Lets talk about how NFTs are a giant scam

https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1445795667826208770

by amin • 5 years ago

119 124 5 years ago

villasv3• 5 years ago

People keep talking about using NFTs for laundering but as a criminal I’d be very wary and just go with the traditional ways. Has there been any actual studies on money laundering through crypto?

supermatt2• 5 years ago

its for laundering cryptocurrencies, not "money". e.g.ransomware bitcoin payments.

Tenoke4• 5 years ago

Any evidence that a significant fraction come from those? It'd be incredibly easy to prove if that's the case and I only ever see guesswork rather than Blockchain analysis behind those claims.

Moreover, most of the big NFT investors seem to have a long history and as far as I can tell are often just collectors who are already rich from crypto.

villasv3• 5 years ago

Right, but there are mixing wallets and private coins so why bother with NFT?

NicoJuicy• 5 years ago

Just lookup any crypto mixing service - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency_tumbler

Eg. from a week ago: https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/founder-of-bitcoin-money-...

villasv3• 5 years ago

But this isn’t NFT? I was hoping for an analysis on methods and volumes in the whole ecosystem.

leppr4• 5 years ago

It's hard to do a quantitative study on something that has inherent deniability. The ones who could map the flows (centralized exchanges, which are de-facto tumblers), will obviously not publish public studies on this.

Andrew_nenakhov2• 5 years ago

It was obvious from the start that all this NFT market is pure nonsense, but it is nice that someone takes time to clearly explain why. Maybe it'll save some innocent souls from losing their money.

vertis• 5 years ago

The maxim "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" applies (sort of).

Just because it's nonsense doesn't mean that a bunch of people aren't going to make significant amounts of money before it fades away.

UncleMeat• 5 years ago

Of course. And a lot of people will lose a lot of money. And it is tricky to ensure you are in the former group.

Andrew_nenakhov2• 5 years ago

That bunch of people is not going to make significant amounts of money, they will take significant amounts of money from other people, giving nothing in return.

I believe that in English language fraud is an appropriate word for such enterprises.

theragra• 5 years ago

While I agree NFTs are dumb, argument that they are scum is weak. People pay for all kinds of dumb things, like penny stocks or collectibles.

I am sure there can be people that pay for database entry and are happy with their purchase.

Jensson14• 5 years ago

Then why have I never seen anyone talk about the cool NFT's they own and instead everyone talks about them making quick bucks on NFT's? Look at youtube search results, not a single person talks about the cool NFT's he has, just a lot of people trying to sell their NFT's for a quick buck.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=nft

Compare with stamps, I see some people talk about making a quick buck on stamps but also a lot of people talking about their stamp collections. There is a huge difference here, the nft case you see 99% scum and 1% calling out the rest of them as scum, and not a single enthusiast who cares about the NFT. Stamps I see mostly enthusiasts and a few scum posts.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=stamps

So until you can find me all these "enthusiast NFT collectors", I'll assume that they don't exist. They could exist in theory, but I have seen no evidence that a single NFT collector actually exists in this world.

CyrusL2• 5 years ago

Hi, I’m an NFT collector. A bunch of my friends are too.

danielvf• 5 years ago

I worked at a company that's done several record breaking NFT auctions and sales. The top tier NFT collector / whales I've know have been constantly talked about how much they like the things they are buying / bidding on. Both in public, and in private.

User interviews seem to go like this:

Us: Why did you bid on this NFT [for upper six figures] Them: I liked it.

Or just take a look at most of this guy's tweets:

https://twitter.com/crypto888crypto/status/14448949722478960...

account-5• 5 years ago

This is a great explanation. I know people who "bought"/"named" stars. Never understood it. And NFTs are this.

You don't own the thing you think you do.

chrisseaton• 5 years ago

Never understood it.

It’s clearly just a joke gift. I’m sure nobody is actually confused that they’ve really bought some legal right.

It’s like criticising a ‘kiss me quick’ t-shirt by asking if people realise the t-shirt actually has no legal power to compete people to kiss you. They already know. It’s a joke.

