Comment by 🐑🇸 🇭 🇪 🇪 🇵 🇱 🇪🐑@lemmy.world on Hackers steal NFTs worth millions. In other news, NFTs worth millions.

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.

He was the first big one I remember. When it still had an air of legitimacy.

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.

My favorite is Murakami, who after selling NFTs he made paintings after all all of them. So which one is the “original”? The actual physical painting, or the digital NFT?

Technically, the NFT. In reality, the physical. Is a lot harder to brag about your art assets if you have to log into your pc to show them off.

That’s why I feel like he just trolled all the buyers of his NFTs.

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?

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.

How exactly would that work? Keep in mind that the blockchain is by necessity not secret.

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.

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

The person talking out of their ass is voted up.

The person bringing up facts is voted down.

The person posting dismissive nonsense is voted up.

Gross.

The only person providing any sources here would put that $5.5b market cap (if it’s accurate) at 1/4 of what it was two years ago.

That’s one hell of a crash and burn.

The vast majority of NFTs are worthless now

“MacContract on Ethereum has a floor price of $13,234,204.2, but its all-time sales is only $18,” the report said, adding: “This stark discrepancy between listed floor prices and actual sales data exposes a significant issue in the NFT market – inflated valuations that don’t reflect genuine buyer interest or real-world transactions.

“It becomes clear that a significant portion of the NFT market is characterized by speculative and hopeful pricing strategies that are far removed from the actual trading history of these assets,” it said.

And this is a report from a crypto website with a vested interest in pretending crypto has uses.

Those are the transactions that are actually happening.

I’m sure there are lots of transactions that aren’t happening because people have given up, and decided that a 99.9% loss in value is basically a 100% loss in value, so they’ve just walked away.

Its hard to be definitive, especially from one data point, but theres no doubt that lots of NFTs are just copycats trying to ride the coattails of other succesful projects, and end up flooding the market with garbage.

But that doesnt mean all projects are garbage, nor that the tech is bad or unutilized.

I had a feeling id get flamed by even mentioning NFTs, so im not surprised a the downvotes or derision. Anyways, have a good one 😃

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.

I mean yeah, it’s better to launder money using a difficult to trace digital ledger. But no, the things you mentioned won’t go away, because there’s also money in the laundering, and double dipping is the name of the game

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.

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.

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.

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.

wouldn’t the above article still point out that people do?

Seth Green has entered the chat

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.

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.

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

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.

That is literally what the concept of value is.

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Hackers steal NFTs worth millions. In other news, NFTs worth millions.(www.theblock.co)

Technology

!technology@lemmy.world

Our Rules

Approved Bots

Community stats

Community moderators