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.
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?
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.
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.
