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.
correction… always were worthless.
It’s always been a con game.
Their so-called “value” was always determined by the ability of the person shilling it to make up bullshit. Literally the definition of a “confidence” game. Same problem as crypto in general. It’s only has value if you have confidence in the person shilling it. The moment that person loses the confidence of their marks, the entire thing crumbles to nothing because it isn’t backed by any real tangible assets.
akshuallllyyyyyyyy, monetary value of anything is derivative to someone else’s willingness to purchase the item
Sure, but some systems are way more stable since they are established and have the general trust of a lot of people. And others simply don’t have that wide ranging trust and as such aren’t stable.
untrue.
Real currency is backed by assets. that used to be the “gold standard”, but has become more ephemeral since the end of the first world war.
A government issued currency is backed by that government’s infrastructure, taxes, tariffs, etc… basically how powerful that government is on the world stage.
in contrast, crypto is backed by nothing more than how persuasive the creator is because the creator doesn’t need any assets to create a crypto currency in the first place.
Heck, in one case, some techbro created a crypto currency, and convinced a bunch of people that it would be stable because he was backing it with ANOTHER crypto currency he literally created for that only purpose.
And people FELL FOR IT!
When something can be created out of thin air with no assets needed but a GPU, it’s inherently worthless.
It’s utter insanity.
Sounds a lot like the banking system today lol.
Edit: Idk why all yall turds down voted me. The u.s. dollar is literally not backed by any physical asset… look up fiat money and do research on the dollar.
So like art. No tangible assets, but the value is derived by the highest bidder.
No, because with art, there’s still a literal piece of art.
With NFTs, it’s just a shitty jpeg some tech bro photoshopped up in five minutes.
With NFTs there aren’t even any art. The NFT is a receipt for the art, not the art itself. You didn’t buy the copyright for the actual art with an NFT, you bought a link to a specific copy of the art.
Not even photoshopped, that would be too much effort. Nah, the most infamous NFTs are a few different elements (different mouths, eyes, accessories, etc) and then a whole bunch of permutations generated from those elements. For a technology with a supposed selling point of scarcity, you’d think they’d try to make the art special instead of procedurally-generated trash, but of course the real purposes were scams and money laundering.
The thing with art is that even if the art itself is completely worthless, the materials used are not.
You can sell a “worthless” painting to be used as firewood.
Same with digital assets, they can be sold to be used as templates or even to train an AI.
But a location in some useless database (which is essentially what an NFT is) does not.
Well I am shocked!
No not actually.
Out of the top collections, the most common price for an NFT is now $5-$10.
Still overpriced!
We have been attributing a huge value to a metal that’s mostly remarkable for being yellow and shinny for millennia, one of the biggest investment bubbles in history was over a flower, and people thought that using a loophole to profit from the arbitrage of international reply coupons was going to last forever. Hell, people paid for fake property titles for land on the Moon and Mars. It’s not that surprising that some people think that buying a random number in a distributed database is an investment.
I didn’t get the “arbitrage of international reply coupons” reference. What’s that one?
Things only have a price when two people are willing to do the transaction.
Say 99% of NFT owners have given up and mentally written off their NFTs as a complete loss. If the remaining 1% are selling at a 90% loss and some sucker is still buying at that 90% discount, the “average price” will be whatever those two agree on.
This is a bit different from physical goods because those can’t just be deleted out of existence. If someone had a warehouse of beanie babies they might choose to give them away (setting the price at zero) or maybe there’s some tiny value of the cloth so they sell them for a few cents per kg.
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
I like how the url could also have the picture changed if someone wanted to lol. You don’t even own the picture that the url points to, you just have a receipt that says “this url is my url, no I don’t own the url, because someone can change what’s on that. No I also don’t own whatever is hosted on that url either”
And the receipt isn’t necessarily unique. The centralized world of Web 3 decided mostly to use Opensea(?) for NFTs, but it isn’t the authority on who owns URLs. It’s just the biggest, most commonly used “star registry” that let people claim that they owned certain stars. But, the same “stars” could be sold by other people on other platforms too.
Everything we create can be changed. Just because it may be difficult doesn’t mean it is impossible, no matter what those tech bros tell you.
Same with any blockchain. Nothing is secure, everything can be hacked.
In a matter of fact, it already has happened.
Small correction: Even though some NFTs sold for millions, the NFTs have always been worthless.
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.
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.
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.
Sigh. How eager our boss was to make all our products “AI powered” as soon as he heard about ChatGPT, even though the techies had all tried it and knew it wasn’t appropriate for what we do. We’re still adding “AI power” to things, because he already put it in all the marketing.
