This has to be a scam of some sort, but i don’t even see how the people at the top are making money.
It’s a multi-level scam.
The people at the top convince other people to put their money and effort in. They tell those people “this is going to be the next big thing, you just have to tell the world about it.”
Then those people write this stuff for them.
This sort of thing isn’t written by the people at the top of the scam. It’s written by their suckers, or their suckers’ suckers.
Even if these weren’t a scam, they use intensive computer resources to add a layer of property ownership bullshit on top of an existing open data architecture simply so certain people can claim “ownership” over information. It’s a way to push the ideology that we should have “ownership” over the things we post to the internet, rather than it being a memetic collage of humanity.
All knowledge is based on previous knowledge. For knowledge to grow, access to information is important. NFTs is an attempt to make technology move backwards and deny access to information via technological means. I’d personally rather have places like Sci-Hub, which is dedicated to sharing information freely for the benefit of science worldwide.
Worse than just being a rejection of the open nature of data and how easily it can be transferred, it doesn’t actually do what it claims to do. One of the people who helped create the NFT spec in a programming jam calls out NFT peddlers by pointing out an NFT doesn’t contain any actual art, it only has enough bits to hold the URL to a piece of art. Technically, if the server the hosts your NFT disappears… so does your NFT. Because the NFT itself is just a hardcoded link to a piece of art that is verified by a series of hash-checks.
Yes, but this is just a scam. It’s about getting people to pay money for wisps of digital vapor.
it’s really not a scam because people know exactly what they’re buying, they just beleive in a crazy backwards concept
Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs for short are shaking up the virtual universe, transforming how we vibe with digital assets.
Oh hello fellow humans. Let’s vibe with our digital assets for a bit since it’s something we do so often in our virtual universe. What assets do you especially enjoy vibing with?
I personally prefer my tokens to be of the fungible kind, to be honest. You know, those famous FTs.
This one is actually pretty straightforward. The middleman here charges interest and hopes the borrowers default so they can sell the assets at a profit.
A lot of the underlying scams are very low-tech. I sometimes work for VCs and get asked to investigate blockchain stuff (a lot in 2022, not so much now!). I’ve vetoed 100% of deals after investigation. For brevity, I’ll only describe the main two type of crime I’ve encountered.
Embezzlement of funds raised is a common one. Most are not exactly criminal masterminds though, and you can see the project accounts being emptied steadily into exchange accounts if you’re really determined.
A lot of the rest is wash trading. Usually exchanges will give you a zero-trading-fees account, and tell you that you need to maintain a minimum volume, wink wink. So most of these scammers just trade between accounts they own, to create the illusion of a sudden rise in price (coinciding with a marketing push). This you can also sometimes catch by looking at orderbook timing. Sometimes you can break their bots too. Often they hire external entities to manage this, so won’t notice overnight.
Anyway, in this last case there is usually just an illusion of people making money at the top. The price spikes, but the whole orderbook is just someone trading with themselves. So if you buy in, they take your payment (and they make a little money)… but there’s no one to actually sell to. You can detect this sometimes by looking for orders being placed then filled within very short time intervals. A lot of these groups make a lot less money than they claim to!
This is easier for NFTs because they are non-fungible. One way you can do this is to track which ones are owned by your company and which are something someone else bought. So you only trade the NFTs that are internally owned in a way that makes them look like they constantly increase in price. Once an NFT is sold to an external account, you cross it off the list and never buy it back, and it’s magically immediately worthless.
If you mention these activities on their official channels, they will just ban you.
There’s also a whole slew of regulatory compliance issues, fake legal opinions, and so on… but I’ll spare you those as it is more boring to read about.
The whole blockchain space is a cesspool of inequity. Stay far away, unless you just like playing around with cryptography for fun. In that case, it’s a cool toy and it’s fun to build a few blockchains in an afternoon to play around with before getting bored and moving on to other technology. I have built a dozen or so blockchains and a few smart contracts to make sure I fully understand the technology before recommending my clients reject investment deals. This has (perhaps ironically) made me somewhat of an expert in the domain, albeit an unwilling one. I consider that path a career dead-end, and look forward to slowly forgetting about it.
nfts are the biggest fucking scam. Fuck anyone who pushes this shit.
