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.
Small correction: Even though some NFTs sold for millions, the NFTs have always been worthless.
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.
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.
I work in manufacturing, I came from an office setting for a national Internet provider. At first it was refreshing, all of the bullshit was gone, and it was just about getting shit done.
But then a tech bro got his teeth in to our CEO and the company has gone to shit. They’ve tried desperately to placate people but the attrition here is harder now than it was during COVID, when we literally begged people to go home. People are leaving for lower paying, non union jobs it’s gotten so bad. I think the only reason I’m still here is I know how much worse it could be.
So it was like we thought all along, cool.
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
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.
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.
It is all worthless?
Always has been
The whole point was to get dollars into crypto so the holders could cash out. The value was never meant to stay.
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
What confused the fuck outta me as someone who has been in the crypto space since 2010 is that it wasn’t new or novel in any way. Colored Coins was virtually the same thing and it flopped in a similar fashion and there were several similar projects that did the same or never made it off the ground. Then, some shitty monkey drawings come along, are backed by virtually the same thing I had seen before and suddenly people I knew from my hometown who barely had two brain cells to rub together were claiming to be financial and tech gurus while peppering “block chain” into conversation. The one thing that brings me solace is that they all lost their investments
Right, when NFT’s we’re going crazy, the pictures and shit didn’t make sense to me at all but there’s a huge opportunity for digital ownership of physical materials like cars or houses. It would make private sales/transfers easy. All title information on the house would be recorded and attached in the blockchain so when you go to sell your home, you can prove there aren’t any liens against the home and once financing has been approved, transfer the ownership on the blockchain and done. That’s where I always saw the practical application going but now nobody will take NFT’s seriously until it’s named something else and rolled out with government approval and systems in place or nobody will feel safe transferring such a large investment digitally
All title information on the house would be recorded and attached in the blockchain so when you go to sell your home, you can prove there aren’t any liens against the home
Don’t we already have state or local databases for stuff like houses and cars? How does the blockchain stuff add anything?
The difference is that you can’t retroactively edit the block chain, and the block chain contains all the data in it.
Databases can be edited, deleted, corrupted, poorly maintained, etc.
Think of the block chain like a permanent audit log of all transactions with it.
Edit: the NFT exists as a value in the block chain as the “point of origin”. As this value is carried forward, the blockchain will always point back to the original.
That’s why the whole pictures thing fucked it all up and we missed out on powerful tech. It could have essentially saved lives in critical machines and made PII tracking easier.
but because people are stupid & greedy made pictures to sell with it
Can you blame them? If I gave someone a photo and then they offered to give me $1,000 if I also would write down a unique number, then I would without hesitation write down a random number and get my grand.
well that surprised no one
Whomever named them NFTs instead of grift cards missed an opportunity.
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
Or they’ll promote just silly pictures for people with lots of money. They don’t owe you an education in investing. If they paid lots for a NFT that’s not an issue, you don’t have to.
It’s no different in someone buying Gucci on minimum wage because a Kardashian wears it.
Except, much like crypto, they were heavily marketed to be just like stocks and other legitimate securities (but the future, because internet stocks!), instead of just speculative gambling on completely unregulated assets. Sure, you could do a modicum of research and see that they did include in the fine print they were explicitly NOT regulated securities, but your Average Joe has no clue what that means and just sees someone he trusts (don’t ask me why, but people absolutely do), telling him he’ll be super rich if he buys some C-list celebrity’s monkey JPEG.
Do I still think people like Average Joe are idiots for buying them? 100%. But that doesn’t make it okay that people are taking advantage of their financial naiveté either.
The biggest operation of money laundering in the history of the world.
Ponzi schemes have an oversaturation problem like every other one.
They started out worthless. That never changed.
Anyone with the ability to read who bought one deserves what happened to them. The sellers are probably still laughing.
99 times out of 100, it was the seller selling it to himself to artificially inflate transaction numbers and nudge the price up.
Yeah, but that’s the thing with scams. They make thousands of attempts, but they only need that one sucker.
I still think NFTs could be used to make a form of DRM that is actually fair to the consumer, by maki g it so you can resell your digital goods and also make it so your digital rights don’t vanish as soon as the seller gets bored. But nobody in a position to make that happen wants that.
DRM =/= fair to the consumer.
DRM as a concept seeks to limit your digital rights. Any DRM of any kind is a form of punishment to the consumer. You bought it, it should be yours to do with in perpetuity as you please.
DRM could be fair to the consumer, it just isn’t in the interests of the publishers to make it so, and as a result the versions of it we have are not fair to the consumer.
NFTs or blockchains are not needed for this. You could just implement selling or transfers in the content platform.
I do think using contacts for escrow and having the sale being independent from the vendor are cool features, bit not at all essential ones.
Okay but what happens when the platform goes away, or decides to change the rules? That`s the only part I could see NFTs actually potentially answering. If the ownership verification was all done client-side via a blockchain it could potentially survive the shutdown of the store you bought it from.
Don’t get me wrong, I can see problems with this. And potentially this could also be done with simple public key cryptography.
Yes, but that’s a different, independent problem.
How would that be fair? There would still be drm running on your computer to verify you have the nft. That would have all the issues of DRM already. And those who want information to be free could still just make illegal cracked copies and distribute them.
Video game ownership rights have been going downhill for years. Most games can disappear from your account at a whim, and you can’t sell them on when you’re done anymore. At least with blockchain-based DRM, you’d be able to sell it when you’re done - and if the thing is hosted in a decentralized manner (IPFS, Pinata etc) then the creator can’t simply delete it or delist it. You’d own it without permission.
In theory it could be a good idea. If done right.
I would say that wouldn’t solve the main problem with DRM, the fact that it locks you out of your own computer. I don’t settle for any DRM.
I prefer physical DRM-free copies. If the industry as a whole is going to try to move away from that model, as it appears to be, I’m not going to walk away from gaming; I’d rather be at the table and talk about viable compromises rather than be left out of the conversation.
How is it unfair? To me fair means making sure the creator gets paid without stomping on the rights of the purchaser; in particular, the right to keep the thing after the publisher has gotten bored of selling it, and the right to sell it, though that last one is a difficult proposition with digital goods, seeing as they don’t devalue.
