this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 211 points 1 year ago (23 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago

Also money laundering and tax rebate schemes.

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[–] [email protected] 128 points 1 year ago

Well I am shocked!

No not actually.

[–] [email protected] 113 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Out of the top collections, the most common price for an NFT is now $5-$10.

Still overpriced!

[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I'm honestly amazed they're worth anything at all.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (9 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 72 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 68 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Small correction: Even though some NFTs sold for millions, the NFTs have always been worthless.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 year ago (16 children)

So it was like we thought all along, cool.

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 year ago (10 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago

The whole point was to get dollars into crypto so the holders could cash out. The value was never meant to stay.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (3 children)

95% seems a little low. I assume that it's closer to 99.9%.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm sure they were a great way to launder money at the time.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not my Donald Trump trading cards! Nooo!

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe now I'll finally be able to buy the ones I want

(There aren't any)

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

It sounds like you could have always bought the ones that you want!

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (8 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It always reminds me of those certificates for owning a piece of the moon.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Started laughing when nfts were introduced, still chuckle today.

It's great. Love it.

Grab the tulips! Grab them!

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago

It is all worthless?

Always has been

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

well that surprised no one

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago

Whomever named them NFTs instead of grift cards missed an opportunity.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Oh man. I remember getting downvoted to hell for stating that they were a scam and provided no actual value or true, to technical "non-fungibility".

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

Wowie gee whiz, no one in the universe could have seen that one coming. /s

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

All those rappers and celebrities with cartoon donkey and monkey profile pics showed how much for sale they are. They will promote poison to you for money

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

Ponzi schemes have an oversaturation problem like every other one.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Don't put your reputation on the line to sell links to ugly JPEGs, please.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My favourite part of NFT/Crypto is all of the creators that outed themselves by pushing for it, taking sponsorships, etc.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Oh no.

Anyway.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

The biggest operation of money laundering in the history of the world.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

Now? Always were.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

Not dissimilar to money laundering or MLMs.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lol, classic. Where's Ubisoft's NFT collection they were selling so hard last year?

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (9 children)

NFTs are like a ticket roll, they can be quite useful, but that requires having an event or service that those tickets apply to. NFTs so far completely failed to create that. To justify the decentralized nature of NFTs you'd further have to make that ticket apply to multiple different services. That didn't happen either.

Buying your hats in a game with NFTs is pointless as long as those hats only work in that one singular game, centralized services can handle that better. On the other side, if you'd use NFTs to sell the digital games themselves, they could be quite useful and breaks through established online-store monopolies. But that of course would require different online shops to accept the same NFT, e.g. buy NFT for a game on Steam, but download it through EPIC. That's something NFTs could allow, but it would require the whole industry to play along, which due to everybody competing against each other is rather unlikely.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (4 children)

"Bull run"

More like Bullshit run. Literally nobody fell for the grift. Celebrities bought into it because it was a pump and dump scheme and they can afford it. There is literally no use case for NFTs and even basic normies saw that.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

literally nobody fell for the grift

Someone somewhere has an NFT instead of a bunch of money. Even if everyone participating knew this was a very expensive game of hot potato someone had to be holding the potato when the buzzer went off.

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