The way I read the article, the “worth millions” is the sum of the ransom demand.
The funny part is that the exploit is in the “smart” contract, ya know the thing that the blockchain keeps secure by forbidding any updates or patches.
No one is gonna buy any NFTs for millions lmao
As crazy as it sounds, some people do.
They did. For like a week last year. Then everyone realized it was a scam.
Love how the NFT hype was a big wealth transfer event. So many rich people, like wealthy oil Arabs, bought into the scam and moved so much money into artists pockets while they essentially got nothing in return.
Is there any way to confirm this? Or are there examples of artists who made a significant amount of money from NFTs? I understand its potential benefit for artists, but I mostly remember already-rich corporations (e.g. UFC) using them as another way to extract money from consumers.
Beeple made a lot
And, sadly, that has led to his posting a lot less content. But I can’t say I blame him.
There are curated NFT auction sites where only selected artists are allowed to sell their work. And you can see for how much they sell their pieces. During the hype many sold items for thousands to tens of thousands or more. Also there is Beeple who rode the hype early from the start and he became a millionaire.
That’s not really what happened. Some people who had invested in companies that would make money if NFTs went up in value chummed the waters by buying NFTs for huge amounts, convincing a lot of people that NFTs were going to be great investments. Then celebrities with an interest in the scheme pumped up the value too.
That convinced a lot of idiots to “invest” in NFTs, then eventually the bottom fell out of the market.
As for artists, some made some money, but most of the money went into shit like “bored apes” which were algorithmically generated.
Oooooh I wonder if the trump NFTs were stolen also! They could be worth millions of pixels!
Trump’s NFTs have the best pixels. He has this friend who’s at a high position in Google, like a very high position, and he told Trump: Mr President your pixels are the best pixels I’ve ever seen, they’re amazing. The best in the world, amazing. It’s true.
I do see potential use for them, but not in the way they are currently being used. I could see uses like door keys, tickets, memberships, etc being of practical value, but not stupid little pictures.
Tickets, yes, door keys, no.
Besides the obvious of your door lock needing to be connected to the internet, and that could be a problem, what else do you see as being an issue with using it for door keys?
How exactly would that work? Keep in mind that the blockchain is by necessity not secret.
Right, but all the lock is doing is checking whether you own the NFT or not. If your house was in NFT, people could see that you bought a house, but not where it was as long as it was generic like house #40000
Another question is: why would you need it for a key?
Long-established public/private keys and signatures are used in this way all the time to control access to servers around the world. No blockchain needed. Blockchain is helpful when we all need to agree on a series of events.
Homes are a nice example of where you can have an isolated system which knows what it needs to about you (e.g. a public key) without sharing or cross-checking anything with the world.
The chain would be used to establish who owns the home.
I thought of it as a good way for artists to earn a living by more tokenized artworks, but then it gets hijacked by this shit.
Just like with everything else, all those things you suggested are already done much more reliably without NFTs.
If you still want to see a more “pratical” use of it, look no further than Decentraland, where it’s used as “ownership” of digital “land” and other “goods”.
Im sure you dont keep up, but NFT market cap still pretty big rn at 5.5bn
I think of it like timeshare values. They’re really high …. Until you try to find someone who will actually buy it
This is a really good point. The same thing happens with stocks every day. You can’t sell at the listed price. Your “sell now” price is a bit lower (the bid part of the “bid-ask spread”). Maybe even lower than that.
As soon as something negative happens, all the buyers at the current price dry up. There are still people who want to sell (more of them, because of the bad news) so they drop the price until enough buyers show up.
Tiny markets like NFTs have huge bid-ask spreads already. Maybe $1000 on a $20K NFT. So any negative news will cause wild price swings within minutes. Investing all your money in an illiquid asset with no income or intrinsic value backing it is… not smart.
Nah, that is what the NFT owners want the greater fools to believe it is worth.
It’s a great way to launder money.
Better than the current money laundering techniques? Using art appraisals to inflate assets and move dirty money, or straight up using banks like Deutsche or Credit Suisse (RIP) to move dirty money?
The smart criminal understands the value of diversity.
