Submitted 7 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
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.
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!
I’m honestly amazed they’re worth anything at all.
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.
They’re still not
I’d pay $10 to clown on some tech bro if I cared enough. $10 doesn’t even buy you a sandwich these days
It’s just a “Save picture as…” with extra steps, and money!
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.
If you want to give me an NFT, I won’t accept it unless you sweeten the deal with an additional 20 €.
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.
Some had ipfs links. In that case they couldn’t be changed.
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.
You’re saying all this like people aren’t fucking stupid. They are.
Billions of dollars have been laundered, so they served their purpose I guess
So it was like we thought all along, cool.
Depends what they are. I have a bunch of NFTS and they have all mostly held their value or increased. The difference is they are all related to games, and the most I have ever paid for one was probably like $15. This only seems to be looking mostly at art NFTs on ethereum networks. I don’t have a single NFT that uses ethereum, although I know that was the craze, especially for “investments”. Which anyone with half a brain should have been able to tell someone an NFT is not a good investment plan.
Frankly that says more about the gullibility of gamers than the legitimacy of NFT. Gamers will pay for the chance of getting access a fictional character in a game that will eventually close its servers and take everything down with it. They can’t seem to differentiate the value of something within the fictional ludic context and the value of something as a piece of media or an entertainment product, and gaming/tech businessmen these days take full advantage of that oversight.
Are we talking about CS:GO skins? Because I never got a knife.
Yeah same here. I’m a Solana dev and have collected a handful. I’ve spent maybe $50 total the last two years and all together probably worth $3k or so
Does anyone else think that NFTs are an allegory/miniature version of how art is easily commodified by capitalism? IIRC, NFTs were there to help finance artists who work on a purely digital medium, but then grifters coopted the NFT space and try to sell sets of same-looking artwork. Complete with “fandoms” and drama, as well.
NFTs are simply a straightforward con, without the financial hullabaloo of cryptocurrency. The con is simple: convince someone that something is valuable when it’s not. Selling a brass ring as gold to a mark too naïve to check, has been around as long as there have been gold rings.
Nah, NFTs were always about the grift first and the art second.
After all, all an NFT token is is a digital receipt which links to an image hosted somewhere off-chain, not the image itself. All the “art” does is help to persuade people that the tokens are actually worth something and hype up the price even further.
It is an allegory for the whole financial system … it’s all made up imaginary money, funds and amounts that don’t exist and never will … it’s all based on trust, faith and belief. If enough people wake tomorrow and stop believing in a segment of this entire system, it can all quickly collapse.
I remember reading about ten years ago that of all debt was stopped all over the world and all of it was to be repaid … it would take the world several million years to do so.
There is wealth in the world but we’ve created very complicated, imaginary ways to make it seem that wealth is worth millions of times more than the actually exists.
I see it as a modern day religion … it exists because we all believe in it … if the faithful ever lose faith, the religion dies.
God I cannot wait for the religion of capitalism to die. Markets are rough enough without greedy fucks institutionalizing their greed.
IIRC, NFTs were there to help finance artists who work on a purely digital medium
That’s not true at all. They were a con from their inception. The “helping artists” bit was something they made up to further that con. Just like when they claim cryptocurrency is an actual viable currency alternative to fiat.
Yeah it was huge in the art world, all the art magazines had articles about how it was the next big thing and how to mint your own nfts - which of course all turned out to be ‘pay my buddy $200 and we’ll turn your jpg into an nft!’ which was a scam within a scam.
Artists generally aren’t tech minded and honestly often pretty surface level in their understanding of things because that’s where their focus is, they’re looking at the visual not the mechanical. There’s nothing wrong in that because life needs a wide range of people.
NFTs were there to help finance artists who work on a purely digital medium, but then grifters coopted the NFT space and try to sell sets of same-looking artwork.
I’m curious if you have a source for this. I haven’t heard it anywhere else…
The whole point was to get dollars into crypto so the holders could cash out. The value was never meant to stay.
I’m sure they were a great way to launder money at the time.
That’s why it’s at the time. I made a quick $600 and never looked back cuz I knew it was unstable, but I wasn’t ignorant to the idea like many people who just wanted to bandwagon hate.
Ignorant to the idea? The idea was basically a spreadsheet with links to PNGs and “”““owner””“” of that PNG. Blockchain only means nobody owns the sheet itself, but that doesn’t make it any less ridiculous.
95% seems a little low. I assume that it’s closer to 99.9%.
💯
Even at the hype max there was already a lot of worthless NFTs, so it can easily be even less than 95%.
Not my Donald Trump trading cards! Nooo!
Weren’t those not even nfts? I believe I remember reading that they were basically just jpegs or something to that effect. Makes sense though, better return of investment on that scam.
I find it fascinating that NFTs were supposed to be a proof-of-ownership technology, but because people are stupid & greedy made pictures to sell with it
It always reminds me of those certificates for owning a piece of the moon.
