionable among wealthy. And people pour millions into it and gain and loose millions, same way they do on the stock market.
anm89 6y ago
Calling things a pyramid scheme is a ponzi scheme. People using these terms incorrectly to describe "bad investment they don't like" gets old quick.
jcpham2 6y ago
Many many many years ago an artist did a linoleum tile etching of Heisenberg ( yes from Breaking Bad) in blank & white, sold a limited number for Bitcoin, and then destroyed the original linoleum tile (supposedly) It’s one of my favorite pieces because the niche and how I acquired it, directly from the artist. This NFT stuff... whooooosh
kemonocode 6y ago
I was on board with this article: a genuine criticism of the entire NFT/cryptoart scene without making use of the environmental impact retort... up until, of course, it was brought up. The impact is not insignificant but it's grossly overstated [0], and it's been used as a tool for harassment which I have to staunchly reject. [0] https://twitter.com/memotv/status/1369594107488829441?s=19 https://twitter.com/memotv/status/1369594107488829441?s=19
robertu 6y ago
when the bubble bursts, almost all of the NFTs, will worth zero due to the liquidity.
Can_Not 6y ago
> these platforms are owned by millionaires such as the Winklevoss twins, who famously sued Mark Zuckerberg for stealing their idea for Facebook. Makes you wonder if Facebook would have been worse under these two.
walkedaway 6y ago
A fool and his money are soon parted
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 6y ago
A picture sold as NFT is akin a football ball signed by Ronaldo, it derives its value from 1) fame 2) scarcity. A ball is a cheap and easily replicated object, but with a signature on it, it becomes valuable. NFT offers several advantages in this respect. 1) Ronaldo's identity is verified by the NFT site, and blockchain ensures authenticity for eternity. Let's remember, how many famous pieces of art turned out to be fakes. Can't happen with NFT. And no need to pay astronomical amounts to art experts for that. 2) Ronaldo must promise that he will sign only a limited amount of digital balls. Yes, the buyers should just trust Ronaldo on this, but Ronaldo has an incentive to keep his promise, because NFT contracts usually include "royalties": every time in the future, when the digital ball is resold, original issuer receives 10-20% of the price increase. So he is interested in objects retaining value.

188 points by CynicusRex 6y ago

Can we stop with the environmental impact complaints of ethereum. ETH2 (Proof of Stake) is running and will be merged very very soon.

ohgodplsno 6y ago
things_that_have_been_said_since_2017_but_have_not_happened.txt
- capableweb 6y ago
  Sorry, can't find that. Eth2.0 is actually filed under things_that_are_very_hard_to_research_develop_and_deploy_to_production_as_they_are_currently_supporting_a_200_billion_market.txt
  - dorkwood 6y ago
    I found one with a quick Google search (actually even earlier, 2016). Excerpts from the comment thread [0]: > Ethereum hopes to do away with mining by early 2017. > They're switching to proof of stake. Early PoS designs have some issues, like the infamous "nothing at stake" problem, but theirs addresses those. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12128406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12128406
gifnamething 6y ago
The article complains about gas fees, how will they change after ETH2?
- rcxdude 6y ago
  eth2 (which is more than just proof of stake) aims to substantially reduce the fees by allowing the network to scale up (I think the current target is 100,000 transactions a second). This is partly enabled by proof of stake and partly enabled by other stuff like sharding.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

niahmiah 6y ago

It's stupid at face value. No pyramid required. You cannot intrinsically link real world items to tokens. The source of truth is the real world, not the token. Add an unlimited supply of unique things, and how could anyone expect to make money from this?

spacemanmatt 6y ago
Beeple did pretty well
- graeme 6y ago
  Beeple’s business partner bought the NFT. We have no idea how much went to Beeple. All we know if Christie’s got $9 million.
  - CryptoPunk 6y ago
    Source on Beeple's business partner buying it?
    - y-satellite 6y ago
      https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beeple-art-buyer-and-his-nft-defi-scheme/ https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beepl... Particularly the "Number Go Up" section, which shows that the buyer also runs (and owns a majority of) a crypto token called "B20", which curiously enough, Beeple also has a 2% stake in.
      - CryptoPunk 6y ago
        That's not proof of them being business partners.
smitty1e 6y ago
Mostly agree, but 'value' is a social construct, and as long as there is a subsequent rube, then NFTs will be NiFTy.