Same with NFTs. It’s clearly a bit of a game and joke - I don’t think anyone is actually being scammed by it.

I feel like people are working so hard to not see the joke.

abcd_f• 5 years ago

Wait till you hear about companies selling plots of the Moon surface and people buying them with a straight face as a high-risk investment.

smcl• 5 years ago

If NFTs are just a joke, then there's a surprisingly large number of people who are playing along. Like, far more than I could believe could actually keep a joke like this going with a straight face.

gjulianm• 5 years ago

From what I've been reading in quite a lot of comments, people are indeed confused that an NFT is or can be some kind of legal ownership title. If people thought it was a joke, you wouldn't see so many people thinking that it's going to revolutionize X (whatever X is, apparently everything can be disrupted with NFTs).

meheleventyone4• 5 years ago

Same with NFTs. It’s clearly a bit of a game and joke - I don’t think anyone is actually being scammed by it.

Except people are getting scammed out of large amounts of money.

For example the Evolved Ape scam that broke last week. Or artists that have their work minted and sold without permission. People pumping the value of their assets through wash trading. And so on.

jbverschoor• 5 years ago

Wrong.

I can sell you stars on paper too. Exactly the same. It all depends on the underlying agreements.

Jensson14• 5 years ago

The main difference between NFT's and stars is that people think they will get rich reselling NFT's but nobody thought they could buy a star and then sell it for more money.

JofArnold3• 5 years ago

You're buying an expensive entry in someone else's database

Nope, you're buying a non-fungible token on a public ledger where the data and association with a specific address (or addresses) can be read without permission. This ownership and permission can then be moved around (potentially for large sums - potentially for near-zero amounts) by means that are independent of the client used. So for instance an NFT could give me access to an exclusive Discord channel (the client here being a Discord bot) and I could potentially sell or otherwise pass that onto someone else who wants access. The ownership of that token could also afford me access to, for instance, buying another token on another smart contract (the client here being another smart contract).

That they are commonly linked to metadata associated with JPEGs is really missing the opportunity here.

Furthermore, since everything's on a public ledger the much-stated money laundering is surprisingly difficult. And in fact multiple people have been caught out by this (a simple example being one of OpenSea's PM's wallets showing that they were frontrunning; another is VCs front-running their portfolio companies' air drops). That NFTs are often exchanged between bot accounts and multiple wallets (often tracked back to known individuals) to pump prices is also well-known and visible on the blockchain.

Whether or not you think expensive JPEGs are 2020s' Beanie Babies, it's hard to imagine a programmer on HN not being able to think of interesting non-JPEG things to do with an open source, public and permissionless ledger/database.

EDIT: disclosure - I have some JPEG NFTs. They weren't super expensive to me but I bought them so I had skin in the game that forced me to investigate this market rather than shouting "but money laundering!" from the sidelines. I'm glad I did this. Via getting into the weeds I've discovered a vibrant and super interesting ecosystem of developers, entrepreneurs, cryptographers and opportunities I'd never have known about otherwise. Are my JPEGs worth it? Doubt it. But the experience has been super interesting so far.

schnebbau• 5 years ago

You just used 4 paragraphs to say the same thing as the text you quoted.

JofArnold3• 5 years ago

How is this "someone else's database"? It's literally a 100% public permissionless ledger. If I store an NFT in Facebook's database is that not "someone else's database" by definition.

DaiPlusPlus2• 5 years ago

it's hard to imagine a programmer on HN not being able to think of interesting non-JPEG things to do with an open source, public and permissionless ledger/database.

You underestimate the extent at which working-for-a-living has utterly destroyed my sense of imagination and ability to have an original thought.

It’s depressing. Very much so.

morelisp• 5 years ago

it's hard to imagine a programmer on HN not being able to think of interesting non-JPEG things to do with an open source, public and permissionless ledger

The history of cryptocurrency is exclusively people trying to come up with ideas for this extremely interesting class of data structures, yet consistently only reaching variants of "fraud." (And, those people who just jump immediately to fraud without much thinking.)

JofArnold3• 5 years ago

There's some truth in what you say. But then same also applies to a lot of tech startups for instance (we could pick many but let's say Thaneros)... in fact it's true of the wider financial system. Just check out the latest HSBC news in the last week.