It’s the art auction for people who wouldn’t be let into an art auction.
Mmm, considering NFTs are all on transparent blockchains, I don’t know that I would choose that particular method to accomplish that.
The transparency is the feature that makes it great. I can buy drugs or whatever, and exchange you buy an NFT from me of equal value. Now when the bank comes and says “where did this >$15k transaction come from?” I can point to the blockchain and say that I sold my fancy monkey pic.
This has been a thing in the physical art world for a while, https://complyadvantage.com/insights/art-money-laundering/, this just made it easier.
Yeah, I know it’s happened for a while, but my big question would be why are you having to put your money back in the bank instead of leaving it on a blockchain such as Monero. The dollar is about the biggest scam around along with all other government fiat currencies.
Because sometimes even criminals need to buy things that aren’t illegal, I guess. And the legitimate people who have those things don’t want to play games dealing with fake internet money.
If I want to buy a jetski, the place I buy it from isn’t going to take crypto because the people that sell the parts for it don’t take crypto and the people who build it can’t pay for food in crypto.
Crypto is only useful for rug pull scams, money laundering, and black-market transactions. It’s real innovation is undoing centuries of banking regulations so that people can learn the hard way why all those regulations exist.
Because sometimes even criminals need to buy things that aren’t illegal
Money has value basically because people need to pay taxes. The shop owner sells things for Euros or USD partially because eventually at the end of the year they need to turn over Euros or USD to the government as taxes. If they sold things for bitcoins, they’d eventually have to convert those bitcoins to USD to pay taxes.
Other than speculation, the only reason bitcoin has any value is that sometimes people need to pay ransomware ransoms. That means they need to buy bitcoin somehow. And, even the criminals who receive that bitcoin will launder it and change it back into real assets because it’s not useful to them as bitcoin. Eliminate ransomware and suddenly the only value for bitcoin is people who hold it hoping there’s a greater fool out there who will buy it from them for more than they paid.
For now, sure. However, i will say that i have been buying food woth crypto for over a year now and havent starved yet. And if i wanted a jetski and wanted to pay in crypto i could do so. Fundamentally, crypto and banking are two totally different things because with a bank somebody holds your money. With crypto, you hold your money.
why are you having to put your money back in the bank instead of leaving it on a blockchain such as Monero.
Because my mortgage company, supermarket and power company only take real money.
The mortgage I could see being a problem. As for groceries and power, I can pay for those with crypto.
Good and services are still primarily purchased with fiat in most of the world. You need to be able to actually use it for it to be useful, so whether or not blockchain is theoretically better doesn’t matter there if there isn’t wide enough adoption.
True, thanks to the internet if the good is not immediately available in my local area for crypto i can order it online and have it delivered. Depending on exactly what the service is makes that an option too.
Hahahahahahaha!
I’m being serious when I say this: you don’t understand what you’re talking about. I know that’s dismissive, and I’m sorry.
*did
wouldn’t the above article still point out that people do?
Nope!
Those who buy art and pack it in a safe until it’s worth more?
Im glad that doesn’t work as well in digital.
Seth Green has entered the chat
They’re priced like police drug busts.
People buy them for millions or their value would not be in the millions
First, DO people buy them for millions, in the present tense? I know that people did in the past, but I thought the price on most of these took a huge hit.
Second: do people BUY them for millions, in the sense that they trade things of well-measured value (like fiat currency or gold) for coins to buy these? Or do they buy them for millions of dollars in equivalent coins that they already have, and don’t want to actually sell for real goods or money because they’d realized huge losses if they actually cashed out, so they have to keep them circulating within the blockchain to maintain a hope that they’ll return anywhere near their previous value? Because if you have 10 million dollars worth of etherium that you bought at 20 million and an NFT of questionable value, can’t you just buy and sell it to a few wallets you own to make it look like it’s recently been purchased for a few million to create the illusion of value without actually ever giving or receiving anything?
I’ll get my friend to buy it from me for millions, then he can give the money back to me and when it sells again, we can split the profit. It’s win-win!
This seems like kind of a meaningless distinction when the comment was speaking about the relative value of these. How some pays is irrelevant.
