Technology
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Were they worth anything to begin with?
They have no intrinsic value, but they're worth what people will pay for them I guess. The only problem is that entire thing was a hype bubble conjured up scammers. The insane thing is that for a brief moment they even had famous auction houses buying into the scam.
https://www.christies.com/lot/lot-6316969?ldp_breadcrumb=back&intObjectID=6316969&from=salessummary&lid=1
That shitty set of randomized pixel art sold for more than anything else in that particular show, aside from a Basquiat.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
no