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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
If you are referring to scam artists, you are 100% right! Also, some actual artists might have got some money out of it, but I suspect the majority of dough that exchanged hands went to the former kind.
I’m sorry you dont have any technically inclined artists in your circle, but I first learned about NFTs from myartists friends.
Colored coins have been around for a very long time, and NFTs have been an income stream for artists long before the financial elite gave them a bad name.
The major nft exchanges paid a portion of each sale to the artists, yes. It was one of the things that NFTs, and blockchain in general, was supposed to help solve for. IMO it’s a good use case for blockchain being used when paired with real world items.
Don’t need blockchain, no, but blockchain has some advantages since its peer verified and, when implemented well, much harder to fake data than a centralized database might be.
With a normal database we have to trust the one person/entity managing it.
Ok, ok, hold on - what’s being sold here? A link to a digital asset or something else? If it’s a link, I still don’t get the point. Does that link (or whatever it is) confer some kind of license? What’s the use case for faking this data and why are we defending from this?
My idea is that the art is being sold and the NFT only says who owns it. It doesn’t need to be digital art, it can be just about anything where an original creator should benefit from the item changing hands.
Whenever the NFT changes hands, there are fees associated, which would include a portion of the sale going to the original artist, a royalty. And because the NFT exists on a publicly visible blockchain, back alley sales can’t happen ensuring that the artist gets paid.
This type of thing helps ensure that artists benefit from their art going into demand and increasing in value.
Blockchain mathematically guarantees trust… for info stored on the blockchain. What guarantee do you have that this info matches things that happen in reality?
If you say: we need a social contract to ensure people update the blockchain, then I say: that defeats the purpose of the heavy lifting you need to mathematically guarantee info on the blockchain is genuine. Let’s just have a social contact to pay the artist when appropriate.
I don’t see what other way could exist to keep the blockchain and reality in sync.
The actual artist? The one that created the art? Not the one that stole the artist’s work and turned it into an NFT for a quick buck from something they had no right to?
Behold my one of a kind unique string of characters. Me I own this tangible property. But lo! For only 0.42069lol “BTC-lts33” (a REAL and stable currency that is NOT speculative AT ALL) I will maintain a CSV on my server (192.168.6.9/wp-admin/test/test2/myPage.php) I will serve you a guaranteed locally unique identifier (starting at “3” (I’m holding on to the other two strings for a rainy day)) that points to the row with this string, so you can show off that YOU are the sole owner of this totally unique investment property.
This server is guaranteed up, with 100.00000% uptime since this morning
It’s not even that it’s unique. It’s just one particular system associates you with something. It’s basically those star registry scams. Except you’re not associated with a star by one particular scam organization. You associated with an image of a cartoon ape by a scam organization! But there’s a trendy technology involved so idiots think that makes it somehow legit.
Try telling that to sports memorabilia collectors though.
“Look at my hockey jersey!” “Yeah, so? I have the same one.” “Yeah but you’re wasn’t signed by Wayne Gretsky.”
Or even trading cards, or comics. Or hell, even plain w-shirts with a brand logo on it for $250. People assign arbitrary values to stuff all the time. I don’t understand it at all, but there’s a whole ton of people that just eat that shit up like it’s candy.
Well no, in my example the shirt is the image and the signature on it is the NFT bit. Physically, it’s just a bit of ink, but the shirt itself is no different than one you can go pickup at the store.
That arises at least somewhat more organically around a real interest that millions of people have been enjoying and obsessing over for generations. So it’s not fair to say it’s totally arbitrary.
The logo stuff is weird though. That’s definitely more “Veblen” like the high price point is itself a flex and desire for, if not true luxury, then the appearance of opulence.
I’m not against this. And as far as I can tell it isn’t a get rich scheme. I mean the tech companies implementing and maintaining it would probably make a killing, but that goes for any enterprise that supports big finance.
NFTs, like crypto in general, is nothing more than a ponzi scheme.
Only it’s worse because there is no one to go after when it collapses. As you can see with the NFT collapse… there is no “Madoff” you can identify to send to prison.
I guess I’m talking more about blockchain? I never got too deep into this world. But like a way to hash transactions made with real money in a way that would be harder to commit fraud with. I dunno, maybe accountants already do this some way.
I’m imagining an example where you couldn’t disappear a line item because then the ledger’s hash wouldn’t come out right, and bingo bango, tax evasion charges incoming.
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Cryptobois be like
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
no
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!
Of no surprise to anyone.
But y’know, everyone who rightfully decried those fuckin things were just FUDing, right?
Guess not!
Actually their value is completely unchanged. Price and money are made up and do not reflect value.
But it was nice while artists were able to sell to profit from rich people
deleted by creator
Yes, many artists made a lot of money on NFTs
If you are referring to scam artists, you are 100% right! Also, some actual artists might have got some money out of it, but I suspect the majority of dough that exchanged hands went to the former kind.
I’m sorry you dont have any technically inclined artists in your circle, but I first learned about NFTs from myartists friends.
Colored coins have been around for a very long time, and NFTs have been an income stream for artists long before the financial elite gave them a bad name.