herodotus 6y ago

I wrote my first Fortran program in 1969. I have been active in the field of computing since then, both as an academic and as a programmer in industry. During this time, there have been several times when I first heard about something new, something potentially game changing. I remember some of them very clearly: 1. Around 1971: a Wang desktop computer. Imagine: a computer that fit on a desk! 2. Visicalc (spreadsheet). Wow! I remember thinking finally, a breakthrough for non-programmers. 3. Relational databases. 4. UUCP - a way to talk to remote computers. 5. HTML/HTTP - we knew from the start that this was big And then there were many that were hyped but which I rejected as hype. Even when I was wrong, I still felt that there was something intrinsically wrong about this category of things. These things either vanished, limped along (and still do), or which I rejected out of hand, but actually succeeded. Like Virtual Reality (back in about 1984), Fuzzy Logic, Proving programs correct, and, of course Bitcoin. The latest in this category are NFTs which my intuition tells me is rubbish on so many levels. However, I think they will have some success, although I will never have anything to do with them (or Bitcoin for that matter).

pilingual 6y ago
What is the primary point for which you believe NFTs to be rubbish?
- tupshin 6y ago
  In what way do you think they have any intrinsic value?
  - capableweb 6y ago
    In what way do you think that you think about intrinsic value?
- XorNot 6y ago
  What legal force does an NFT bring to what it claims to authenticate? Even a certificate of authenticity for a painting is still notionally a legal contract between the authenticator and buyers: after all, there will be consequences if they cannot show they could reasonably support the identity they establish for something. What does an NFT do? Nothing. There are no consequences in the real world. You can make another blockchain with more NFTs. It doesn't even establish an interesting digital history for an item: they're tied to hashes, not data.

ohgodplsno 6y ago

NFTs are paying for a signature in a blockchain that links to a random URL. If you're lucky, it's IPFS and it'll go down when people stop hosting it. If you're slightly less lucky, it's whatever platform you went through that's operating an IPFS tunnel because cryptobros can't figure it out, and it will go down whenever your flavor or the month NFT site goes out of business, which is any time between six months and 5 years. IF you're even less unlucky, it's just a random link to a website, and I can't wait for people's art to be replaced with penises because that's what happens to hotlinkers.

antonvs 6y ago
Is it not possible to put the "owned" data itself on the NFT blockchain? If so, that does seem like a serious flaw.
- ohgodplsno 6y ago
  It _could_ be possible, although prohibitively expensive. https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1372163423446917122 https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1372163423446917122 for more context.
- Dma54rhs 6y ago
  Data on blockchain is too expensive. Or to be more exact blockchains people actually use or care about.
  - classified 6y ago
    Are there blockchains that people actually use or care about?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- steveharman 6y ago
  Filecoin is a possibility here (based on and created by the IPFS folks)

draklor40 6y ago

Ironic coming from a website like fstoppers. What exactly is the "value" of fine art photography ? Why do people pay exorbitant amounts for basically a few hours of photos during their wedding, given that a wedding might end up divorce ? People pay for whatever has "intrinsic" value to them. If Digitally generated/cryptographic art is it, so be it.

