The Sotheby’s auction house has been named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by investors who regret buying Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs that sold for highly inflated prices during the NFT craze in 2021.
Nope. Too bad, they knew what they were buying. That they convinced themselves the value they attributed to it would remain or increase is entirely on them. The fact that so many others saw it through a realistic lens means they had the same ability and chose not to.
But that said, the proceeds for them should also get clawed back and 100% put toward scam identification education. Neither side in this one should walk away enriched.
Honestly I’m ok with them keeping their money, afaik everyone knew where they were buying they were just dumb enough to think it would ever be worth something. If we want to claw back money from people we should start with the ones ruining the environment to make the line go up
I mean yeah, if you make it illegal for dumb people to overpay for stupid shit, half the global economy would collapse overnight
I’m all for that. And the stock market bros too.
That’s the whole point of legitimate auction houses like Sothby’s. They pay experts to provide some legitimacy and sanity. It’s one thing for me to say that a kids finger painting is worth 50k, it’s a different thing for a trained art appraiser at an auction house to set that price.
Sotheby sets the initial prices and provides estimates of value. They were supposed to be the responsible adult in the room. Now if they values them at say $1000 and they sold for 100,000k that’s on the buyer. If the value was set for 80k and it sold for 90k that’s a different story.
This is the part about wealthy people that I just love. If muh investment pays off, f-off society, I was smart and made a wise investment. I deserve to keep 100% of the proceeds. But when things go south, “Save meeeeeeeeee, you [society/regulators] shouldn’t have let me go through with it”. Then we’re back to the socialism they say they hate so much and that they lobby their own money to deny to the common folk.
Oy vay
Should’ve invested in beanie babies like the rest of the smart people.
Nah man, pogs are where it’s at. Pogs!
Joking aside, I miss my Pogs. Those need to come back.
I actually looked this up recently. You can buy pog makers!
Baby come back
You can blame it all on me
I don’t think pogs were ever expected to make anyone a millionaire. The most expensive slammer I ever saw back in the day was $20 and pog $5. My mom wouldn’t buy me that fancy $20 slammer. :(
Back in the mid-90s I had a friend who inherited $40,000 from her grandmother and spent all of it on $75 Fossil watches, the kind that were based on old cartoons like Popeye etc. And it took her a while to do it since she would drive to malls within a few hours of her and clean out the department stores that carried them. That’s over 500 watches, a few at a time.
She was adamant that this was an excellent investment, but these are on eBay now for $50 to $60. At parties she would pull out the collection and start showing them to people (no touchy, of course) as if there was something intrinsically interesting about a cartoon Fossil watch. The sad thing is, with $40,000 in hand she probably could have bought two or three times as many from a wholesaler and maybe eventually actually have made some money.
At least with beanie babies there was a physical object.
The fact that they still sell for 50k is insane. It’s a shitty picture with a convoluted proof of ownership. The fuck.
A lot of those transactions is just to up the price so dumb asses think they are worth it. The other half is just dumb asses ofc.
It has to be some form of money laundering.
It is, but tsss.
Shhhhhhh don’t tell them
I all but guarantee you that those are getting shuffled around between owners to keep the price inflated.
Well, it’s not that convoluted, it’s basically just a hashmap.
I hope the defendant loses, but the damages shouldn’t be awarded to the fools who bought the NFTs. That money should go to literally anyone else, because they’ve already proved they can’t be trusted with money. Fuck both sides of this dispute.
I wish I had the temerity to sue people when an ‘investment’ doesn’t go my way.
I’m sure they’d have sued Sotheby’s if they made lots of profit right?
There was the bit about Sotheby’s misrepresenting FTX as a buyer, but that doesn’t make me any more sympathetic to their situation. Which, now that I’ve typed that, is extremely cynical when I like to think of myself as empathetic. I’m gonna try to change my take here. I like @db2’s take that the money should be invested in public education.
I don’t think it would have mattered had they known. FTX was still in their good graces at the time, and FTX didn’t actually scam anyone (in this particular transaction lmao).
That’s an average price of over $241,000, but Bored Ape NFTs now sell for a floor price of about $50,000 worth of ether cryptocrurrency, according to CoinGecko data accessed today.
Wait till they realize the actual value is $0.
The 50k value is itself propped up by fake transactions anyways. Since these sales are public, they can just push some around between two paid off clients to give the impression this is their worth.
Wait until you realize money is worthless.
Wait…the article says they’re still worth $50k each.
Really?
Collective delusion of people who still think they’re holding onto something worth anything
Yup!
My vinyl collection is “worth” $50k. I just have to find someone deluded enough to believe me and buy it.
In reality it’s worth ~$1k because they’re old and play music instead of being ugly pictures of monkeys.
It just means some moron is willing to pay that much
Presumably they’re still useful for money laundering. Makes sense to keep some kind of price floor.
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These silly things, according to the article, are still selling for $50k each. There are still greater fools to sell to, they just aren’t as rich. The current owners can still walk away with about 20% of their initial “investment”. They themselves will be the greater fool if they don’t unload them onto someone else.
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NFTs are not a terrible idea it’s just another way of adding a signature to something. If a famous artist made a beautiful work of art and made an NFT of it and said “this is the only one I am selling” then I can understand how it might hold some value to collectors because it’s just like how their signature adds to the value of their artwork.
My dog just took a shit outside and if I put my signature on it the value would still be that of a pile of dog shit. Dumb pictures of apes generated for the sole purpose of making more pictures of apes to sell that hold no value to begin with don’t magically become more valuable after they have a signature on them.
