The whole NFT thing was one giant pump and dump.
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.
Dramatic? I found this an entertaining example of dumbness 🍿🍿🍿
For sure. This is comedy, not drama.
Who could have predicted this? Literally impossible without hindsight and that’s the revisionist history I’m sticking to.
This was never anything aside from a scam designed to separate the tech illiterate from their money.
Isn’t it pretty obvious this was 99% a money laundering scheme?
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 and con artists jumped from one ship to the other so quickly, or somehow have feet in both.
AI wasn’t the NFT killer, right click > saveas killed it at the very moment of conception.
Digital scarcity is a complete joke.
Sure you can copy the image, but you can’t have the same machine-readable hash indicating ownership in my private system!
Whoever could have seen this coming
Everyone with eyes.
The way money-laundering works, you take ill-begotten funds and somehow churn it into legal tender in ways that can’t be traced back to the source. Another angle is to create corporate entities that show loss against gains, so you can deduct and don’t have to pay taxes on your windfall profits.
In the olden days, these were physical, degrading assets. Like strip malls, real-eestate, and dodgy, money-losing businesses that somehow stuck around forever. At the end, you were stuck with physical entities you couldn’t unload.
Crypto and NFT were just digital variations of the same financial model, minus the hassle of having to manage the property.
Anyone with the most basic common sense knew it was going to end up like this.
Oh, they caught their money laundering scheme!
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?!?!
Hey but this cryptographic key says that I own it because I paid made up currency units for it or something
Hey but that made up currency I worked for by burning electricity, I mean MINING it.
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?
WHAT?!? I’ve never heard of that! That’s nefarious! WOW!
I got it from a Folding Ideas video (the problem with nfts one)
But here’s a link actually detailing it https://www.gate.com/learn/articles/beware-of-unexpected-nfts-and-assets-in-your-wallet-they-could-steal-all-your-funds/7682
Edit: for those that haven’t seen the video it’s worth the 2 hour watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
These ape NFTs are also the ugliest and dumbest thing ever. Their faces look like hairy testicles. Whoever spent more than like $0.5 for this, fully deserves the outcome.
but for a brief period of time, some people made some money, while most participants lost
edit: do AI next
This describes our species’ entire existence 👌
we were the bored ape all along