The problem is that people find it easy to jump to "money-laundering! beanie-babies!" and not spend the time thinking about what they might want to do with the tech. Strikes me as a bit curmudgeonly versus the optimistic, open-minded and innovative roots of HN...

DaiPlusPlus2• 5 years ago

fraud

Link?

fergie• 5 years ago

How _could_ an NFT give me exclusive access to a Discord channel? I see how it could let me read some sort of access token that I could use, but I dont see how it would prevent others from seeing/using that same token, particularly those who have previously owned it.

leppr4• 5 years ago

You sign a message containing your Discord username with the address that's registered as owner of said NFT. The bot then approves your Discord account, while also watching for changes in NFT ownership to revoke your access if you transfer the token out.

CyrusL2• 5 years ago

The implementation is usually cryptographically signing a message from the account that owns the NFT.

meheleventyone4• 5 years ago

It's pretty common to do this for Patreon rewards so it's not really much different to how you'd approach that except instead of connecting to their API it does it using the records on chain.

You'd run a bot or similar on Discord that would grant you a role to access the channel and it would use your wallet to verify your identity (ala public key crypto) and the ownership of the NFT by your wallet to verify the permission to join.

Most of the time you're a centralized thing anyway in this case so the NFTs don't really add much (unless you want users to be able to trade access) even if you wanted to take payment via crypto-currencies.

anonymoushn• 5 years ago

When you buy an expensive piece of art, you often never physically see it, and a warehouse just notes that it belongs to you instead of the previous owner.

brk• 5 years ago

Maybe, I've never bought expensive art. But I know people who have, and I've sat around their kitchen surrounded by 10's of millions of dollars worth of art. It was mostly kept covered up from sunlight, but it was not in a warehouse.

scyzoryk_xyz• 5 years ago

Before the 20th century technological advancements, when you bought a piece of art you not only owned it, you were in control of who gets to actually see it.

meheleventyone4• 5 years ago

In these cases though people are buying the art not for the sake of actually owning the art but for another use that it's high value provides them. Which is an apt comparison to NFTs because they mostly seem to be used for speculation.

robjan3• 5 years ago

With NFTs, another warehouse can also note that the art belongs to you and you have equal legal rights to enjoy and sell the art as the original owner.

12700180802• 5 years ago

You're missing the point.

When you buy a piece of art, you own the piece of art.

When you buy an NFT, you own a row in a fundamentally meaningless database that points to some image on the internet. The database has no value, no one recognizes it, you don't own the image.

There is a fundamental difference there.

infide1castr0• 5 years ago

This was an insightful thread, but I think these arguments miss the "bigger picture" that NFTs carry with them. Yes the popular use case right now of expensive art and "selling a JPG" is rather silly, just like the art world always has been. What I see in the space however is a lot of opportunities to grow community-building tools - POAPs for example are rarely sold for profit (some still try to) and are a great way to encourage participation and attendance of events, with added functionality of rewarding said participation after an event for example. A lot of media coverage is on the absurd art market use cases, and though the possible profits make it a loud use case, it is just one sliver of potential of Blockchain technology. I am excited to see NFTs move beyond these cases, and I see that happening quite often.

dTal• 5 years ago

What exactly does the blockchain contribute, that could not be accomplished in a superior way with an SQL database?

osigurdson3• 5 years ago

The primary advantage is increased trust. With a SQL database, it is necessary to trust the organization that hosts the database. With blockchain it is necessary to trust a distributed network of organizations (or more precisely their computational power).

danpalmer4• 5 years ago

What I see in the space however is a lot of opportunities to grow community-building tools

Technological solutions to what are fundamentally social problems don't typically work out.

LurkingPenguin• 5 years ago

Yes the popular use case right now of expensive art and "selling a JPG" is rather silly...

There's nothing silly about "selling a JPG". Billions of dollars are spent annually on digital copies of photos. People pay for (high) resolution and rights.

