Everyone comment how much did they lose on NFTs.
I will start: $0.
From millions of dollars to under a grand: The dramatic fall of the NFT
Submitted 3 weeks ago by NomNom@feddit.uk to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 3 weeks ago
YesButActuallyMaybe@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Also I made: 0$
BassTurd@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I found value in shitting on people buying them. $0 monetary gain, but at least $10 in schadenfreude.
Simulation6@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Damn, I lost twice as much as you did.
The_Almighty_Walrus@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I actually got a free NFT in some kind of sweepstakes. It’s probably worth negative money now.
It did get me 3 free drinks at a music festival so there’s like +50 bucks in value right there.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
I actually made money from NOT putting any of my investment money in NFTs.
Then again, from the very start the NFT mania looked like a more obvious and dumb version of the Tulip Bulb mania, so I can hardly claim great wisdom from not having put a cent in it.
crystalmerchant@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
$0
ozoned@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
What? You mean digital art that infinitely reproducible, can’t actually be owned, WASN’T the next big thing? Oh jeez. I hope the metaverse succeeds and if not then AI surely will RIGHT?!?!
WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Hey but this cryptographic key says that I own it because I paid made up currency units for it or something
ozoned@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Hey but that made up currency I worked for by burning electricity, I mean MINING it.
criss_cross@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
My favorite thing is there are certain NFTs that are viruses that as soon as you do ANYTHING with them, they go and transfer all of the contents of your wallet to another wallet. Even deleting them triggers this action. So if you have unknown NFTs in your wallet you can’t touch them lest they trigger this virus.
How could this not be the future of commerce?
ozoned@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
WHAT?!? I’ve never heard of that! That’s nefarious! WOW!
BananaIsABerry@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Hey! You be fair to the NFT owners.
They never owned digital art, just a link to a specific instance of!
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
If you weren’t using them to launder money for a criminal enterprise, then you were doing them wrong.
NotAnonymousAtAll@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
…
doing them wrongfalling for a scam.
ordnance_qf_17_pounder@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
I need to come up with my own scam to rinse rich idiots.
Alpha71@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The best scams are either holistic/psychic stuff or Hi-fi Audio.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
A good scam is all about finding a way to bypass bs detectors. Appealing to greed or fear while adding a sense of urgency are the classic ones for good reason. But you’ve got others like appealing to in group/out group dynamics, distrust of institutions, ego, desired self image, laziness, carelessness so much more. You’ve also got those selecting to trigger anyone with a bs detector to only spend time on those without one.
BioDriver@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
High Fi audio is actually legit to a point. Over $300 (well, $400 now with tariffs) is when the scam begins
entropiclyclaude@lemmy.wtf 2 weeks ago
Ok - hear me out.
We get idk 1000 of us poors to buy some cheap land in the Midwest. Up in Appalachia.
We sell “Rapture Survival Communities”
They’re $999/month and you’ll get a hidden bungalow community complete with bunker. We’ll fill it with doctors and pastors and birthing women.
BUT YOU CANT KNOW THE LOCATION UNTIL THE RAPTURE HAPPENS. You don’t want any pesky liberals finding it and gaying up the place with their liberal demonic child sacrifice transness.
We will deliver coordinates via analog radio and Morse code once the rapture has started.
By business plan makes Sam Altman hard in his butt:
- Collect money
- Don’t build anything.
- repeat
When they come screaming for proof and receipts and refunds… Just gaslight them and buy a politician.
WildPalmTree@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
If I were an “angel”, I’d go with you. I like the cut of your jib. You have what it takes. If only 1) me business angel 2) you pitch-deck. We would clean-up the business space.
utopiah@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Unfortunately for you you don’t have what it takes. You need to be a proper psychopath to scam others.
Canconda@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
This. The worst thing for any salesman to have is scruples.
tio_bira@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Sometimes i observe so many ways to get easy money and don’t have to hard work, than i remember than my parents raised my scruples and moral… Would be so easy if i wasn’t
Agent641@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’m working on the grift of all gifts, if you want in, you can buy shares of my grift for $100 each.
Canconda@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Wanna help me convince maga that citrus makes people gay? I think we could solve a lot with that.
Atropos@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
And if you don’t trust this guy, I offer grift insurance for only 15% of expected value!
vane@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Add “AI Agent” to something everyone’s doing like “Tooth brushing AI Agent.”
billwashere@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The whole NFT thing was one giant pump and dump.
expatriado@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
but for a brief period of time, some people made some money, while most participants lost
some_designer_dude@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This describes our species entire existence 👌
expatriado@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
we were the bored ape all along
fierysparrow89@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
As with everything crypto this was a huge scam. Besides the obvious profiting from gullable idiots, the other use case is to illegally funnel money.