coldcode 6y ago
Everything is valued economically at whatever people will pay for it. But true value is independent of the price. Van Gogh sold almost nothing in his short 10 years of producing and killed himself because he thought he had no value and didn't want to burden his brother (he had some mental issues of course). Now his art is priceless. Value changes over time, things that people truly love will go up over time, things that have no real "value" will go away. Most of the "art" NFT's I've seen have no real appeal beyond a few minutes; I would happily take the money though if people offered it, but not feel any real value was traded for it, so it would seem less than rewarding other than the money.
jrochkind1 6y ago
People definitely aren't paying a lot for wedding photography because they think they can resell their wedding photos later for much more than they paid for the photography. And if they were, we'd think they were making a pretty strange mistake. Instead, they actually want the photography to exist that wouldn't otherwise exist if someone didn't make it. Not at all clear that's true with much NFT.
IshKebab 6y ago
> Why do people pay exorbitant amounts for basically a few hours of photos during their wedding, given that a wedding might end up divorce? That's about the worst example of people paying more for something than it is intrinsically worth that you could have come up with! People pay lots for wedding photographs because they want good photos, you're paying for an entire day of a skilled person's time - actually more because they usually edit the photos and produce some kind of photo book - and because there's high demand for wedding photographers. People don't pay lots because of price speculation for their wedding photos! A better example would be modern art, or maybe MTG cards.

endisneigh 6y ago

The only situation I see NFTs making sense is if there’s a virtual reality social network bigger than Facebook. In that scenario perhaps. Then again even in that scenario blockchains are unnecessary.

whateveracct 6y ago
The virtual reality social network would also need to be decentralized. Otherwise, why use NFTs when the social network host could just manage ownership through traditional means?

luka-birsa 6y ago

So basically: NFTs are a scam since the early adopters are not very good artists. And there is no unique value in them since its just Pepe memes, which are stupid to be NFTed, since it's just Gifs? Oh and let's not forget about the Ethereum fees and how shitty the tech is. This really reminds me on how everybody perceived internet in early noughties, when everybody was telling me it's shit and it will never ammount to anything. Man they were right, there was literally no value, just like there couldn't be value in standardized mode of exchange for digital goods - it doesn't have to be Pepe GIFs only.

jimhi 6y ago
Critical thinking says NFTs could work for say reselling tickets or something where you need to transfer the proof of ownership. The NFT Art market as it is seems to be about equivalent to the real world autograph market. It is likely vastly overvalued and the current sales are just people buying and hoping they can sell for more later like a Beanie Baby
benrbray 6y ago
ELI5: What can NFT achieve that a combination of Twitter + public key cryptography cannot achieve? As far as I can tell the only benefit is "decentralization" and just like BTC, the average user is beholden to bank-like entities for all their transactions anyway, so you get all the cons of existing monetary systems without the insurance.
- olouv 6y ago
  trading?
  - benrbray 6y ago
    generate new keys and announce it on Twitter
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
6y ago

Havoc 6y ago

I would have thought that is obvious to all. It still has a place in the world - a bit like fortnite skins or something. Bit of harmless fun. What I don't get is the insane amount of money people are willing to pay. $5 here or there I could understand but thousands??

jrochkind1 6y ago
The answer to your final question is that it isn't in fact obvious to all, right?
itomato 6y ago
I stumbled across a pair of socks that were selling for converted 160MM USD worth of Ethereum.

Zealotux 6y ago

An acquaintance of mine made 15k euros in 6 days with auto-generated artworks, he even made it to the local newspaper. I don't even know why I bother learning new frameworks and languages anymore.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago
Is your friend making that money on a regular basis? Or just once during a market mania?
- Zealotux 6y ago
  Just in the last week, he started 2-3 weeks back I believe. I doubt the mania is going to last but this is a very low risk high reward market for artists.
  - tasuki 6y ago
    As per the article, not necessarily "low risk" for artists - they pay real money to mint the NFTs.
volkk 6y ago
i feel like everyday at this point (at least from the time i've noticed which started with the GME craze) there's some get rich quick scheme happening and i keep missing out. i'm still happy in life but there's a not so small part of me that is very FOMO-ey and disappointed/jealous with the concept of doing almost nothing and making a lot of money on what essentially just boils down to hype. the other part of me is a bit intrigued/excited because there seems to be some amount of wealth transfer happening here. whether it is from richer to rich or rich to poor or poor to poorer is the primary question for me and what will define this movement to be dangerous (i.e poor to rich) or the start of something new and great
- tasuki 6y ago
  >there's some get rich quick scheme happening and i keep missing out I had similar feelings. An acquiantance told me he didn't mind missing out on Bitcoin: he has all he needs, and he's happy to earn his money by solving people's problems. Actually, so do I! Perhaps there isn't much to be jealous of... > there seems to be some amount of wealth transfer happening here Yes, from poor artists to the people operating the NFT marketplaces? I'm generally for people losing money on their dumb decisions, as it's the best way to learn, but I can't help feeling sorry for them.