Selling an NFT is usually "selling an NFT", not even "selling a JPG". Most of the time the NFT just points to a piece of digital media accessible to anyone, and it conveys no rights of ownership or use of that digital media.

meheleventyone4• 5 years ago

Most of the time the NFT just points to a piece of digital media accessible to anyone, and it conveys no rights of ownership or use of that digital media.

Or very surprisingly any guarantee that the media pointed to is immutable or won't disappear.

raesene9• 5 years ago

Another Interesting NFT thread from today https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1448066579611234305 .

leppr4• 5 years ago

The fact that this kind of art NFT (direct link to a centralized resource without a hash) is so widespread, at least proves that a huge portion of the NFT ecosystem is indeed a scam.

throw_m239339• 5 years ago

I mean people literally buy "property" and space ships in virtual game worlds. NFT are no different, it's microtransactions but for rich people.

Is it a scam? well it depends whether the elite values NFT or not... it certainly is a speculative "asset" by nature.

It's not a scam provided people know what they are exactly buying. It's more of yet another "get rich quick" scheme for some.

However, beyond the speculative aspect of NFT, artists need to know that putting their art in a virtual gallery as NFT WILL COST THEM money, so the business model for the middle man is to make artist believe that they will make money from NFT. The house always wins...

Traubenfuchs• 5 years ago

Space ships and virtual property is virtual property, at least you got something. Something to look at maybe, something that distinguishes you in game?

NFTs give you NOTHING. They don't give you the right to anything. All you own is a (hopefully) unique cryptographic sequence.

Tenoke4• 5 years ago

If you think of Cryptopunks (or whatever) as a game then buying one gives you as much or more in the context of the game as buying a skin or a plot of land in the context of another game.

Something to look at maybe, something that distinguishes you in game?

You pretty obviously get that here, too. I honestly don't see why you'd think it gives you less other than out of general dislike for NFTs.

superrad• 5 years ago

There's more of tangeable value from buying property in virtual game worlds in the sense people get to use those property or items when normally in the game they would not be able to.

For things like ship preorders on Star Citizen it's much more of a risk that the value will ever be delivered but it's still offers more than just a note of ownership of an abstract token on a blockchain sequence.

If someone decides to honor these tokens as proof of ownership of property/items in the real world/ a virtual world then they may offer some value but there's a very great risk that will never happen.

phereford• 5 years ago

IMO, someone’s tangible value of putting an Ape as their avatar pic on social media might be greater than that of someone being able to use a ship purchased in Star Citizen.

It’s a little crazy to me how Twitter profiles with Apes are viewed as “influencers” and “pioneers” and get treated as such. Not my cup of tea per se, but there is tangible value for some people there.

JumpCrisscross2• 5 years ago

If you’re buying NFTs with hopes of profiting from them, i.e. as assets, you’re an idiot. If you’re buying because it’s silly, funny or otherwise makes you happy, go for it. No scam there.

If you’re playing middleman, frankly, I think you’re wasting your life, but then I don’t see how you’re so different from an art dealer or auction house. At any rate, you’re probably a better allocator of those dollars than whoever gave them to you. (Exception: if you’re pitching NFTs as investments to unsophisticated investors, you deserve to be prosecuted.)

All that said, NFTs do something similar to what much of fine art and religious prohibitions do: demonstrate group membership by submitting to arbitrary prohibition and sacrifice requirements [1] with the aim of accessing club goods [2], e.g. in-group access and standing. When someone calls NFTs a scam, they’re saying those club goods are worthless. Objectively, as a crypto sceptic, the wealth made by crypto insiders would appear to reject that hypothesis. (Whether buying an NFT or expensive painting alone confers those club goods is a separate question.)

[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w6715/w6715...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_good

danpalmer4• 5 years ago

If you’re buying because it’s silly, funny or otherwise makes you happy, go for it. No scam there.

I think there's a significant group who are buying because under their understanding of what NFTs are, they're silly/funny/make them happy, but that they are mistaken about what NFTs are.

Arguably if it's bringing them joy, who cares, but at some level this is still a scam.

