Gee, if only there was some way to have seen this coming before hand...
this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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Actually I didn't have many hopes in humanity when it started to happen. It's a bit comforting, not much though with other things around.
🌍👨🚀🔫👨🚀
Just because something is unique doesn’t mean it’s valuable.
Some people are just discovering this.
It's not even that it's unique. It's just one particular system associates you with something. It's basically those star registry scams. Except you're not associated with a star by one particular scam organization. You associated with an image of a cartoon ape by a scam organization! But there's a trendy technology involved so idiots think that makes it somehow legit.
Try telling that to sports memorabilia collectors though.
"Look at my hockey jersey!" "Yeah, so? I have the same one." "Yeah but you're wasn't signed by Wayne Gretsky."
Or even trading cards, or comics. Or hell, even plain w-shirts with a brand logo on it for $250. People assign arbitrary values to stuff all the time. I don't understand it at all, but there's a whole ton of people that just eat that shit up like it's candy.
However NFTs were trying to assign value to the receipt for the Gretzky shirt.
Well no, in my example the shirt is the image and the signature on it is the NFT bit. Physically, it's just a bit of ink, but the shirt itself is no different than one you can go pickup at the store.
In your example what happens if the shirt is sold to someone else? In the NFT case the signature changes.
The shirt analogy doesn't work well, but NFTs are great for transferable tickets.
Were they worth anything to begin with?
They have no intrinsic value, but they're worth what people will pay for them I guess. The only problem is that entire thing was a hype bubble conjured up scammers. The insane thing is that for a brief moment they even had famous auction houses buying into the scam.
That shitty set of randomized pixel art sold for more than anything else in that particular show, aside from a Basquiat.
No one will convince me that there isn't money laundering going on there. There's just no way an actual person looked at that and thought it is worth that kind of money
Well, no piece of art has an intrinsic value. And auction houses exist to make money, not because of some divine purpose to connect true art to its worthy new owner. Of course they're going to jump on the hype train if they think it's worth it. I fully agree that NFTs are a scam, like almost all crypto crap. But so is the current art market. Money laundering and investments for the rich.
A better question would be, did anyone ever even buy them to begin with?
This means that 79% of all NFT collections – otherwise known as almost 4 out of every 5 – have remained unsold.
That is, most of the NFTs included in the OP statistic were listed for sale by their creators, and never recorded a sale. Another important detail is that even for the ones that did record sales, there's no real way of knowing if those sales were real. You can easily make another crypto wallet and buy an NFT from yourself. For more elaborate wash trading, you can find someone with an established wallet to collude with. There are obvious reasons to do this too; building up a history of increasing sale prices could potentially dupe someone into thinking an NFT is a good investment, or you could launder money by selling an NFT to a 'dirty' wallet you also control.
Probably some portion of the market was "real", but the volume is almost certainly much lower than anyone is reporting. Statistics like what the OP article is quoting are just about totally meaningless.
Hundreds of millions collectively, when people were dumb enough to buy them. The problem is that eventually dumb people ran out of money and the worth plummeted to zero.
🔫️ Always have been
Of no surprise to anyone.
Perhaps they’d have retained value if they had been attached to quality art rather than awful-looking algorithmically generated complete trash.
No, they wouldn't have. Because owning a link to a thing doesn't mean anything, no matter what that thing is. They were only valuable because people didn't understand NFTs and wanted to get rich quick.
The concept of a certificate of authenticity for digital goods that can be traded isn’t inherently terrible.
The concept isn't, I agree. But it also isn't a useful idea, either. There really doesn't appear to be any benefit to using NFTs in any meaningful application, or at least nobody has pitched one that isn't either a grift or a way to appear "trendy" by reinventing the wheel.
The actual infrastructure was horribly inefficient, but that may have improved with ETH's move to proof of stake.
There's other issues, but the idea of using the digital receipt as an "investment" seems fundamentally flawed.
Some established, legitimate artists have been selling NFTs with their originals. But sure, overall, like crypto in general, the field is filled with scammers and get-rich-quick schemes.
I know someone who is a painter who for some reason decided to try selling NFTs a couple of months ago (I pointed out it was a bit late…). The only responses on opensea and Instagram she received were from scammers, trying to pull a “my payment didn’t work, you need to manually approve it” scheme to try to steal her credentials.
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But it was nice while artists were able to sell to profit from rich people
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To be real, even cryptobros would tell you the vast majority were useless as soon as they were minted.
Who would have thought?
It must have been really hard for the underpaid researcher to put this report together while doubling over in laughter.
I can imagine being desperate to hit it big, but at least but a lottery ticket or something. That way, the school system (or whatever) gets a few bucks, instead of the fucking Trumps.
Pumped, dumped, done.
They always were.
Grass is green...
69,795 out of 73,257 NFT collections have a market cap of 0 Ether
LMAO!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Tens of thousands of NFTs that were once deemed the newest rage in tech and dragged in celebrities, artists and even Melania Trump have now been declared virtually worthless.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are a form of crypto asset that is used to certify ownership and authenticity of a digital file including an image, video or text.
The report comes nearly two years after the craze for NFTs swept up celebrities and artists alike, with many rushing to purchase NFT collections of the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Matrix avatars.
The drastic downward market shift surrounding such crypto assets “underscores the need for careful due diligence before making any purchases, especially one of high value”, the report said.
Researchers identified 195,699 NFT collections with no apparent owners or market share and found that the energy required to mint the NFTs was comparable to 27,789,258 kWh, resulting in an emission of approximately 16,243 metric tons of CO2.
In order to survive market downturns and have lasting value, NFTs need to be either historically relevant such as first-edition Pokémon cards, true art or provide genuine utility, they said in the report.
The original article contains 650 words, the summary contains 189 words. Saved 71%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Given that they can be generated effectively for free, this is hardly surprising or particularly meaningful. I can generate ten thousand new images with my AI art generator for basically zero cost and I don't expect any would be economically valuable, but that doesn't mean there aren't some images that are valuable.
Cryptobois be like
Actually their value is completely unchanged. Price and money are made up and do not reflect value.
Not Fart Token
NFT's never made much sense to me, at least in the way people attempted to use them.
Maybe they'd be useful as additional proof of ownership of a physical object? Like if they issued one when you bought a car, and you could use it as proof of ownership if you lost your title. That's probably a bad example as I imagine there's already safeguards in place for this in most places. And probably some other issues that haven't occurred to me. Still, conceptually I think it makes sense.
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How to say, "I'm a rube," without saying it out loud. Not a tear will be shed for these doofs.
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