95% of NFTs now totally worthless, say researchers Just a couple of years ago you'd have no trouble finding some celebrity hawking a non-fungible token (NFT) project. But how quickly times change, as now, even websites dedicated to gambling with cryptocurrency are warning people to stay away from NFTs. For those who don't recall, NFTs are entries on a blockchain, typically the …
The same way other collectibles with little or no use-value get elevated exchange-value. The information on baseball cards, for example, is readily available elsewhere; it's hard to see what use-value they have, unless you use one as a coaster or to make a sound effect for your bicycle. Their value is all in exchange.
Same thing with, say, collecting stamps (particularly canceled ones, or others that couldn't be used for postage).
That doesn't make NFTs not stupid, of course. At least with baseball cards and stamps there used to be, and presumably still is, a pretty large community of collectors, and there were social events like sales and swap meets organized around collecting; and they're physical objects so you can perform physical activities with them such as putting them into albums. NFTs lack even those virtues.
True. On the other hand, there are many people out there "collecting" all sorts of shit, gambling that in the future it will be in demand and they have "originals", in unopened packaging. Same with crypto currency. Some of those few early adopters probably made a fortune out of mining Bitcoin and hanging onto it instead of selling up early. I think you are probably right about NFTs, but really, there was a chance some may have taken off in some form and that's the gamble people are prepared to take. The sensible ones will look at risk and returns and only spend what they can afford to lose.
I still upvoted you though since, yeah, the odds of NFTs being anything other than a very short term investment at the height of the hype were obviously incredibly low to almost anyone with two or more brain cells to rub together :-)
Such an exercise in the distortion of meaning has become normal in anything crypto-prefixed.
For example, translate crypto to English:
while the NFT space has introduced a revolutionary new model for ownership and the monetization of digital assets, it remains a highly speculative and volatile market.
Translates to
NFTs were a pump-and-dump confidence scam from the outset.
All those who 'invested' in NFTs will now realise they were conned into spending money on basically a GIF file, but fair do's to those who managed to sell some fairly rudimentary art for large amounts of money to gullible people at the NFT high. As long as they were sensible enough to cash out any payment they received for the sale of NFTs to real money and didn't decide to keep it as crypto.
Of course there were a number of savvy folks who hot-potatoed them and sold them on as soon as the price went up (or perhaps even, as you suggest, sold them at a nominal loss to launder ill-gotten gains, though I'd be shocked – shocked – to hear such a thing was done by any member of the upstanding Trump family).
And there were a whole bunch more people who took the expedient route of stealing NFTs from poorly-secured wallets and immediately selling them on, then tumbling the cryptocurrency proceeds, and cashing out as much as they could. That's, like, one out of three stories on Web 3 is Going Just Great. So it's not like NFTs don't have any uses.
> they were conned into spending money on basically a GIF file
Nope, you've missed the subtle distinction that all the value of NFTs relies upon.
They didn't spend money on a GIF, the GIF was free for everyone to enjoy[1].
What they bought was a note on a blockchain (hopefully, that blockchain is still being mined and hasn't just evaporated) and that note said they now owned this copy of a URL - i.e. they literally owned one copy of a sequence of characters that starts "http" - and the fact that, at the specific point in time when the note was made, the claim that said URL leads to a copy of the GIF in question. Where that same URL leads to now, or tomorrow, is one of the great imponderables[2]
The value is all in understanding this chain of references and how its very ephemeral nature highlights the essence of Man's struggle against Nature. Or something like that. Maybe it was Man's Inhumanity Against Man[3]?
[1] enjoyment is not guaranteed; the aesthetic appeal of a garish cartoon of a monkey may go down as well as - actually, no, it just goes down.
[2] or it is just a 404 - damn, I should have sold NFTs to a 404 page and saved the hosting fees for the GIF! Is it too late?
[3] if the NFT mongers had made that claim, they could have actually had a case for charging money for the things: "the art is in the process by which we ripped people off, it is a performance piece".