Uehreka2• 5 years ago

I feel like most people see the art dealing world for what it is: a clout-chasing game that’s basically a scam. And I hear some NFT people take the stance of “yeah art dealing is a scam, but it’s going to happen anyway, so I might as well make some money.”

Which is all well and good in a sense, I’m not gonna cry over rich people spending their money on bs. But it’s also the case that if you take this position, you do abdicate any ability to advocate for NFTs as something other than a scam. And if you try and flip this around and argue that “art dealing is a legitimate business actually”, people will (correctly) look at you weird.

bigboy12• 5 years ago

It’s dumb but it makes sense if you live in the meta verse.

seanieb• 5 years ago

Same influencers that flog the grind culture, selling vitamins one minute and NFT’s the next.

adnzzzzZ3• 5 years ago

Like all crypto scams, the essence of the NFT grift is in recruiting new believers by convincing them a blessed database is an authoritative registrar of value. Just like star naming the grift isn't about utility it's simply a shared delusion in a get rich quick scheme.

I think this gets to the core of why so many people (like the entirety of Hacker News) seem to irrationally hate NFTs, to the point of posting about it almost every day instead of just ignoring it.

There are shared delusions that are useful as social coordinating forces. Religions are generally this. Social justice is this. And crypto is also this. I find that a lot of the irrational hatred for NFTs and crypto in general tends to come from people who hold certain shared delusions and who don't like that another competing one is so successful at coordinating behavior.

Jensson14• 5 years ago

It is the "get rich quick scheme" part people don't like about NFT's, not the "shared delusion" part.

adnzzzzZ3• 5 years ago

There are plenty of NFT platforms that are not about getting rich quick yet no one talks about them because it doesn't fit their narrative. This leads me to believe that what I said is correct, rather than you said.

nathias• 5 years ago

You too can use the classic fudster starterpack:

-- it has no use

-- it is used by criminals

-- tulips

davedx2• 5 years ago

People are still saying this about cryptocurrencies too.

Many people also say EVs and green energy are a scam.

People also frequently accuse public companies of being scams or trash (there's a certain intersection between the previous sentence here).

Healthy skepticism is a powerful weapon of thought. But you have to be able to acknowledge where skepticism ends and stubborn refusal to accept reality starts.

Humans value certain things. They may not be the same things you value. That doesn't necessarily mean they're just "a giant scam".

40four3• 5 years ago

Yeah I’m totally with you. I think many of us had a similar reaction the first time NFTs were explained to us. But the not I learn about them, an see them in action, it’s definitely starting to make more sense.

This (very uninteresting) Twitter rant doesn’t really make any good arguments. The comparison to ‘star naming’ services is very contrived & makes absolutely no sense.

birtoise2• 5 years ago

Yeh but sometimes what people value and like is a scam. You know, some people do like certain MLM brands or even cults, that doesn’t mean those aren’t scams/cults. Stop trying to normalize predatory behavior and institutions under the banner of “people value different things”

davedx2• 5 years ago

How are NFT's "predatory behavior"?

Some stuff is for sale. Nobody is being tricked into buying it. Everyone knows you click right click and save if you want.

omnicognate• 5 years ago

This says nothing. You could just as well be arguing in favour of three-card monte or any other obvious scam.

cameronh903• 5 years ago

Most of these arguments apply to recently produced art in general, don't they? Historical art is a little different, being a kind of combination of antiques and arts.

Art also has no intrinsic value. Art is also used for money laundering. When you buy art, you don't own the copyright, you just own the original production. The copyright owner can continue to manufacture prints and reproductions, but they are worth a fraction of the original. If it were possible to create one, an exact atom-for-atom duplicate of a piece of art would likely also only be worth a small fraction of the "original".

Even weirder, nowadays, much art doesn't really have an "original" as it was produced electronically in the first place - so what does owning the original even mean? Is it really an original, or is it just a blessed instance that everyone commonly understands as the one with value?

Arguably NFTs distill the essence of art ownership into its core proposition: you become the owner of intangible that is commonly understood by all market participants to truly represent the artwork and is valued as such.

The NFT market is odd, but the art market is odd in general.

null_object• 5 years ago

Most of these arguments apply to recently produced art in general, don't they? Historical art is a little different, being a kind of combination of antiques and arts.

