Remember when NFTs sold for millions of dollars? 95% of the digital collectibles are now probably worthless.

You can use this logic to explain away any other ponzi scheme too.

Sure, but some systems are way more stable since they are established and have the general trust of a lot of people. And others simply don't have that wide ranging trust and as such aren't stable.

untrue.

Real currency is backed by assets. that used to be the "gold standard", but has become more ephemeral since the end of the first world war.

A government issued currency is backed by that government's infrastructure, taxes, tariffs, etc... basically how powerful that government is on the world stage.

in contrast, crypto is backed by nothing more than how persuasive the creator is because the creator doesn't need any assets to create a crypto currency in the first place.

Heck, in one case, some techbro created a crypto currency, and convinced a bunch of people that it would be stable because he was backing it with ANOTHER crypto currency he literally created for that only purpose.

And people FELL FOR IT!

When something can be created out of thin air with no assets needed but a GPU, it's inherently worthless.

It's utter insanity.

Yes it is. It's backed by the US's economic power on the world stage. That's how economies function.

Crypto can be created or of thin air by literally any tech bro with a GPU. By definition that is literally worthless

The u.s. dollar is literally not backed by any physical asset

It doesn't need to be, it's backed by the need to pay taxes in USD.

No, because with art, there's still a literal piece of art.

With NFTs, it's just a shitty jpeg some tech bro photoshopped up in five minutes.

The thing with art is that even if the art itself is completely worthless, the materials used are not.

You can sell a "worthless" painting to be used as firewood.

Same with digital assets, they can be sold to be used as templates or even to train an AI.

But a location in some useless database (which is essentially what an NFT is) does not.

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.

They’re still not

I'd pay $10 to clown on some tech bro if I cared enough. $10 doesn't even buy you a sandwich these days

Things only have a price when two people are willing to do the transaction.

Say 99% of NFT owners have given up and mentally written off their NFTs as a complete loss. If the remaining 1% are selling at a 90% loss and some sucker is still buying at that 90% discount, the "average price" will be whatever those two agree on.

This is a bit different from physical goods because those can't just be deleted out of existence. If someone had a warehouse of beanie babies they might choose to give them away (setting the price at zero) or maybe there's some tiny value of the cloth so they sell them for a few cents per kg.

It's just a "Save picture as..." with extra steps, and money!

And the receipt isn't necessarily unique. The centralized world of Web 3 decided mostly to use Opensea(?) for NFTs, but it isn't the authority on who owns URLs. It's just the biggest, most commonly used "star registry" that let people claim that they owned certain stars. But, the same "stars" could be sold by other people on other platforms too.

Some had ipfs links. In that case they couldn't be changed.

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.

You're saying all this like people aren't fucking stupid. They are.

Frankly that says more about the gullibility of gamers than the legitimacy of NFT. Gamers will pay for the chance of getting access a fictional character in a game that will eventually close its servers and take everything down with it. They can't seem to differentiate the value of something within the fictional ludic context and the value of something as a piece of media or an entertainment product, and gaming/tech businessmen these days take full advantage of that oversight.

Are we talking about CS:GO skins? Because I never got a knife.

Why did you even buy them though? Surely you could have just downloaded them for free?

Yeah same here. I’m a Solana dev and have collected a handful. I’ve spent maybe $50 total the last two years and all together probably worth $3k or so

God I cannot wait for the religion of capitalism to die. Markets are rough enough without greedy fucks institutionalizing their greed.

Ignorant to the idea? The idea was basically a spreadsheet with links to PNGs and """"owner"""" of that PNG. Blockchain only means nobody owns the sheet itself, but that doesn't make it any less ridiculous.

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.

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

"Don't ever come between a man and his meal" - Dave Chappelle

Yup. Does feel good to be vindicated for being willing to honestly express reality, in spite of willful delusion and ingnorance. Not that I am happy for those that suffered immense losses but, they can't say that they weren't warned.

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.

Helps sell more NFTs /s

Magic the Fungering

It might be overkill, but the whole point is that you want to have a distributed record of ownership. Something that no single company can control and that can survive companies going out of business and disappearing. There aren't very many alternatives that can accomplish that and even less that are ready to use right now and not just hypothetical.

Yeah, a lot of the NFT craze was pump and dump where people were selling NFTs to themselves. Even that famous digital artist who got super rich did it because the guy who paid him was trying to inflate the market. But, like any con game, there are suckers. Many of them aren't rich, just stupid.

"bulletproof"

Blockchain can be hacked, just like any other digital technology. In fact, it has already happened.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is theoretically possible to make a system that would let people make personal copies of software, songs etc for backup purposes and do all the other things they should be able to do with something they have bought, without letting them give copies to everyone for free or otherwise go into competition with the creator without doing any work themselves. Just no such system has been made because publishers want an unfair system.

Not talking about that kind of thing. When I say digital goods, I mean things like games, things we currently have DRM for.

Of course, there being no reason to buy a game new if someone is selling it used, that part would never work.

Isn't most art for money laundering. You move money and purchase a piece or "art" for 4 million. Art isn't worth it. But because it's been bought it now has a value. If you sell it. Now you've created money from nothing. Fucked up

Pretty sure those in government are far shadier than any deep webbers. Keeping huffing that

Yeah, but that's the thing with scams. They make thousands of attempts, but they only need that one sucker.

Yeah that part sucks.

Rich or poor, they were all stupid.

Dumb poor people who were obsessed with greed.

I have no sympathy.

Idk man I liked my tomagatchi and that little fuck was worthless as shit but it was still neat to me 🤷🏻‍♂️