santiagobasulto 6y ago

Let people do whatever the F they wanna do with their money. If they lose it, shrug, it’s their money. I hate this idea of people telling other people what to do or what’s good for them.

cbozeman 6y ago
Ain't that the bitch of freedom? You have to put up with what other people do with it.
__s 6y ago
This was my advice to someone: don't expect any returns. Do it as a fun experiment, not an investment People piss away plenty going to casinos or clubs or amusement parks. So buy in with your for-fun budget, not your savings. Quit when it stops being fun
XorNot 6y ago
> I hate this idea of people telling other people what to do or what’s good for them. What if that's what I want to do?
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
It's called "Lassez-faire" [0], from French "let do". Take a look at the "criticism" section of the linked wikipedia source. Besides that: I think that some form of laws and regulation is necessary to prevent bad actors from taking advantage of people. In that sense, I strongly disagree with your approach. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laissez-faire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laissez-faire
francoi8 6y ago
Except they're shitting on our planet in the process!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
CynicusRex 6y ago
Just as we ban or should ban completely rigged televised gambling games, we should ban pyramid schemes such as bitcoin. It's not because people like the rush and addiction of gambling that we should just leave it be. People are being taken advantage of and doing nothing about it is immoral. To advance as a human species, there needs to be an environment of equal opportunities (not equal outcomes) where everyone can lead a fruitful and satisfying life, devoid of pyramid schemes preying on the hopes of someday making it. In that sense, cryptocurrencies are not helping but exacerbating the problem.

yrgulation 6y ago

Suppose I was someone with money to launder. I'd draw a cat's arse, and buy it with my anonymous BTC wallet "money". No one would ever know where the money come from, especially if I anonymise transactions with one of the many services (e.g.: from what i read, some buy mining services, pay with the dirty money and viola, "clean" coin, while other services just make thousands of transactions to distribute payments and lose one's trace). If I wanted to be real clever, I'd buy Elon Musk's or Jack's NFT, and sell it for more because hey "it's made by someone popular" so its more credible. That's one explanation I have for the crazy amount of money moving around NFTs. Sure there are naive people, or some genuine traders, swapping NFT but those are a small percentage, and as the quote goes: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?". Literally 90% of the coins and NFT's i dug into have no application and look at least dodgy if not outright scammy. I have no proof other than my observations, just adding my thoughts to the conversation. The "it's rare" and "non fungible" arguments don't really stand in my view. There is a ton of rare stuff out in the real world that's simply useless.

skyzadev 6y ago
Seems plausible if you can cover all traces of where your crypto came from, and considering NFTs stay unregulated by legislation/governments. If NFTs remain a thing after all the hype & fake demand fades then I am sure regulation for NFT purchases will come into effect to combat such practices.
- CryptoPunk 6y ago
  Letting people in law enforcement, and the banks deputized by the AML enforcement agencies, monitor all private financial interactions, in a warrantless dragnet manner, to make a 1% dent in crime [1], is a terrible trade-off. [1] https://www.ledgerinsights.com/anti-money-laundering-has-less-than-1-impact-on-crime-at-what-cost/ https://www.ledgerinsights.com/anti-money-laundering-has-les...
  - skyzadev 6y ago
    Today it's really hard to exchange crypto for fiat without proving your identity first. Seeing as NFTs are in the same space, I can imagine similar regulations will get enforced for NFC market places. As for the effectiveness of such measures, well, that is another discussion for another time!

