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Remember when NFTs sold for millions of dollars? 95% of the digital collectibles are now probably worthless.
(markets.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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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.
Also money laundering and tax rebate schemes.
akshuallllyyyyyyyy, monetary value of anything is derivative to someone else's willingness to purchase the item
You can use this logic to explain away any other ponzi scheme too.
It's not really logic, and I don't think it's defending anything, it's just the definition of monetary worth.
For better or for worse, stuff is always as valuable as people consider it to be. Which may be related to how useful that stuff is, but often is not.
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.
That's why I trust money issued by a government. Because even if individual politicians are evil and useless, the money is still backed by bombs and bullets a huge amount of infrastructure and tangible assets.
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.
This was the comment I came here to make. "They were always worthless."
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.
I mean, there are ways to tie them together, though the point still stands that NFTs add nothing to art. Copyright works fine without an overly complicated digital receipt.
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.
Actually you're still a bit overestimating it.
Most NFT's are literally just hyperlinks, where the hyperlink could suffer link rot and stop working OR the image on the other side of the hyperlink could be changed.
And as LegalEagle had pointed out "You can't own that"
Yea, it's truly amazing anyone fell for those stupid things... Sooo little effort was supposed to magically generate real value!? Give me a break... It was sooo obviously just a way to get people to pool money in an unsafe way so it could be pocketed.
Who ever donated to those scams didn't deserve the money, as much as their losses are still a tragedy. Still, the scammers deserve that money even less. Bunch of idiots all around.
What about regular digital art?
It is art and doesn't need NFTs to give it value. People comission digital pieces all the time and don't need NFTs to get it done.
...is not an NFT
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.
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.
Yes it is. It's backed by the US's economic power on the world stage. That's how economies function.
Crypto can be created or of thin air by literally any tech bro with a GPU. By definition that is literally worthless
It doesn't need to be, it's backed by the need to pay taxes in USD.