But none of your arguments apply to 'art in general' at all, do they? Because when you "buy art" you are actually... buying a piece of art.

The way we value 'art' obviously has culturally historical oddities attached to it. But none of them are comparable to what people are paying for when 'buying' NFTs (ie: their name in a database).

Which was the entire point of the Twitter thread.

Tenoke4• 5 years ago

But none of your arguments apply to 'art in general' at all, do they? Because when you "buy art" you are actually... buying a piece of art.

It's naive to think that the majority of the value of buying a painting of a pure black square comes from having the physical painting itself rather than almost exclusively out of the story and recognition by others. Once you recognize that it's not so hard to see that you can remove the physical painting aspect altogether.

ben_w2• 5 years ago

Eh, I can see a difference between commissioning a new piece (or likewise attending a live performance or a cinema) and spending the cost of the average U.K. home on William Shatner’s prop phaser: https://www.today.com/popculture/william-shatners-star-trek-...

cameronh903• 5 years ago

You're not just buying "a piece of art" though. If that was the case, duplicates/prints/casts/reproductions or whatever would be worth a substantial portion of the original, relative to their true-ness.

The value in owning art isn't the physical object. The value comes from how owning that specific physical object means you "own" that art, whatever that means. I don't really understand why anyone would care about that either, but people clearly do.

And even if you disagree with that point, the other points about not owning copyright, lack of intrinsic value and using art for money laundering definitely apply to real art too.

ben_w2• 5 years ago

Sure (plus inheritance tax funk, which I learned thanks to my dad’s stamp collection), except:

If it were possible to create one, an exact atom-for-atom duplicate of a piece of art would likely also only be worth a small fraction of the "original".

Is a hypothetical for now.

I don’t get most of the famous artists — Picasso, The Beatles, Shakespeare and so on all seem overrated to me — but high-value original works are mostly that way because they are distinguishable from copies. I expect atomically precise duplicates would destroy the market for collector items unless you can re-attach scarcity in some way.

cameronh903• 5 years ago

I imagine you're correct that if a theoretical perfect duplicator existed, the physical art market would be destroyed, but only because there would be no way of authenticating the original. The original still has value if you could prove it, but nobody would know which one the original is.

Let's say this theoretical duplicator was perfect in every way EXCEPT you could tell it wasn't the original because the isotopic signatures didn't match. That is, for all intents and purposes, each duplicate is exactly the same but each instance encodes an unreproducible signature that can be used to identify it.

I postulate the original would still carry an enormous value relative to the exact duplicates.

BiteCode_dev• 5 years ago

I'm so waiting for somebody selling pieces of the moon as NFT, like the good old 1900 scams.

They already redid the million dollars home page, NFT edition.

cinntaile2• 5 years ago

Stephen Diehl is unfortunately blinded by anti crypto hate, so his arguments on the subject usually don't make much sense. Which is weird, because he's obviously a smart guy. This is no different, I don't know why his posts keep ending up on HN.

leppr4• 5 years ago

Crypto attracts blind love/hate ("shilling"/"FUD"). Very few express rational views about it in public. Our social fabric is not used to everyone having skin in the game.

I predict this will calm down once the Ponzi-era fades out (whenever central banks finally decide to tapper), but it's still always going to be a problem which we need to find solutions to.

acomms• 5 years ago

For sure this thread of his is passionate, but I can't really refute any of his points. The current NFT market is hot potato.

robjan3• 5 years ago

Attack the argument, not the person

cinntaile2• 5 years ago

I'm providing context based on his previous crypto opinions. Strong feelings don't make good arguments, they do tend to give rise to fallacies. A scam is something where you are being maliciously tricked. Yet nobody is claiming NFTs give you any legal rights. It's a non sequitur.

html5web• 5 years ago

Am I on Reddit?

coldcode• 5 years ago

As an artist I would love to sell something for $69M. But I have not yet put a single item up for sale as an NFT as it seems so silly, you are selling a node in a merkle/patricia/etc tree, not a piece of art. The NFT art that is actually generated when you pay for it (and lives entirely in the blockchain), such as the bored apes, etc, is mostly predrawn parts assembled randomly; i.e. digital Potato Head toys. Some are based on interesting algorithms, but that has nothing to do with blockchains or crypto (other than using the hash as the random seed). I would rather create art (I do generational art as part of my work) on my own time and with my own tools. I would also prefer to sell art that people can put on their walls.

