by theklub on 8/27/21, 10:51 AM with 83 comments
by PragmaticPulp on 8/27/21, 12:02 PM
The more noteworthy you can make your NFT, the more you can convince people that they might be able to make some profit by flipping it, meaning the more you can sell it for.
The high prices are a known gimmick for grabbing headlines. “Useless NFT sells for $100,000” is (or was) a sure-fire way to get your NFT into the headlines. The trick was that you could actually bootstrap these high prices yourself without actually spending the money. If you have $100,000 in ETH sitting around, you didn’t have much to lose by using it to “buy” an NFT from yourself in a transaction with yourself. You keep the money, you keep the NFT, but now you’ve generated a public record of the NFT having sold for $100,000, and now you can claim to hold an extremely valuable NFT. After all, the record is on the public blockchain! No one can deny it “sold” for that high price.
Maybe this kid actually lucked into a trading fad where crypto-rich individuals had so much extra money that they didn’t care about tossing hundreds of thousands of dollars to a kid in exchange for a virtual blockchain receipt for the lulz. Or maybe they think they can use these headlines to further flip the NFTs at a profit to someone else.
But whenever you see a headline like this, it’s important to remember the possibility that maybe nothing actually changed hands at this price at all. If this kids’ dad (who works in finance) wanted to generate headlines hopes of flipping NFTs to someone else, what better way to do it than by getting headlines about your 12-year old making hundreds of thousands of dollars? All he needs to do is “buy” those NFTs with crypto funds, keeping the crypto funds in the family, and then start contacting news reporters about these miraculous, high value NFTs that they should totally write about in every outlet so that hopefully someone else will buy them for an even higher price. Come tax time, you can always argue that you never actually sold anything because you control both wallets, so there wasn’t any profit to be taxed.
You’re only out the transaction fees, so you can buy headlines like this for tens of dollars.
by occz on 8/27/21, 11:21 AM
by eurasiantiger on 8/27/21, 11:32 AM
by illwrks on 8/27/21, 11:33 AM
I view NFT's with a hefty dose of skepticism, although I have a very talented ex-colleague that has been creating 3d artwork and made a few thousand. My view is that there's a chance his father etc was already invested in bitcoin and wanted to put it to good use...
by blunte on 8/27/21, 11:43 AM
"But on eliminating every other reason
For our sad demise
They logged the only explanation left
This species has amused itself to death"
NFTs are mostly used as a ponzi game. There's not enough physical art or exotic cars or other collectibles for the moneyed folks to trade, so now they have NFTs.
This, plus the stories of groups and corps buying up homes, negative interest rates, etc., all suggest that too much money has been concentrated in too few places (hands, people). And those people seem to be focused primarily on just making money, so they need vehicles like NFTs as another place to play. It's just mind boggling where humanity has ended up.
by Aransentin on 8/27/21, 11:39 AM
The article even mentions that they are keeping the profits as Ethereum, which would be necessary as he can't cash out since the money isn't actually his.
by Aeolun on 8/27/21, 11:55 AM
I kind of have the same mental association I have with drug cartels. Except somehow it’s legal.
by soco on 8/27/21, 11:42 AM
by SirensOfTitan on 8/27/21, 12:33 PM
…we ended up closing shop. We were paying for minting transactions behind the scenes and the market was too expensive in 2018-2019. We made a crucial error there, but we didn’t think people would be willing to pay so much for transactions.
..boy, were we wrong. I just sold a couple remnants of my old Editional wallet for a good chunk of money. I had a…hard time doing it though: transaction fees cost from a minimum of $40 and and a maximum of $160 for those smart contract transactions. Add in the fact that every provider takes a large cut: from Coinbase, to NFT marketplaces, to the 10+ dollar fees to actually complete a successful transaction.
To be honest, I was intimately involved in this space for a while, and I don’t get it anymore. We had this hypothesis that the ecosystem would scale and mature as we went, but we didn’t see much of that at all. It’s all gambling. It’s not even cool gambling: the decentralized prediction markets I was particularly excited to see never really took off.
I got interested in the space because I thought: decentralized consensus is really interesting, how important that’ll be in a world trending lower on trust; but this crypto world is so dishonest that I’ve realized that trust is integral to most effective systems.
by Roonerelli on 8/27/21, 12:13 PM
"Benyamin Ahmed is keeping his earnings in the form of Ethereum - the crypto-currency in which they were sold.
This means they could go up or down in value and there is no back-up from the authorities if the digital wallet in which he is holding them is hacked or compromised."
by janmo on 8/27/21, 11:46 AM
https://upvotetracker.com/blog/beware-of-NFTs-promoted-on-r-...
by fab1an on 8/27/21, 11:31 AM
What a former Christie's auctioneer thinks on this (as quoted by the BBC here) is _especially_ irrelevant, as they are of course partially disrupted by the NFT hype. Like asking a telco company in the 90s about the internet.
Strong Demis Hassabis vibes (DeepMind founder who did Theme Park at the age of 17)
by SideburnsOfDoom on 8/27/21, 12:00 PM
by lanevorockz on 8/27/21, 11:55 AM
by smokey_circles on 8/27/21, 11:30 AM
Strange addition, a little defensive there BBC? Something something coal miners and programming