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.

  • mightyfoolish@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    Small correction: Even though some NFTs sold for millions, the NFTs have always been worthless.

    • Wogi@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      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.

      • III@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        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.

        • Wogi@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          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.

  • OldQWERTYbastard@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    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

  • pavnilschanda@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    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.

    • fubo@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      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.

  • peopleproblems@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    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

    • lps2@lemmy.ml
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      2 years ago

      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

      • untrainedtribble@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        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

        • wmassingham@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          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?

          • peopleproblems@lemmy.world
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            2 years ago

            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.

    • Emerald@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      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.

  • Blue@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    The biggest operation of money laundering in the history of the world.

  • answersplease77@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    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

    • Squizzy@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      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.

      • skyspydude1@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        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.

  • lloram239@feddit.de
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    2 years ago

    NFTs are like a ticket roll, they can be quite useful, but that requires having an event or service that those tickets apply to. NFTs so far completely failed to create that. To justify the decentralized nature of NFTs you’d further have to make that ticket apply to multiple different services. That didn’t happen either.

    Buying your hats in a game with NFTs is pointless as long as those hats only work in that one singular game, centralized services can handle that better. On the other side, if you’d use NFTs to sell the digital games themselves, they could be quite useful and breaks through established online-store monopolies. But that of course would require different online shops to accept the same NFT, e.g. buy NFT for a game on Steam, but download it through EPIC. That’s something NFTs could allow, but it would require the whole industry to play along, which due to everybody competing against each other is rather unlikely.