Were they worth anything to begin with?
Hundreds of millions collectively, when people were dumb enough to buy them. The problem is that eventually dumb people ran out of money and the worth plummeted to zero.
Cost vs worth. Their pricetag may vary; but they’ve been worth nothing since their inception.
Elon musk is worth 250B (source Forbes, idk how legit)
He’s like a piggy bank - gotta break it open to make a withdrawal.
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Well, no piece of art has an intrinsic value. And auction houses exist to make money, not because of some divine purpose to connect true art to its worthy new owner. Of course they’re going to jump on the hype train if they think it’s worth it. I fully agree that NFTs are a scam, like almost all crypto crap. But so is the current art market. Money laundering and investments for the rich.
It’s crazy how interlinked black market dealings and money laundering have been to the art world. I shudder to think the amount of artists careers that were made because a couple guys needs to pay each other millions of dollars for something worthless to easily make some clean money on illicit exchanges.
No one will convince me that there isn’t money laundering going on there. There’s just no way an actual person looked at that and thought it is worth that kind of money
Yeah, $17M USD. It would be interesting to see the real bidders and their history
I’d love to print out that shitty pixel art and wave it at the person who spent $17M on that garbage… Unfortunately I’m sure it’s someone $17M doesn’t mean much to.
A better question would be, did anyone ever even buy them to begin with?
This means that 79% of all NFT collections – otherwise known as almost 4 out of every 5 – have remained unsold.
That is, most of the NFTs included in the OP statistic were listed for sale by their creators, and never recorded a sale. Another important detail is that even for the ones that did record sales, there’s no real way of knowing if those sales were real. You can easily make another crypto wallet and buy an NFT from yourself. For more elaborate wash trading, you can find someone with an established wallet to collude with. There are obvious reasons to do this too; building up a history of increasing sale prices could potentially dupe someone into thinking an NFT is a good investment, or you could launder money by selling an NFT to a ‘dirty’ wallet you also control.
Probably some portion of the market was “real”, but the volume is almost certainly much lower than anyone is reporting. Statistics like what the OP article is quoting are just about totally meaningless.
I knew people (well one person; in my developer meetup group) that went deep on the NTF craze, like has an spe avatar unironically, spent a bunch on NFTs, and if they’re telling the truth made bank off of them.
It’s pretty disappointing. I wonder whose money they took.
Again, probably some of it is real, and that’s the segment people who made money dealt with. I think of it as a sort of gambling; your acquaintance won a gambling game, someone else lost. Possibly there were some overly wealthy people buying them for status, or maybe that’s just a myth. But the point is, most NFTs themselves aren’t part of that at all, were never a part of any real market, so doing analysis on them is going to be misleading.
no
What??!
Nooo!!!
Grass is green…
🔫️ Always have been
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Ehhh. The ones that were always worthless are now actually valued. The ones with some purpose for existing, I assume not as much (see: none that are just simple files).
How to say, “I’m a rube,” without saying it out loud. Not a tear will be shed for these doofs.
Actually their value is completely unchanged. Price and money are made up and do not reflect value.
NFT’s never made much sense to me, at least in the way people attempted to use them.
Maybe they’d be useful as additional proof of ownership of a physical object? Like if they issued one when you bought a car, and you could use it as proof of ownership if you lost your title. That’s probably a bad example as I imagine there’s already safeguards in place for this in most places. And probably some other issues that haven’t occurred to me. Still, conceptually I think it makes sense.
No they’re shit at that too.
Proof of ownership is this big complicated thing with lots of safeguards. If someone steals your title, you still own your car, and you can get this fixed.
If someone steals your nft, it’s gone. The entire point of the Blockchain is there’s no central authority that you can appeal to who will do the work to check that transactions are legitimate.
Anything that happened stays happened, unless the entire community explicitly roles back the Blockchain.
That’s their intended purpose, but idiots made a bunch of images and sold them for stupid amounts of money to other idiots and that’s the ONLY aspect 99.99% of humanity will ever know about it because the media went full fucking bore to convince everyone, every day, every hour, that that’s all they are.
NFTs are stupid AF for most of the tasks people currently use them for and definitely shouldn’t be used as proof of ownership of physical assets.
However, I think NFTs make a lot of sense as proof of ownership of purely digital assets, especially those which are scarce.
For example, there are several projects for domain name resolution based on NFT ownership (e.g you look up crypto.eth, your browser checks that the site is signed by the owner of the crypto.eth NFT, then you are connected to the site), as it could replace our current system, which has literally 7 guys that hold a private key that is the backbone of the DNS system and a bunch of registrars you have to go through to get a domain. This won’t happen anytime soon but it is an interesting concept.
Then I think an NFT would also be good as a decentralized alternative to something like Google sign in, where you sign up for something with the NFT and sign in by proving your ownership of it.
In general though I find NFTs to be a precarious concept. I mean the experience I’ve had with crypto is you literally have a seed phrase for your wallet, and if it gets stolen all your funds are drained. And then for an NFT, if you click on the wrong smart contract, all your monkeys could be gone in an instant. There is in general no legal recourse to reverse crypto transactions, and I think that is frankly the biggest issue with the technology as it stands today.
Now?
Given that they can be generated effectively for free, this is hardly surprising or particularly meaningful. I can generate ten thousand new images with my AI art generator for basically zero cost and I don’t expect any would be economically valuable, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some images that are valuable.
Who would have thought?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Tens of thousands of NFTs that were once deemed the newest rage in tech and dragged in celebrities, artists and even Melania Trump have now been declared virtually worthless.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are a form of crypto asset that is used to certify ownership and authenticity of a digital file including an image, video or text.
The report comes nearly two years after the craze for NFTs swept up celebrities and artists alike, with many rushing to purchase NFT collections of the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Matrix avatars.
The drastic downward market shift surrounding such crypto assets “underscores the need for careful due diligence before making any purchases, especially one of high value”, the report said.
Researchers identified 195,699 NFT collections with no apparent owners or market share and found that the energy required to mint the NFTs was comparable to 27,789,258 kWh, resulting in an emission of approximately 16,243 metric tons of CO2.
In order to survive market downturns and have lasting value, NFTs need to be either historically relevant such as first-edition Pokémon cards, true art or provide genuine utility, they said in the report.
The original article contains 650 words, the summary contains 189 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Gee, if only there was some way to have seen this coming before hand…
Actually I didn’t have many hopes in humanity when it started to happen. It’s a bit comforting, not much though with other things around.
Yup.
Could have put the money in stock instead and they’d likely have made a profit since then.
Hell, they could have stuffed it into their mattress and it would have been a better investment lol.
Inflation can’t even lose this much money is such a short time
The first tweet nft sold for $2.9mil and is now “worth” less than $4.
Like it was worth anything at all in the beginning anyways
Edit: Spleling
Beautiful edit.
- lose
Might a a good idea to buy it, I’m sure it will sell for 10$ with some haggling.
O rly! 🦉
