Biggest surprise of the century: shitty jpegs aren’t worth hundreds of dollars anymore
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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NFTs are cryptographically authenticated links on the blockchain to shitty jpegs hosted on some website.
It's like how a boy scout troop can volunteer to clean trash off the side of a highway, and in exchange the city puts up a sign saying "Next 2 miles sponsored by Troop 123". Except instead of volunteering, you pay $100k. And instead of a sign, it's a huge granite wall in front of city hall on which they etch your name, a latitude, longitude, and elevation. And instead of a highway, it's 1 cubic foot of garbage buried in the municipal solid waste dump. And instead of sponsoring or owning the garbage cube, you are paying for the right to be the only name on the wall associated with that specific volume of trash.
I'm not sure your analogy really captures the sheer amount of waste blockchain is. Even a granite slab has some value, whereas the huge expense to create a blockchain entry gives you ... a receipt. Something that normally is completely free and which can be disposed of without a second thought.
Anyone who thought NFTs were good out of all the stupid blockchain ideas has to be beyond stupid. Stupid or desperately greedy ... which is also stupid.
you are paying for the right to be the only name on the wall associated with that specific volume of trash.
Is a fantastic analogy. Well put.
"anymore" is the funny part.
Some of us saw this coming and held onto our Pog investments instead.
Edit: I'm not saying my Pogs have matured in value yet, I'm just saying my Pogs collection continues to be worth more than any NFTs.
Edit 2: Haha. I'm not even close to the first person to bring up Pogs here. I love this community.
They were worthless when they came out
They got their value out of them; they provided a means for money laundering, they got dollars out of the banks of suckers and into the crypto economy where it was promptly removed by those looking to hand off the bag to a bigger fool. It all worked if you were a scammer.
Oh yeah, everybody at the top won while the poor suckers who got FOMO were the ones to pay for it all. It's - unfortunately - a tale as old as time.
Digital Pogs.
I'll take Pogs over NFTs any day.
At least you can play with Pogs.
Majority of
That’s underselling it, of 74k analyzed, 69k had literally $0 market cap
Wow. I didn't think I could laugh any harder at people who bought NFTs. But I was wrong.
That said, I suspect there's a lot fewer ripped-off people and a lot more laundering drug money than the official counts reflect.
It took long enough
Wait what? My picture of a monkey grimacing stupidly with those shutter shades isn't worth $1.8 million dollars anymore?!
I know someone who made some money on bitcoin (enough to 'retire' in his 30's) - he's proud of his NFT collection and even has a large print of one of those dumb apes which he owns lol.
I don't hear him talking much about cryptos and such these days. (Instead I hear a lot more about how it's "over" for Ukraine any day now, lol)
Aww what happened to the last 5% since yesterday?
Ok, so I've been hearing "NFTs are worthless" for so long now.
Why is it being repeated so much that it's nauseating? The technology behind them is awesome, the things buying and selling with them are pictures. Of course it's stupid. People buy and sell baseball cards, and magic cards, and pokemon cards. They sell for far more than the fucking cardboard and ink they are made of, and they aren't reminding us they are worthless.
What the hell is trying to be said?
Most people (even with otherwise good understanding of tech) still fail to grasp that "an NFT" is not the monkey picture itself.
This is both why some managed to be bought for insane prices, and why we see reporting like this.
Your examples would actually be a useful case for NFTs since you'd have to both have a genuine card, and the token saying its genuine
Your examples would actually be a useful case for NFTs since you'd have to both have a genuine card, and the token saying its genuine
How exactly would you pair a physical object to a digital NFT?
QR code on the card?
The technology behind them is awesome
What use case would you imagine?
Yes, people who have been sceptical of NFTs have said this for a long time, but now even those who are willing to trade NFTs aren't willing to pay for them anymore (= the price on the NFT market places is zero). So it's a prediction that has come true.
But its disingenuous. NFTs have value. It's functional value. Tying a image to an NFT and artificially inflating the monetary value of the images has ruined the public opinion on the NFT as a technology.
As an example this post is probably stored in Postrgress with some sort of identifier, possibly a GUID. If I went around and traded posts for cash because I had a GUID of the post, the value of the GUID doesn't change, and the post remains worthless.
Actually I'd even wager this was done intentionally. NonFungible Tokens as a proof-of-ownership cannot be duplicated. If I were a giant financial institution that worked with Fiat currency, high frequency trading, controlling order flow, and using derivatives that aren't back by actual securities, i would be fucking terrified that the common person would find out about the technology, and demand that all transactions made via the internet be non-fungible.
A NonFungible Token is a direct threat to fiat currency, and I'm really starting to wonder if these authors, and the stories of over priced .jpgs trading back and forth is all manufactured.
No, they do not. Value is derived from supply and demand and determined by trade in the market place. If there is an oversupply, but no demand, value drops and can drop to the point where value cannot be determined anymore. At that point things are essentially worthless. That's how the free market works.
I'm not about the price of the image, I'm talking about the value of a non-fungible token to computer software. A non-fungible token itself can't have a price tag, it's essentially a number.
Same with cryptographic private keys. They are numbers. To a computer a private key and nft have no value, but to the software they have function.
The images are not the nft.
You are correct and if we as a society said "this land/material/resource has a value and legal ownership of that is determined by the nft" then yes.
But the actual object behind the nft in most cases is just a picture.
The deed of a parcel of land is essentially worthless except we all agree the person who owns the deed owns the land and the land has value. The issue with most nfts is even if we all agree the who owns the nft owns the art, and the art had no value... The nft has no value.
Shocking.
my tokens jerry..... they're all getting funged
"something I made up with a bunch of maths without a shred of use for anything has no value"... yeah... go figure...