rognjen 6y ago

*Cryptocurrencies

SkipperCat 6y ago

At first I thought Bitcoin and crypto currencies were bunk. Totally useless compared to USD or any other national currency. Although I still believe I'm correct, I've pretty much been shown that a lot of other people disagree with that premise because I've seen Bitcoin go from about $10 to $60,000. I still think it's a total bubble but have to admin there's a lot of other people who disagree. The one thing we can agree is that people who want to own Bitcoin do own Bitcoin and those that don't want to spend $60k on a coin dont. But with NFT.... You don't have to spend any money at all. You can just download the item. Why would you pay any money at all. If Van Gough painted two "starry night" painting and sold the 1st for $10MM but offered me the 2nd one for free, I'd take the free one. Why would anyone pay money for something that you can get for free? I think its because we're in a time of massive inflation of assets, probably brought on my the Fed's policies. We've inflated housing with low interest rates, stocks with QE and salaries for the lucky few in certain industries have risen much faster than the rest. This has lead to a group of people with excess cash chasing return. Once all the low hanging fruit has become out of reach in terms of value (ie: TLSA), money is seeking any other place to get returns - Crypto, penny stocks, SPAC's and now NFTs.

capableweb 6y ago
> The one thing we can agree is that people who want to own Bitcoin do own Bitcoin and those that don't want to spend $60k on a coin dont. Almost right. Yes, the ones that wanted to own Bitcoin badly enough have Bitcoins by now. The ones that want Bitcoin but not badly enough don't. The ones that don't want to have Bitcoins don't have Bitcoins. The error in your statement is within "those that don't want to spend $60k on a coin dont" because you don't need to spend $60k minimum to buy Bitcoin, that's the price of a full Bitcoin, which you don't need to buy. > But with NFT.... You don't have to spend any money at all. You can just download the item. That's not how NFTs work. Yeah, sure, you can download the NFT metadata, or the multimedia that the NFT links to, but that's not "ownership" as defined by blockchains, where the owner is the one the blockchain consensus has said is the owner. A bit like saying is the same to own the hosting of a SaaS landing page if you download the HTML file. Sure, now you have a copy of it, but that's the limit of your ownership there. Disclaimer: I'm myself not into NFTs because it mostly seems like hype at this point, I own zero NFTs myself and have no interest in buying. But I also care about accuracy.

simplecto 6y ago

Where our parents would hedge with gold, Gen-x and younger who got a foothold on finance are hedging with digital. Consider this: We have 2 generations who are digital native. They have digital relationships. They buy digital. They consume digital. The missing part has been to earn and spend digital. No that digital natives have been handed $$$ in govt handouts which has caused an explosion of economic activity in crypto. Now they can and will speculate in markets with digital. And do it with provable scarcity They are discovering scarcity

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

Don’t forget the wash trading aspect: Since this occurs on the blockchain, it’s trivially easy for someone to create two wallets and then “sell” an NFT to themself for whatever amount of money they have. If you have $10K in ETH, you can buy a $1 NFT and then trade it among your own wallets for increasing amounts of ETH up to $10K. Now your $1 NFT is “worth” $10K and you only spent as much money as the gas costs at the time. Use that momentum to flip the NFT to an unsuspecting buyer who sees the value skyrocketing, and you’ve made a huge return by selling nothing at all. Or simply show your friends that you have an expensive NFT as a way to flex. Or talk to a reporter who wants to write a story on how people are getting rich with NFTs. Amazing. Contrast this with something like eBay where the buyer would lose 10-20% on each sham transaction, limiting the profits. With NFTs, the transaction costs (gas) are fixed so the more money you wash trade, the lower percentage you lose. Some NFTs are designed to kick money back to the artist with each transaction, but curiously those aren’t trading at exorbitant prices in most cases. Of course, there’s nothing stopping the artist themself from using this scheme to pump up the price of their own artwork.

