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Ether Rock – Pet Rocks on the Blockchain
- abledon 5y agoIts kind of brilliant... Like... what can a super-rich quasi-billionaire / hundreds-millionaire buy to impress their friends? impress someone at a party etc... You can buy a Lamborghini etc... but now what? all your friends have Lamborghinis, how are you different. You're nothing... unless you buy this virtual pet rock that costs X millions of dollars. And signals you are so F'ing rich you can blast a couple Million on a digital rock. I'm reminded of the business card scene in American Psycho, but with crypto geeks showing each other their 300,000,000$ Crypto punk avatar
- 908087 5y agoI don't understand how that would be seen as impressive, though. If anything, I would be embarrassed for and suspicious of a person who spent millions of dollars on something so incredibly stupid for the sole purpose of trying to impress people. Plenty of people in my circle have expensive things, but we don't buy them to impress each other by showing how much we spent on them. We buy them because they're fun to drive/fly/etc, or because we get actual utility out of them. What kind of person would be impressed by someone paying a ridiculous sum of money for the ability to claim they own a pixelated rock image, just for the sake of spending a ridiculous sum of money on it? More importantly, what kind of person would want to be around a person like that at all, let alone spend time and ridiculous sums of money trying to impress them? The way I see it, the "best case scenario" for what is going on with the NFT market is that a lot of incredibly shallow and sad people are making incredibly awkward and embarrassing decisions with money out of desperation to impress other shallow and sad people. The most likely scenario, however, is that it's mostly just money laundering going on (which is somehow less depressing than the former scenario).
- aphroz 5y agoI don't think we have imagined that in any sci-fi anticipation books or movies. At least Crypto Kitties required design skills.
- smoldesu 5y agoNext time I break something while soldering, I'll start hot-gluing the broken components onto a rock. Then I can have my very own crypto-rock, sans blockchain integrations (though really: how hard is it to get a pet rock fully connected?)
- ethbr0 5y ago> how hard is it to get a pet rock fully connected? If you grind six faces flat, in a roughly perpendicular manner, and then epoxy a series of metal links on, in a linear fashion, I believe you'll have your own block chain.
- DSingularity 5y agoIs this a joke?
- noitsnot 5y agoNo, but the crazy stuff sure seems to be coming back into play again. There was an article out a few days back about 10? year old who made 400k with a set of pixelated whale NTF's.
- firloop 5y agoInteresting Twitter thread from a few days ago about the provenance of Ethereum rocks: https://twitter.com/whatdotcd/status/1429969801624031236 https://twitter.com/whatdotcd/status/1429969801624031236
- rubyist5eva 5y agoCryptokitties is less of a meme.
- H8crilA 5y agoMemes can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
- dheera 5y ago> Beware of any other projects claiming to sell rock NFT's, which may either be scams How the fuck is it a scam when the first 100 rocks are fake already? They're just more fake rocks just like the first 100.
- pope_meat 5y ago...I'm disappointed in the human race
- paulpauper 5y agowhy not create your own NFT niche (maybe NFT Furbies, NFT leafs, or whatever) and then use some of the profits to better the human race like by donating to charity, after buying a home. If this is such a huge and legal opportunity to profit from a bubble, why not jump in.
- pope_meat 5y agoI'm personally of the opinion that the amount of harm this will do will never outweigh the good one could do. In the same vein, I could also start a toxic chemical disposal company and just dump the stuff in the ocean, and then use the profits to support cleaning up the ocean. Burning cycles to maintain the blockchain for... pixel art is not something that I consider ethical behavior. But you do you, perhaps you can design a Blockchain solution for water rights, it will greatly reduce friction for nestle to buy up more water rights for the billions of plastic water bottles they need to fill up for rich suburbanites, they like the flavor better.
- cratermoon 5y agoOK but when do we get to tulips on the blockchain? Pictures of tulips as NFTs.
- firloop 5y agoFor only 0.02 ETH (~$65 USD), you can own an EtherTulip: https://opensea.io/collection/ethertulips https://opensea.io/collection/ethertulips
- cratermoon 5y agoFor $65 US I could buy a couple of dozen real ones.
- cratermoon 5y agohttps://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1399058952336277505 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1399058952336277505
- randtrain34 5y agoTurns out one of these rocks sold for 888 Eth today, which is around $2.8 million USD.
- 908087 5y agoThere were also a number of "cryptopunk" sales for 888.88 ETH today. Totally normal and organic market behavior.
- space_rock 5y agoIt's wash trading to get attention and bring in a mark that they can offload the scam to
- space_rock 5y agoWash trading scam
- elefanten 5y agoCan you elaborate or share a link?