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Not absolutely everything in crypto is a scam, though 99% of it is, and I will definitely agree with you there. But there is 1% that is actually trying to do something useful, and you’ve got to be able to find that 1% and not throw it out with the bath water.
traxex@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
I’d wager even the 1% is the stereotypical “solution in search of a problem”. Seems to be a reoccurring theme as of late in the tech industry.
fierysparrow89@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The silver lining is that after the obligatory exploitation by grifters, every new technology of this caliber finally gets a more positive use in our lifes. Maybe somewhat naive, but I think we (ie. our societies) have payed ~50% of the tuition fee as far as crypto is concerned. So hopefully we’ll be able to absorb the tech in our collective lives soon.
Ps: Different topic, but using the same metaphor for AI, I’m afraid we’re just at the begin of its initial fallout.
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
There are great uses for crypto, just like there were great uses for Ithica_hours. A place holder for goods and services without physical constraint is a useful idea.
But it wont work. Because people want to leverage that to make fiat. They don’t care about usefulness, actually earning it, or trading for it.
They want to get some, hold it, and sell it back for their fiat. Because of that exchanges came into being so they could capture some of the wealth in the process. And from then on it was never going to be useful. Just a way to hope the next sucker would buy what you had.
mattyroses@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
yeah, the cryptoleftists community has found some decent actual use
BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Also worth noting. The Bored Ape Yaht Club NFTs (in the thumbnail) were released by 4chan trolls with Nazi symbolism hidden in some of the. This was the most successful NFT project of them all.
sveltecider@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
This is the least surprising thing ever
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
That’s why I divested to Labubu dolls and TSLA
trslim@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
A grand is still 1000 dollars too high a price for these things.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’ll see your grand and say 950 is still too high.
PixelatedSaturn@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I think most people don’t understand cryptocurrencies. On one side it’s all hyperbolic about being your own bank and financial freedom and new tech, on the other side it’s hyperbolic about how there is no underlying value, it’s all going to 0, scams, drugs, terrorism, money laundering,…
But the fact is that crypto does have an underlying value. It’s gambling. Gambling is a huge industry.
leoj@piefed.zip 3 weeks ago
Also drugs.
I always said as long as crypto can be used to buy drugs, it will have value.
When everything we know in the world is gone and we’re using rocks to make spears again, people will still want drugs, the value is eternal.
underisk@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
I mean it’s also really really good at money laundering and other financial securities scams that are otherwise illegal in real currency. IDK why OP is being so dismissive of that.
As long as the gov refuses to regulate it, it’s going to be useful for crimes. On the off chance we ever get a government willing to actually do anything but war crimes and graft, regulating it would destroy a lot of its utility and value.
frongt@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Congrats, now you understand fiat currency. It only has value because we agree on it.
PixelatedSaturn@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
No. I mean you can get all philosophical and say that everything has value only because that’s a human concept, but thats not really something I would answer to.
Fiat has value because it’s enforced. Because we have institutions that enforce it and because all of our lives are intertwined with it. We buy food with it and we are paid with it. It’s everywhere. It doesn’t make it immune to manipulation and fraud and crime, but we can take legal action because law is also intertwined with the same system.
Crypto is , with a couple of exceptions, a really terrible casino.
mattyroses@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Fiat has value because the government demands taxes in it. If you don’t pay your taxes, they put you in jail.
ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
As opposed to the USD, which is backed by nothing, and therefore has no underlying value, but is not gambling for some reason?
arandomthought@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
The USD is backed by a state who demands their taxes be paid in their currency, ensuring there will always be demand for said currency.
phutatorius@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Speculating on the value of an investment based on an asset that doesn’t exist is similar to scammers offering to sell certificates of ownership of dogs’ souls.
Capitalism tends over time to create increasingly abstract forms of ownership. And what could be more abstract than ownership of something that isn’t there at all? They’re selling GUIDs that point to nothing.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They can be used to launder money though.
That’s why art is so inflated. It’s used as a means to launder
Jaysyn@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This was never anything aside from a scam designed to separate the tech illiterate from their money.
Frozengyro@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
How could it possibly be worth more than pennies?
supamanc@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This is the question!
Siegfried@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Who could have thought it?
theuniqueone@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Who could have predicted this? Literally impossible without hindsight and that’s the revisionist history I’m sticking to.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Etherium was run out of the offices of JP Morgan Chase and NFTs were a gimmick to boost the deal flow of their then-underperforming crypto offering.
It was, by and large, an enormous investment in sales and marketing on top of a ton of insanely shady business practices. Case in point, the infamous Beeple NFT that sold for $69.3M was purchased with Etherium to showcase Christie’s auction house accepting cryptocurrency for auction bids. The winning bidder for artwork was an early crypto adopter and marketer named Vignesh Sundaresan who was flush with these tokens, but lacked any kind of liquid market to sell them into yet.
It’s trite to say that the whole thing was a scam because… duh. But I think people read this as “just dumb people being stupid with their stupid dumb money” and ignore the layer upon layer of market manipulation and con-artistry that went into making cryptocurrencies what they are today.
