Technology

Isn't it pretty obvious this was 99% a money laundering scheme?

Everyone comment how much did they lose on NFTs.

I will start: $0.

Under a grand. Is there anyone really stupid enough to think this is still worth anything at all?

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?!?!

If you weren't using them to launder money for a criminal enterprise, then you were doing them wrong.

I need to come up with my own scam to rinse rich idiots.

The whole NFT thing was one giant pump and dump.

but for a brief period of time, some people made some money, while most participants lost

edit: do AI next

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.

Also worth noting. The Bored Ape Yaht Club NFTs (in the thumbnail) were released by 4chan trolls with Nazi symbolism hidden in some of them. This was the most successful NFT project of them all.

This is the least surprising thing ever

A grand is still 1000 dollars too high a price for these things.

I think most people don't understand cryptocurrencies. On one side it's all hyperbolic about being your own bank and financial freedom and new tech, on the other side it's hyperbolic about how there is no underlying value, it's all going to 0, scams, drugs, terrorism, money laundering,...

But the fact is that crypto does have an underlying value. It's gambling. Gambling is a huge industry.

Speculating on the value of an investment based on an asset that doesn't exist is similar to scammers offering to sell certificates of ownership of dogs' souls.

Capitalism tends over time to create increasingly abstract forms of ownership. And what could be more abstract than ownership of something that isn't there at all? They're selling GUIDs that point to nothing.

This was never anything aside from a scam designed to separate the tech illiterate from their money.

How could it possibly be worth more than pennies?

Who could have predicted this? Literally impossible without hindsight and that's the revisionist history I'm sticking to.

Etherium was run out of the offices of JP Morgan Chase and NFTs were a gimmick to boost the deal flow of their then-underperforming crypto offering.

It was, by and large, an enormous investment in sales and marketing on top of a ton of insanely shady business practices. Case in point, the infamous Beeple NFT that sold for $69.3M was purchased with Etherium to showcase Christie’s auction house accepting cryptocurrency for auction bids. The winning bidder for artwork was an early crypto adopter and marketer named Vignesh Sundaresan who was flush with these tokens, but lacked any kind of liquid market to sell them into yet. That's before you get into the Congo Line of largely clueless celebrities going on Late Night comedy shows to plug their online pogs.

It's trite to say that the whole thing was a scam because... duh. But I think people read this as "just dumb people being stupid with their stupid dumb money" and ignore the layer upon layer of market manipulation and con-artistry that went into making cryptocurrencies what they are today.

The fact that Donald Trump is using them to launder bribes from Middle Eastern dictators and East Asian kleptocrats should illustrate how deep these rabbit holes can go. It's so much more than just peddling bad clipart to dumb bros.

Anyone with the most basic common sense knew it was going to end up like this.

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.

Who could have thought it?

NFT just served as a training opportunity for the people behind it to learn how to get away with legally scamming people, not surprised the Reddit admin was all in on it when it came out.