Gee, if only there was some way to have seen this coming before hand…
Yup.
Could have put the money in stock instead and they’d likely have made a profit since then.
Hell, they could have stuffed it into their mattress and it would have been a better investment lol.
Inflation can’t even lose this much money is such a short time
The first tweet nft sold for $2.9mil and is now “worth” less than $4.
Like it was worth anything at all in the beginning anyways
Edit: Spleling
Beautiful edit.
Might a a good idea to buy it, I’m sure it will sell for 10$ with some haggling.
- lose
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.
🌍👨🚀🔫👨🚀
Were they worth anything to begin with?
deleted by creator
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.
It’s crazy how interlinked black market dealings and money laundering have been to the art world. I shudder to think the amount of artists careers that were made because a couple guys needs to pay each other millions of dollars for something worthless to easily make some clean money on illicit exchanges.
I’d love to print out that shitty pixel art and wave it at the person who spent $17M on that garbage… Unfortunately I’m sure it’s someone $17M doesn’t mean much to.
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.
Cost vs worth. Their pricetag may vary; but they’ve been worth nothing since their inception.
Elon musk is worth 250B (source Forbes, idk how legit)
He’s like a piggy bank - gotta break it open to make a withdrawal.
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.
Each one of my shits is unique, but just as valuable as an NFT
It can have real value if you use it to fertilize a square meter of dirt and plant corn on it. Shit + water + seeds = food.
They were always worthless
Not to the people targeting the suckers out there…
And they still are!
🔫️ Always have been
Of no surprise to anyone.
If value is completely dependent on speculation how the fuck do people expect to make money?
Crypto Booms: “This is the future of money. You can’t lose.”
Crypto Busts: “I’m just interested in the tech it’s not about money.”That is some high grade cope. Highly refined. 99.99% pure cope.
Those are two different communities that are interested in crypto. Some of the crypto bros used the pro-decentralized peoples logic to cope… but there are both.
I’m surprised there aren’t more of the decentralized endorsers here, amongst a community of technically literate people using FOSS software.
I mined for years, 2011-2014 or so. I don’t need a lecture on crypto culture lol
To be real, even cryptobros would tell you the vast majority were useless as soon as they were minted.
But it was nice while artists were able to sell to profit from rich people
Was that happening? All I ever heard about was people selling artists art that they didn’t own the rights to without permission, and getting away with it
Yes, many artists made a lot of money on NFTs
If you are referring to scam artists, you are 100% right! Also, some actual artists might have got some money out of it, but I suspect the majority of dough that exchanged hands went to the former kind.
I’m sorry you dont have any technically inclined artists in your circle, but I first learned about NFTs from myartists friends.
Colored coins have been around for a very long time, and NFTs have been an income stream for artists long before the financial elite gave them a bad name.
History is important
The major nft exchanges paid a portion of each sale to the artists, yes. It was one of the things that NFTs, and blockchain in general, was supposed to help solve for. IMO it’s a good use case for blockchain being used when paired with real world items.
But we don’t need blockchain to do any of that, someone still has to be trusted so might as well just use normal database tech.
Don’t need blockchain, no, but blockchain has some advantages since its peer verified and, when implemented well, much harder to fake data than a centralized database might be.
With a normal database we have to trust the one person/entity managing it.
With blockchain, it’s a community that we trust.
Ok, ok, hold on - what’s being sold here? A link to a digital asset or something else? If it’s a link, I still don’t get the point. Does that link (or whatever it is) confer some kind of license? What’s the use case for faking this data and why are we defending from this?
My idea is that the art is being sold and the NFT only says who owns it. It doesn’t need to be digital art, it can be just about anything where an original creator should benefit from the item changing hands.
Whenever the NFT changes hands, there are fees associated, which would include a portion of the sale going to the original artist, a royalty. And because the NFT exists on a publicly visible blockchain, back alley sales can’t happen ensuring that the artist gets paid.
This type of thing helps ensure that artists benefit from their art going into demand and increasing in value.
Blockchain mathematically guarantees trust… for info stored on the blockchain. What guarantee do you have that this info matches things that happen in reality?
If you say: we need a social contract to ensure people update the blockchain, then I say: that defeats the purpose of the heavy lifting you need to mathematically guarantee info on the blockchain is genuine. Let’s just have a social contact to pay the artist when appropriate.
I don’t see what other way could exist to keep the blockchain and reality in sync.
The actual artist? The one that created the art? Not the one that stole the artist’s work and turned it into an NFT for a quick buck from something they had no right to?
Yes. The actual artist.
That was one of the things that was working quite well during the NFT hype.
Pumped, dumped, done.
Who would have thought?
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.
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.She could also simply write down the name of the person who bought the painting from you. And ask them to let her know if they sell it so she could update her records.
Sure it’s possible someone might not let her know they sold the painting. But it’s equally possible someone sells the painting without transferring the NFT along with it.
Sure, and instead of credit cards, the store can just write down on an index card that I owe them $60. Anyway, the idea is a level of automation exceeding what they had in Sumeria 7,000 years ago.
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.
They always were.