The fact that Donald Trump is using them to launder bribes from Middle Eastern dictators and East Asian kleptocrats should illustrate how deep these rabbit holes can go. It’s so much more than just peddling bad clipart to dumb bros.
merdaverse@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
MadMadBunny@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Anyone with the most basic common sense knew it was going to end up like this.
TheObviousSolution@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
NFT just served as a training opportunity for the people behind it to learn how to get away with legally scamming people, not surprised the Reddit admin was all in on it when it came out.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I remember playing with Stable Diffusion in 2022, and thinking “Oh. That’s the end of NFTs.”
NFT art was stupid to begin with, of course, but SD was such a blatent, extreme inverse of the “artifical digital scarcity” angle. If I wanted a shitty, albeit “unique” and deterministically reproducible digital image, I could just make it in 30 seconds on a desktop. If I wanted a certain look, I could use img2img or eventually controlnet and all sorts of augmentations.
Yes, junky AI was junky AI, but ironically it was the antithesis of everything NFTs stood for. Instead of “digital information is worth commodifying at great expense,” it was “digital information is basically free.” And I still find it amusing that Tech Bros jumped from one ship to the other so quickly, or somehow have feet in both.
Furbag@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
AI wasn’t the NFT killer, right click > saveas killed it at the very moment of conception.
Digital scarcity is a complete joke.
frongt@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Sure you can copy the image, but you can’t have the same machine-readable hash indicating ownership in my private system!
ZombieCyborgFromOuterSpace@piefed.ca 3 weeks ago
In hindsight, the monkey NFT thing was a “good” idea but poorly implemented. It was an attempt to create a digital version of beanie babies or baseball cards.
I mean “good” if you consider beanie babies and baseball card collecting and the value speculation a good thing. (I don’t.)
Tiresia@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
It was very well implemented. The people that invented, designed, and minted them made billions of dollars from a bunch of gullible idiots using very little work, and they got away with it too.
ZombieCyborgFromOuterSpace@piefed.ca 3 weeks ago
Yeah that’s true.
Lemming6969@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Ya’ll are fucking stupid. There is no fall of nfts and they aren’t useless. If there is an authority who recognizes the nft, then it has the utility value of the authority. End of story. It doesn’t matter if some people traded them for outrageous amounts of money and it has nothing to do with the ability to copy a picture. All it does is tie a digital item to a hash to an owner on a ledger, for purposes of authentication. If a hash of a monkey picture gets you on a yacht, then if you don’t have one you aren’t getting on that yacht. In the future, if the nft of your house deed isn’t in your wallet, then if a judge looking at a specific ledger says you don’t own your house, you don’t own it.
Bakkoda@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
First time bagholding?
Lemming6969@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I don’t have any nfts as I don’t have a personal use-case. If an authority adopts nft for any of my assets however, yeah I’d get one. For instance transacting a deed can cost a lot, but an nft would be 10-100x less.
Canconda@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Top shelf sarcasm if my pallet is correct
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
I purchased a really cheap NFT domain that I can link my cryptocurrency wallet address to so that instead of having to type out the 90 character string and get it right, you can type out a human readable domain. Other than that small use case, I’ve never had any other reason for it. But hey, it’s kind of cool. And I don’t see why not keep it since I already have it. And as I said, it wasn’t that expensive anyway.
crystalmerchant@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Whoever could have seen this coming
Ulrich@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
But Gary Vee told me NFTs would make me rich!
lechekaflan@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That was the most goddamn awful thing ever seen. Where are those shitheads who first sold the fucking idea?
Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Its not worth a single cent in reality
bonenode@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Isn’t it pretty obvious this was 99% a money laundering scheme?
timroerstroem@feddit.dk 3 weeks ago
That’s easy to say with the benefit of hindsight in 2026. However, back 2021, it was easy to say without the benefit of hindsight.
darkdemize@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Had me in the first half, not gonna lie.
cecilkorik@piefed.ca 3 weeks ago
I think it was even easier to say in 2021, because more people knew about it and the scam was even more obvious. Now, in 2026, most people’s hindsight doesn’t go back that far, it was quickly forgotten as it should be, and people are like “huh? NFT?”
chaotic_ugly@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
If it wasn’t in the beginning, it was after Folding Ideas/Dan Olson but out “Line Goes Up”.
Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Only to people with brains.
a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Nah, A large portion of it was idiots attempting to lose money as quickly as possible.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Walking up to a game of Three Card Monte and saying “It’s pretty obvious he’s palmed the Queen” mostly just gets you heckled and chased away.
Part of the problem with digital spaces is that you’ve got your person setting up the scam, and then you’ve got your layer of people marketing the scam, and then you’ve got your first layer of suckers who think they are coming out ahead on the scam, and then you’ve got the second layer of suckers who all know a tier-one sucker who just got rich. And then you’ve got the bots and the ideologues and the contrarians and the know-it-alls, all repeating the line that the person who set up the scam encourages them to say.
And it’s over all that cacophony that you announce “It’s obviously a scam”. Then Reddit boots you for violating terms and conditions of the platform.