This feels like you’re trying to shit on them so just refuse to believe that the concept of value has any meaning. Things are worth whatever someone will pay for them.
That doesn’t make the people willing to pay for it smart.
I’m sorry it feels that way, that’s not my intention.
I think it’s a meaningful distinction because my understanding is that many large matter holders are early adopters who acquired coins at at basement prices that them became highly valued when crypto took off. These people, as I understand it, have a different spending pattern than we associate with conventional wealth. They may shuffle their coins between digital assets with limited conversion into real world good and services, because inside the block chain they’re billionaires, but if they tried to buy a house or a vacation they’re forced to find buyers at prices that are reflective of the value among crypto holders, but not nearly as high to those outside the system who they’d need to complete cash transactions.
The distinction isn’t meaningless, it’s actually vitally important. The thing is, we’ve been here before, hundreds if not thousands of times, with the stock market and other speculative bubbles. Once a big enough entity decides to cut their losses and bail with whatever they can get, all that “value” disappears and there’s no inherent value of the asset itself to fall back on. So it has been with other crypto crashes in the past few years.
Granted, this is generally true of fiat as well, we just have a lot more people and hopefully some safeguards and, vitally, an active economy holding up that value.
All art is inherently without value, and it’s value is entirely speculative.
I think NFTs are dumb as fuck, but they’re worth what people will pay for them. Same shit with tulips in Denmark famously spiking - bubble or not, things are literally worth what someone will pay
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No, and that is exactly the problem.
They artificially inflate the price to make it seem more worth than it actually is.
It is a type of fraud
Things are worth what people will pay. People pay out the nose for diamonds and they are just shiny rocks and not particularly rare.
Sounds like a great way to make an insurance claim on a bunch of NFTs worth “millions” that you could not convince anyone to buy.
What insurance company is dumb enough to insure NFTs?
Ones that understand the Internet and/or technology. And believe the “secure” hype.
I’d say more likely to be able to declare a capital loss on taxes.
Can I carry that loss over for the next… 100 years or so?
I never had a jpeg stolen from me.
What a time to be alive.
No no, they stole the link to a jpeg, careful you will make them angry
Here, take my link to get a feeling
https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/db03eae9-a3a9-42df-8cf2-f2aa8bfa2d95.webp
That’s not just a feeling, that’s something more.
You better quit yapping before I steal more of your bytes pal, it’ll be the biggest regret of your life
Another interpretation is that it’s all an insurance scam were something worthless is “stolen by hackers” and then claimed to be worth millions for the insurance claim.
But surely nobody in the “well known as impeccably honest” NFT world would ever do something like that!
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It wouldn’t be the first time that somebody who should’ve known better gets taken in by hype.
That said, I agree it’s unlikely.
“If some idiot wants to pay for it…”
You can get “cybersecurity insurance”, but that usually has more holes than swiss cheese. Maybe an umbrella business policy might cover anything over a certain amount ($1,000).
I guess the millions are in the transaction fees
“Potential losses”. I get the feeling that NFT owners got bit by the same bug that bit RIAA executives.
One of the great thing about the AI revolution is that since generating infinite number of unique random (and commonly, bad) pictures of literally anything you can think of takes only seconds, the entire concept of NFT has become completely worthless as it completely destroyed the value-from-scarcity argument. Not that it ever was a good argument to begin with.
How do you steal a hyperlink to a jpeg
"Do I look like i know what an NFT is?
I just want a picture of some gaht dang shitposts."
And why should any sane person care if you did?
It’s a digital file. Copies are exactly the same as the original.
I’m having difficulty with the word “worth”. It appears to be doing an awful lot of heavy lifting
Just because the suckers that bought them paid millions doesn’t mean that the NFTs are worth millions.
I’m worth millions, but I’m paid jack shit :(
Did they steal all NFTs?
There were sufficiently stupid people to pay money for NFTs. They will sufficiently stupid people around to pay the ransom.
ITT: a handful of people starting to sweat about their NFT retirement strategy
Insurance scam? Not too be cynical, but after the price dropped a year(?) ago there were a number of thefts for which there was speculation about them being insurance fraud.