Some of what I see people selling for 10ETH are so unimaginative. But then again people in the past bought rocks as pets, so there is always someone with too much money and no sense...

Art itself is often overpriced, but it has a long history of increasing in value over time (since generally it is only made once and the artist eventually dies), and is a legit investment (and often handy for money laundering but then so is real estate and even startups). But NFTs are mostly uninteresting art, can be made in huge quantities with no work by an artist, and have no useful value other than bragging rights I guess. Museums who want to display NFTs are seriously hilarious.

Some NFTs are made by real artists who actually work hard on the works, but very few make any money at all (Beeple for example is a hard working real artist who got lucky) since NFT people seem to only gravitate to the auto-generated things like the apes.

Uehreka2• 5 years ago

Yeah, I’ve noticed this too. I feel like a lot of people in the NFT space have a pretty nihilistic view of art (i.e. “all art is worthless, so these procedural mix-and-match apes are as good as anything else”). They’re correct that the value assigned to art is often arbitrary, but the thing is that once you acknowledge that, the correct response isn’t to start buying random crap for thousands of dollars, it’s to buy things you want in your life for hundreds of dollars.

Like, would I pay $100 for a super high quality 2ftx2ft print of a diagonal gradient with two really well chosen colors? Yeah, possibly, if I thought it would look nice in my living room. Would I pay even $10 (let alone thousands) to “own” a PNG of that gradient in some abstract sense? Absolutely not.

phponpcp• 5 years ago

What's silly is not embracing new ways of making your art a revenue stream so that you can live off of it.

danpalmer4• 5 years ago

The NFT ecosystem is people with bad engineering skills, poor social skills, and no understanding of economics, attempting to create a new economy of social contracts based on technology they have created.

koonsolo2• 5 years ago

Can't NFT's be linked with copyright ownership? The whole story about "Charlie bit my finger" NFT suggests that there could be a legal link. If not now, maybe laws could be adapted to support it.

So let's assume the law supports linking NTF's to copyright ownership. What would be the scammy part then?

Jensson14• 5 years ago

If you manage to get legally accepted copyright contracts into a crypto then that has value, yes. But NFT's aren't that.

koonsolo2• 5 years ago

Are you sure? I'm not a lawyer, but it seems copyright is basically "whatever you can prove in court".

The family of "Charlie Bit My Finger" sold that video through an NFT. So I wonder if the family would still use that video, and the NFT owner would sue them... who would win. I would actually think the NFT owner.

See https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-57227290

mathrall• 5 years ago

There's this something that I have read that he randomly created NFT just for the memes, and yet he made a fortune out of it. Also, many NFTs are powered by pumps and dumps. Have you seen the scandal of one of the OpenSea executives?

ladyattis• 5 years ago

The saddest part is that the NFT concept has a practical use: ticket sales. But it seems just like with all the other practical uses the investor class keeps passing them by for the "to the moon!" nonsense schemes. Seriously, why are boring ventures that have solid business models baked in the thing that modern would-be investors avoid? Is it because there's not enough digits on the ROI? Sorry for the rant but I've seen this a trend across many other industries such as power generation. I read a comment of a CEO in a trade magazine years ago talked about how he had investors snub investing into utilities because they felt 5-7% a year was too low or pointless as a return.

IYasha• 5 years ago

As usual, selling something for inadequately high price is a standard money laundering scheme. Often, VERY often used on modern (or not) "works of art" auctions. It's just a way to transfer sometimes ridiculously high amounts of money in front of everyone's eyes and getting away with it.

12700180802• 5 years ago

The connection between pointless star registries and the NFT industry is exactly what I've been looking for. I could never put it into words.

Lets talk about how NFTs are a giant scam

Related Stories