capableweb 6y ago
Sure you can do this. But keep in mind that "wash trading" is illegal, and you still need to declare where the money comes from when you want to cash out. Yeah, any asset that can artificially propped up. Cryptocurrencies doesn't make this harder nor easier, they simply make it possible to do without a central authority. We still have laws people need to follow in their countries, and up to government to act against people who break the law. If anything, blockchains makes it easier for local governments to spot things like this, because the centralized exchanges need to corporate, and all the transactions are stored forever. So if you have a IT department with even a small amount of IT knowledge, it'll be easy to setup a system to spot things like this and tie the data to actual individuals via the exchanges.
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  Illegal or not, it seems to be happening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26530373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26530373

sillysaurusx 6y ago

I've been watching the @cryptopunksbot Twitter account: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1373488203785629698 https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1373488203785629698 It's a bot that tweets whenever someone "buys" a cryptopunk, which is apparently a pixel artwork of a face. These have supposedly been being sold at a rate of around one per hour, for around 20 ETH each ($35k). I could see a rich person buying one of these out of boredom. But it seems certain that insiders must be buying these to create a false sense of demand. It's probably time for some sort of awareness campaign (which this article is doing).

junon 6y ago

The fact not a single person can explain it in simple terms to me is a huge red flag on its own.

teraflop 6y ago
The technology isn't complicated, if you already know what a cryptocurrency is. An NFT is a "bespoke" currency that anyone can create, each instance of which has a single indivisible "coin" with an embedded URL that points to some kind of content. This coin can be traded, bought or sold for other kinds of currencies. The baffling part is that people are willing to pay thousands or even millions of dollars for these things.
EMM_386 6y ago
Beeple was just on a US Sunday morning political talk show "explaining" it. One of his examples was that you can now go to an electronic dance festival, record it, and sell that as an NFT. The fact that his NFT was sold to a business partner, this seems like a classic pump and dump. Hyping anything and everything NFT to pump blockchain tokens.
Adrig 6y ago
It's the Steam community market but on blockchain. It's a platform that allows everyone to issue proofs of ownership and trade them
koonsolo 6y ago
digital baseball cards

yonatron 6y ago

Duh!

ses1984 6y ago

Jacob Collier was going to sell an nft that granted lifetime access to any of his concerts. That seemed like a not terrible use case for an nft. He changed his mind when people pointed out the environmental impact of cryptocurrency.

greenonions 6y ago
Did anyone point out the environmental impact of concerts?
- ses1984 6y ago
  I think people are willing to accept the environmental impact of concerts. If you're not, then you'll quickly fall into the "no ethical consumption in a capitalist society" pit of despair. People can see the value created by a concert: the socializing, the experience. And they can take steps to mitigate the impact. How do you mitigate the environmental impact of a proof of work blockchain?
- yardie 6y ago
  If each concert ticket generated the carbon footprint of a household for an entire month[0] then people may start asking questions if concerts are even worth it. [0] https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption
  - Can_Not 6y ago
    I believe that user meant the environmental impact of 10,000 people showing up to one place.
- toss1 6y ago
  The actual impact might be surprising Heard about the 1970's gas crisis, that there was a move to ban auto racing, because of the "obvious waste" of racing cars circling tracka at <5miles/gallon, and stadiums full of people. Some studies were done. It turns out that auto racing didn't even make the charts in terms of fuel usage. What had the greatest environmental/fuel impact? Bowling. Yup, bowling. Competition leagues meeting daily in every micro-town and neighborhood, all the driving to & from the lanes... A couple dozen cars driving several hundred miles at 5mpg, once in the nation each week for the top series, even with 10K cars, doesn't make a dent. I'd expect concert tours, with a few big concerts per week, compared to constant heat generation of ETH miners is similarly gnat-on-an-elephant scale.

