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I checked out OpenSea a few days ago to see what was selling. I went in with low expectations but I was still shocked. The hottest NFTs are all trash. It's a bu

by api 5y ago

I checked out OpenSea a few days ago to see what was selling. I went in with low expectations but I was still shocked. The hottest NFTs are all trash. It's a bunch of dumb ape doodles and piles of variations on the same few templates. Some of them are algorithmically generated. It's just shockingly dumb, yet I have smart people I follow on Twitter and elsewhere who are convinced this is all world changing. I keep asking for people to point me to the evidence and it's never there. I've been asking for years.

nikanj 5y ago
Yet people keep putting their life savings into it - and coming out significantly richer. It’s rather frustrating how well the market has been rewarding bad decisions
- api 5y ago
  It's all built on historically low (or even effectively negative) interest rates. We've been in a crazy low rate environment since 2008 and COVID pushed the money printing into overdrive. When inflation eventually forces interest rates to be raised a lot of these crazy bubbles are going to pop almost instantly. The alternative, a deflationary depression, would probably have been a lot more painful and destructive. Instead of mass defaults and cascades of bankruptcies we get million dollar ape doodles.
  - mandmandam 5y ago
    Mass defaults and bankruptcies and worse are still coming, I promise you. You can't funnel money upward this hard for decades and not pay a price.
hnuser847 5y ago
It's not dumb, it's gambling. You buy a stupid monkey doodle for $100k and hope to sell it to somebody else for $200k. Nobody wants the monkey doodle. The NFT craze has nothing whatsoever to do with art, novel technology, decentralized ownership, or any of the other high-minded concepts people keep bringing up in these discussions. It's about gambling. CrytoKitties did it back in 2017. NFTs are not new and there were flurry of articles back then along the lines of "How I Made $100k Trading CryptoKitties in My Free Time". https://hackernoon.com/how-we-made-100k-trading-cryptokitties-2d69aebe715b https://hackernoon.com/how-we-made-100k-trading-cryptokittie...
- api 5y ago
  Gambling not labeled as gambling is a scam. NFTs are being sold to the ignorant as something with real value or even as the future of art ownership and patronage. They are not even close to that today.

by api 5y ago

nikanj 5y ago

Yet people keep putting their life savings into it - and coming out significantly richer. It’s rather frustrating how well the market has been rewarding bad decisions

api 5y ago
It's all built on historically low (or even effectively negative) interest rates. We've been in a crazy low rate environment since 2008 and COVID pushed the money printing into overdrive. When inflation eventually forces interest rates to be raised a lot of these crazy bubbles are going to pop almost instantly. The alternative, a deflationary depression, would probably have been a lot more painful and destructive. Instead of mass defaults and cascades of bankruptcies we get million dollar ape doodles.
- mandmandam 5y ago
  Mass defaults and bankruptcies and worse are still coming, I promise you. You can't funnel money upward this hard for decades and not pay a price.

hnuser847 5y ago

It's not dumb, it's gambling. You buy a stupid monkey doodle for $100k and hope to sell it to somebody else for $200k. Nobody wants the monkey doodle. The NFT craze has nothing whatsoever to do with art, novel technology, decentralized ownership, or any of the other high-minded concepts people keep bringing up in these discussions. It's about gambling. CrytoKitties did it back in 2017. NFTs are not new and there were flurry of articles back then along the lines of "How I Made $100k Trading CryptoKitties in My Free Time". https://hackernoon.com/how-we-made-100k-trading-cryptokitties-2d69aebe715b https://hackernoon.com/how-we-made-100k-trading-cryptokittie...

api 5y ago
Gambling not labeled as gambling is a scam. NFTs are being sold to the ignorant as something with real value or even as the future of art ownership and patronage. They are not even close to that today.