Because it’s pretty much the same.
At the very core ownership that isn’t recognised by the state is meaningless. So that ape picture? No one really cares about some guy claiming to own it because they have control over the token. As long as it’s on the internet everyone can just copy it and there’s no authority caring about it one bit since NFT isn’t recognised as for example copyright is.
Even when it comes to stuff like items in games, these also are only worth anything as long as the publisher of the game recognises your claim to it! And even if they did recognise it, there’s absolutely nothing preventing them from changing their minds later. Simply because they create the game however they like and have 100% control over it’s development.
Can you blame them? If I gave someone a photo and then they offered to give me $1,000 if I also would write down a unique number I totally would write down a randon number and get my grand.
Maybe now I’ll finally be able to buy the ones I want
(There aren’t any)
It sounds like you could have always bought the ones that you want!
It is all worthless?
Always has been
Started laughing even they were introduced, still chuckle today.
It’s great. Love it.
Grab the tulips! Grab them!
Shocking
Oh man. I remember getting downvoted to hell for stating that they were a scam and provided no actual value or true, to technical “non-fungibility”.
Well, NTF is based upon the Greater Fool Theory.
So if those with invested interests are unable to find a bigger fool to sell them to, those NFT become worthless.
You got downvoted because you were interfering with money from the NFT investors.
I feel like a lot of people probably knew that to some degree, but didn’t want to believe it to be true. Supposed to leave your emotions at the door when trading stocks or crypto, but a lot of people don’t seem to do that.
Yup. Does feel good to be vindicated for being willing to honestly express reality, in spite of willful delusion and ingnorance. Not that I am happy for those that suffered immense losses but, they can’t say that they weren’t warned.
well that surprised no one
The rubes people with useful opinions on Reddit assured me I would be left behind if I didn’t understand NFTs. I’m sure they’re surprised.
I still think NFTs could be used to make a form of DRM that is actually fair to the consumer, by maki g it so you can resell your digital goods and also make it so your digital rights don’t vanish as soon as the seller gets bored. But nobody in a position to make that happen wants that.
DRM =/= fair to the consumer.
DRM as a concept seeks to limit your digital rights. Any DRM of any kind is a form of punishment to the consumer. You bought it, it should be yours to do with in perpetuity as you please.
What about the rights of the creator and fair compensation? That argument alone is driving the entire backlash against AI and AI created art reading people’s work without restriction, why not here too?
Wowie gee whiz, no one in the universe could have seen that one coming. /s
All those rappers and celebrities with cartoon donkey and monkey profile pics showed how much for sale they are. They will promote poison to you for money
NFTs are like a ticket roll, they can be quite useful, but that requires having an event or service that those tickets apply to. NFTs so far completely failed to create that. To justify the decentralized nature of NFTs you’d further have to make that ticket apply to multiple different services. That didn’t happen either.
Buying your hats in a game with NFTs is pointless as long as those hats only work in that one singular game, centralized services can handle that better. On the other side, if you’d use NFTs to sell the digital games themselves, they could be quite useful and breaks through established online-store monopolies. But that of course would require different online shops to accept the same NFT, e.g. buy NFT for a game on Steam, but download it through EPIC. That’s something NFTs could allow, but it would require the whole industry to play along, which due to everybody competing against each other is rather unlikely.
Whomever named them NFTs instead of grift cards missed an opportunity.
Ponzi schemes have an oversaturation problem like every other one.
My favourite part of NFT/Crypto is all of the creators that outed themselves by pushing for it, taking sponsorships, etc.
Don’t put your reputation on the line to sell links to ugly JPEGs, please.
Oh no.
Anyway.
“Bull run”
More like Bullshit run. Literally nobody fell for the grift. Celebrities bought into it because it was a pump and dump scheme and they can afford it. There is literally no use case for NFTs and even basic normies saw that.
Not dissimilar to money laundering or MLMs.
Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
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.
Jagermo@feddit.de 7 months ago
Also money laundering and tax rebate schemes.
nudnyekscentryk@szmer.info 7 months ago
akshuallllyyyyyyyy, monetary value of anything is derivative to someone else’s willingness to purchase the item
ram@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
You can use this logic to explain away any other ponzi scheme too.
Syndic@feddit.de 7 months ago
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.
Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
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. Heck, in one case, some techbro created a crypto currency, and convinced a bunch of people or would be stable because he was backing out with ANOTHER crypto currency he literally created for that only purpose.
And people FELL FOR IT!
It’s utter insanity.
hstde@feddit.de 7 months ago
So like art. No tangible assets, but the value is derived by the highest bidder.
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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.
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
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.
Yokozuna@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Sounds a lot like the banking system today lol.
Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
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
merc@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
It doesn’t need to be, it’s backed by the need to pay taxes in USD.
orphiebaby@lemm.ee 7 months ago
This was the comment I came here to make. “They were always worthless.”