doodlebugging 6y ago

Someone once said that there's a sucker born every minute. It doesn't matter who said it but if you look back at the time period when it could've been said by the person it was initially attributed to, PT Barnum, then you have an approximate period between 1835 when he began his sideshow of oddities tour and 1850 when he shifted focus to theaters and a new audience. If during that time period it was true that there was a sucker born every minute, then today it is probably reasonable to expect that the number of suckers born every minute is firmly in the double digits and maybe higher when the difference between the number of women of child-bearing age available then versus now is considered.

koonsolo 6y ago
Who is the sucker? The one who bought bitcoin years ago, or the one that didn't? Because I'm confused now. I guess it's always "the other person" that is the sucker, as long as you can convince yourself of this fact.
- doodlebugging 6y ago
  Why did you ask me this question if you already knew the answer?

jrururufuf666 6y ago

this might mark this cycles bubble top

mannykannot 6y ago

This is, very literally, the old scam of selling a bill of goods. The mark has bought just a bill (list) of goods, not the goods themselves. The author appears to be comparing it to a pyramid scheme because artists are being encouraged to buy other artists' NFTs, so earlier entrants into the scheme are being paid by more recent ones.

pabe 6y ago

The problem with NFTs is that they're not linked to any real legal contract. You basically buy a pointer to a file, not the file. Not even usage rights. For NFTs to become more than a Ponzi, they have to be bound to legal contracts.

Hamuko 6y ago
>You basically buy a pointer to a file, not the file. AFAIK, you buy a pointer to an URL, not to a file. I imagine a lot of these NFTs are going to be pointing to a bunch of 404s in the upcoming years. https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1372334547455512577 https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1372334547455512577

karaterobot 6y ago

It may be a bad idea, it may be a place for scurrilous people to take advantage of credulous people, but in what sense is it a pyramid scheme exactly?

scotty79 6y ago

This is exactly same as art 99.9% of non-utilitarian art is wothless and people who buy any of it will never see their money again. But 0.1% is fasionable among wealthy. And people pour millions into it and gain and loose millions, same way they do on the stock market.

anm89 6y ago

Calling things a pyramid scheme is a ponzi scheme. People using these terms incorrectly to describe "bad investment they don't like" gets old quick.

jcpham2 6y ago

Many many many years ago an artist did a linoleum tile etching of Heisenberg ( yes from Breaking Bad) in blank & white, sold a limited number for Bitcoin, and then destroyed the original linoleum tile (supposedly) It’s one of my favorite pieces because the niche and how I acquired it, directly from the artist. This NFT stuff... whooooosh

kemonocode 6y ago

I was on board with this article: a genuine criticism of the entire NFT/cryptoart scene without making use of the environmental impact retort... up until, of course, it was brought up. The impact is not insignificant but it's grossly overstated [0], and it's been used as a tool for harassment which I have to staunchly reject. [0] https://twitter.com/memotv/status/1369594107488829441?s=19 https://twitter.com/memotv/status/1369594107488829441?s=19

robertu 6y ago

when the bubble bursts, almost all of the NFTs, will worth zero due to the liquidity.

Can_Not 6y ago

> these platforms are owned by millionaires such as the Winklevoss twins, who famously sued Mark Zuckerberg for stealing their idea for Facebook. Makes you wonder if Facebook would have been worse under these two.

walkedaway 6y ago

A fool and his money are soon parted

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 6y ago

A picture sold as NFT is akin a football ball signed by Ronaldo, it derives its value from 1) fame 2) scarcity. A ball is a cheap and easily replicated object, but with a signature on it, it becomes valuable. NFT offers several advantages in this respect. 1) Ronaldo's identity is verified by the NFT site, and blockchain ensures authenticity for eternity. Let's remember, how many famous pieces of art turned out to be fakes. Can't happen with NFT. And no need to pay astronomical amounts to art experts for that. 2) Ronaldo must promise that he will sign only a limited amount of digital balls. Yes, the buyers should just trust Ronaldo on this, but Ronaldo has an incentive to keep his promise, because NFT contracts usually include "royalties": every time in the future, when the digital ball is resold, original issuer receives 10-20% of the price increase. So he is interested in objects retaining value.