An NFT is a way of pretending something is unique when it’s not at all unique.
If you want unique art, buy a physical piece and put it on your wall.
Pretending you own a JPEG image just because there’s a token somewhere in the blockchain is idiotic, and a complete waste of the electricity used to maintain it. Anyone can save that same JPEG to their hard drive the second it’s displayed anywhere. Masturbatory technobabble nonsense with no real-world significance.
You are missing my point. It’s more like a pile of photos. If some artist took a picture and printed a shit ton of copies of it and sold those but signed one of them the one they signed might hold more value to collectors. That is what an NFT is like, the single copy of the photo that is signed. It’s not some amazing ground breaking thing that makes something so amazingly unique that nothing else compares to it… it’s just like a signature on a photograph.
I also never said anything about ownership of the image. A signature doesn’t imply that either.
Its not though, the signature and the digital art are stored separately. Their association only exists within a controlled a system. So that, you don’t actually have a signature attached to art, you have a signature associated with art, and only when viewed through a website such as OpenSea. You’re not investing in the infallibility of math. Your “investing” in some joker with an httpd server, who pointed two records at each-other in a database, the same way any other database works. Imagine someone giving you a number, and saying somewhere there’s some art that this number means you own. You can check to see what art you own, only by plugging your number into my software… that’s what you’ve purchased.
Its not though, the signature and the digital art are stored separately.
They don’t have to be. That is just how it was done to sell thousands of stupid pictures of Apes, Cats, more apes and whatever else stupid crap they made thousands of iterations of.
I’m not missing your point, I just disagree with it. A signed print is physically distinct from a copy. If an artist personally spent extra time with a particular piece to sign it, adding another personal touch on their creation, I would think that legitimately adds value.
An NFT does not do that. All an NFT does is cause somebody’s GPU to spin up and generate carbon emissions associated with the same literal string of zeros and ones that accompanies every other copy of the print. It doesn’t represent any additional attention on the part of the creator. It’s just a substandard copy that comes with excess waste.
All an NFT does is cause somebody’s GPU to spin up and generate carbon emissions associated with the same literal string of zeros and ones that accompanies every other copy of the print. It doesn’t represent any additional attention on the part of the creator. It’s just a substandard copy that comes with excess waste.
None of that is true. You don’t need a GPU to spin up to do anything. You are conflating mining crypto currency with NFTs. A NFT is just a cryptographic signature kept on some sort of blockchain that is associated with an image or file or unique pointer. You can use a preexisting blockchain or even make your own. Blockchains don’t have to be mineable and blockchains themselves are actually a good idea… mineable crypto currency is just a really shitty use case for them. It has nothing to do with mining and is just another form of cryptographic signature.
Edit: The fact that you think a physical signature has value while a unique digital signature (yes… the signature is unique) has none is personal preference and once again not the point I am making. I am saying it is a type of signature and some collectors might find value in it.
No, NFTs are absolutely a stupid idea. Putting a few bytes of data on the block chain does not add any value whatsoever to whatever art is involved, nor does it prove any sort of ownership or legitimacy.
Whether the artist only sells one copy of their art or not, making an NFT is about the worst possible way to facilitate single ownership. This is because there’s no practical way to store the entire artwork on the block chain. The images associated with NFTs “live on the block chain” in the same way that the a website “lives in” the URL that points to it - not at all.
That’s a small price to pay for such a valuable insight. I know too many people who have lost tens of thousands of dollars chasing returns that will never happen.
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I get what you trying to say but
A foolish monkey and his bananas are soon parted.
When the price of all that worthless shit was going up these bozos smugly told anyone who told them it was worthless to ‘have fun staying poor’. They made their bed. They need to eat their loses.
Duh! NFTs are a scam.
How much are NFTs worth? Not a Fucking Thing!
Nonono you didn’t read the article, the company behind says these are unique, and they were promoted by famous people, and auctioned at Sotheby’s.
Trust me, clearly they are very valuable, honest! Somehow they are claimed to still be worth $50,000!! I bet in another couple of years they’ll still be worth way over erh let me think, they may still be worth something, maybe a couple hundred? It’s the future, it’s a sure thing!!
I spent a lot of time coding some NFTs for a unique use case / idea I had. It doesn’t involve trading / speculative cryptocurrency or drawings of apes. If I ever finish it I definitely will not advertise it as using NFTs. The interesting thing to me is using them as contracts and/ or programmable money. Currently the banking system and credit card companies have a chokehold on payments/purchases/etc. But, NFTs and smart contracts in general provide an alternative to that. That to me has value inherently. Now, I’m aware that bad actors have been using crypto to circumvent laws/regulations, and I’m not in favor of that. But I also do not like the credit card system, and think there’s value in exploring alternative paradigms.
There’s nothing new under the sun.
I don’t even understand how someone could fall for NFTs. It was so obviously a stupid, broken concept from the very beginning, it hurts to know that anyone actually was so dumb spent money on this.
Conmen typically target people of low intelligence in scams because it increases the chances of said scam being successful, like the classic Nigerian Prince scam littered with spelling inaccuracies aimed at duping the idiots.
Seth Green was literally going to make a TV show about his worthless scam. Like, bruh, you made Robot Chicken and have been on Family Guy for 24 years. Are you actually out of ideas?
He wanted to use it as a mascot and written off the purchase as a business expense that would also gather value because now his bored ape has a show. Tons of advertising for the ape, in the form of the show, that he flips his 300k purchase for millions would normally be a smart investment except NFTs spoil all good things.