《What they bought was a note on a blockchain (hopefully, that blockchain is still being mined and hasn't just evaporated) and that note said they now owned this copy of a URL》
I would have thought at least one or more crypto hash (eg sha256) or a signature of the gif file would be added to the blockchain entry. I have absolutely no idea how this nonsense was supposed to work but cleary didn't for the punters.
For crypto investors NFT's fulfilled a vital purpose - for a while at least. They provided the liquidity to the market that investors needed to sell their crypto currency assets. The whole thing is effectively a 'find an even bigger idiot' scam, and the people that are left holding this shit at the end have really lost out.
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Well, an asset with a NFT assigned to it is still the same image or object, so the actual difference in value between other copies is arbitrary. It wouldn't keep its exclusive value for long because there's no reason to keep caring.
I laughed at the concept, because I couldn't give a fuck.
"the NFT space has introduced a revolutionary new model for ownership and the monetization of digital assets"
With quotes like that, dappGambl's are clearly part of the cult of bitcoin, so for them to say their favourite parrot is dead, must mean it is indeed very very dead.
Well who could doubt the authority of a website whose homepage screams "Your Crypto Gambling Made Easy" at you? Except of course that they're right, although it's taken them a lot more time than those of us who instantly said what a load of worthless bullshit the whole idea was. I guess the idea is to say "don't waste your money on NFTs, they're worthless! Come and gamble it with us and win some other kind of digital token which definitely isn't also worthless no siree!".
I doubt they'll be researching and publishing how much the mugs who hand them money are making on average.
It is sad, in that there is a very real need for digital art to be saleable, so that artists who put work into it can get money.
Unfortunately Midjourney more than NFT scams, is probably going to destroy any perception that digital art took actual creative time and effort, and has real monetary value.
Indeed
A few days ago we visited a gallery & purchased a (small, relatively inexpensive) signed print by the artist (who also signed a book of hers we also purchased ).
Whether these fall or rise on value is irrelevant* as we purchased them because we liked them: With reputable artists also the advantage of limited print runs & numbered copies, unlike "infinitely reproducible" NFT "art".
The advantage being that (barring a house fire, theft or similar scenario) we keep them to enjoy (and when we are gone, physical objects** remain for the will recipients to do with as they see fit)
* Some other prints have definitely gone up in value, e.g. we have a Hockney print & looked to buy another (different picture but from same "series" of print runs), all the print runs sold and the prices on offer were ludicrously high & not worth considering (the whole point of a print is it's a nice (relatively) cheap way for the non wealthy to get an art work (in the form of a decent quality copy) they like)
** Even if some NFTs etc. actually have a meaningful financial value I do wonder how many people will actually think about dealing with digital assets in their wills? - e.g. I wonder how many crypto wallets are sitting there, the owners dead and relatives totally unaware the wallet exists / what the credentials are (lets be realistic we may all want a long, but accidents and illness can strike at any time )
Yep. Even now, the authors of this study are probably offering pennies for worthless NFTs, which they can then turn around and sell to the next generation of suckers. I can practically smell the opportunisim from here. "We bought this collection for $0.01 apiece in 2023, we're selling them today for $20 apiece, just imagine what they'll be worth next year!"
Checking that site is one of the highlights of my day, to be perfectly honest. Not the only highlight, but whenever I see Molly's posted a new piece or two it brings a smile to my face.
I feel a bit guilty about not being sadder about the tremendous waste of resources – energy, capital, inventiveness – being wasted on cryptocurrency and DeFi and the like, and about how it's used to enable criminal proceeds and bring hard currency to North Korea and so forth. But I can't help chuckling at Every. Damn. Story.
(It's much the same with cryptocurrency research. I think blockchain is a Merkle Tree for babies, and cryptocurrency is an abysmal idea. But I've read a bunch of really fascinating papers about this area. Stupid in practice, intriguing in theory. It's the theology of computer science.)
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