- doopy1 5y agoThey can't, because it's not.
- space_rock 5y agoOn social media there are a these large prices shared about NTF sale price The transactions are all likely to be organized by the same entity. A, B and C are all buying and selling this NFT for headline grabbing price. The problem is they're all the same people trading at high prices to get attention That's when the mark will come in attracted by large prices shared on social media. The mark will be unaware of the wash trading and they will paying what they think is a market price but is really a constructed price by one colluding entity. There is no large group of people willing to pay this price for the product it is an illusion The colluding group is able to sell well above a realistic market price to the mark. A highly profitable scheme. This is the basic breakdown of the wash trading scam which is the basis for NTFs
- okareaman 5y agoMy best guess without wasting days and weeks of my life studying this is that some people with a lot of extra money laying around are passionate about blockchain, Ethereum contracts and non-fungible tokens so they are attempting to will a system into existence that eventually will stay afloat without their assistance. This system will be extremely useful is what they imagine and as early adopters, they will make their money back. If not, it was money they had to gamble. Of course, I could be imagining all this.
- DSingularity 5y agoSo yet another pump and dump by the early crypto?
- toomuchtodo 5y agoMore like early days of Reddit where founders would fake convos between each other to bootstrap the site, but in this example, an economic system.
- okareaman 5y agoI think it's much more than pump and dump, or if it is, on a much longer time frame. There is a absolutely spectacular documentary on Andy Warhol by Ric Burns that I think sheds some light. Warhol was relatively unknown before the 32 soup cans. An art dealer in California named Irving Bloom showed them and most people hated them or dismissed them, but by some mysterious process they became like a talisman that divided the hip from the unhip. Later in the documentary Bloom brags about how they're now worth millions of dollars. NFT's of JPG's of rocks are kind of like the soup cans. You either get it, or you don't, but people are betting that the one's who get it will pay good money for all kinds of NFT's in a self-sustaining market. It's very futuristic, like the idea that a soup can could be art. It's not based on anything that happened before. You really have to get the context starting at 1:08:15 where a friend tells him "you like money, why don't you paint pictures of money? You should paint something everyone recognizes, like a can of soup" The Life of Andy Warhol - Part 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDIdjvezp2U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDIdjvezp2U
- abledon 5y agoLatest rock traded for 2.3 Million $$ https://twitter.com/etherrockprice/status/1431641800431714313 https://twitter.com/etherrockprice/status/143164180043171431... I'll take "our economy is signalling ____ for 500 alex"
- leashless 5y agoThis stuff is the Million Dollar Homepage but for crypto. A bunch of faddish mucking around which almost entirely obscures where the value is being generated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage for our younger readers ;) Over here, gold bullion NFTs with individual numbered bars tied into a legal framework which ensures that NFT ownership gives bar ownership, bridging the physical/legal/digital domains. And they're CO2 offset, with the calculation of CO2 impact and the CO2 offsets bound into the NFT too. It's a building block of a new economy, with the environmental and social costs of trade bound right into the product description data. You can safely ignore the rocks. But there's action elsewhere in the ecosystem. https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/can-the-world-computer-save-the-world-part-3-building-an-economy-with-a-future-5d4156f06a04 https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/can-the-world-... (what I do for a livin')
- paulpauper 5y agoSo many people are calling this a scam or laundering, but I think there are some ppl who have so much $, like early adopters, brands, exchanges,execs, that they are willing to make seemingly stupid purchases for PR purposes or as some weird form of signaling. Like for the same reason luxury goods cost so much even if they are not much better.
- gjvc 5y ago> Like for the same reason luxury goods cost so much even if they are not much better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
- inthewoods 5y agoOne interesting theory I've heard on this is that, given there are about 6400 accounts with 1000+ ETH, that these folks essentially don't recognize the amount of money they're using to buy this stuff. In other words, it's like casino chips and that may be altering the way they view the purchases. Obviously no way to really know, but I do find it amazing (and very suspect) that Openseas went from $8m a month to $2.3b a month - that's a pretty heady number. It does make me suspect either wash trading or other activities going on.
- xur17 5y ago> Obviously no way to really know, but I do find it amazing (and very suspect) that Openseas went from $8m a month to $2.3b a month - that's a pretty heady number. It does make me suspect either wash trading or other activities going on. Opensea charges a 2.5% fee on every purchase, so wash trading would be relatively expensive (but not impossible).
- space_rock 5y agoIt's very likely Opensea is organizing the scams or is colluding with the scammers. Considering every crypto founder as a career criminal collusion is very likely.