History is important
The major nft exchanges paid a portion of each sale to the artists, yes. It was one of the things that NFTs, and blockchain in general, was supposed to help solve for. IMO it’s a good use case for blockchain being used when paired with real world items.
But we don’t need blockchain to do any of that, someone still has to be trusted so might as well just use normal database tech.
Don’t need blockchain, no, but blockchain has some advantages since its peer verified and, when implemented well, much harder to fake data than a centralized database might be.
With a normal database we have to trust the one person/entity managing it.
With blockchain, it’s a community that we trust.
Ok, ok, hold on - what’s being sold here? A link to a digital asset or something else? If it’s a link, I still don’t get the point. Does that link (or whatever it is) confer some kind of license? What’s the use case for faking this data and why are we defending from this?
My idea is that the art is being sold and the NFT only says who owns it. It doesn’t need to be digital art, it can be just about anything where an original creator should benefit from the item changing hands.
Whenever the NFT changes hands, there are fees associated, which would include a portion of the sale going to the original artist, a royalty. And because the NFT exists on a publicly visible blockchain, back alley sales can’t happen ensuring that the artist gets paid.
This type of thing helps ensure that artists benefit from their art going into demand and increasing in value.
Blockchain mathematically guarantees trust… for info stored on the blockchain. What guarantee do you have that this info matches things that happen in reality?
If you say: we need a social contract to ensure people update the blockchain, then I say: that defeats the purpose of the heavy lifting you need to mathematically guarantee info on the blockchain is genuine. Let’s just have a social contact to pay the artist when appropriate.
I don’t see what other way could exist to keep the blockchain and reality in sync.
The actual artist? The one that created the art? Not the one that stole the artist’s work and turned it into an NFT for a quick buck from something they had no right to?
Yes. The actual artist.
That was one of the things that was working quite well during the NFT hype.
God I am not going to miss every art community being flooded with low effort developer art that had no actual artistic merit.
I mean I do developer art, but I wouldn’t try to sell it, let alone sell it as an investment. Fucking rofl
Pumped, dumped, done.
Just because something is unique doesn’t mean it’s valuable.
Some people are just discovering this.
Behold my one of a kind unique string of characters. Me I own this tangible property. But lo! For only 0.42069lol “BTC-lts33” (a REAL and stable currency that is NOT speculative AT ALL) I will maintain a CSV on my server (
192.168.6.9/wp-admin/test/test2/myPage.php) I will serve you a guaranteed locally unique identifier (starting at “3” (I’m holding on to the other two strings for a rainy day)) that points to the row with this string, so you can show off that YOU are the sole owner of this totally unique investment property.This server is guaranteed up, with 100.00000% uptime since this morning
It’s not even that it’s unique. It’s just one particular system associates you with something. It’s basically those star registry scams. Except you’re not associated with a star by one particular scam organization. You associated with an image of a cartoon ape by a scam organization! But there’s a trendy technology involved so idiots think that makes it somehow legit.
Try telling that to sports memorabilia collectors though.
“Look at my hockey jersey!” “Yeah, so? I have the same one.” “Yeah but you’re wasn’t signed by Wayne Gretsky.”
Or even trading cards, or comics. Or hell, even plain w-shirts with a brand logo on it for $250. People assign arbitrary values to stuff all the time. I don’t understand it at all, but there’s a whole ton of people that just eat that shit up like it’s candy.
However NFTs were trying to assign value to the receipt for the Gretzky shirt.
Well no, in my example the shirt is the image and the signature on it is the NFT bit. Physically, it’s just a bit of ink, but the shirt itself is no different than one you can go pickup at the store.
In your example what happens if the shirt is sold to someone else? In the NFT case the signature changes.
The shirt analogy doesn’t work well, but NFTs are great for transferable tickets.
That arises at least somewhat more organically around a real interest that millions of people have been enjoying and obsessing over for generations. So it’s not fair to say it’s totally arbitrary.
The logo stuff is weird though. That’s definitely more “Veblen” like the high price point is itself a flex and desire for, if not true luxury, then the appearance of opulence.
Each one of my shits is unique, but just as valuable as an NFT
It can have real value if you use it to fertilize a square meter of dirt and plant corn on it. Shit + water + seeds = food.
🔫️ Always have been
Not Fart Token
removed by mod
NFTs will fix future financial fraud by utilizing blockchain tech to keep public trades accountable. True audits
Doesn’t have to be a JPG
Not sure I’d say ‘will’ because the people who have to implement it are the same people that benefit from the current system.
I’m not against this. And as far as I can tell it isn’t a get rich scheme. I mean the tech companies implementing and maintaining it would probably make a killing, but that goes for any enterprise that supports big finance.
@pomodoro_longbreak @Zuberi
NFTs, like crypto in general, is nothing more than a ponzi scheme.
Only it’s worse because there is no one to go after when it collapses. As you can see with the NFT collapse… there is no “Madoff” you can identify to send to prison.
I guess I’m talking more about blockchain? I never got too deep into this world. But like a way to hash transactions made with real money in a way that would be harder to commit fraud with. I dunno, maybe accountants already do this some way.
I’m imagining an example where you couldn’t disappear a line item because then the ledger’s hash wouldn’t come out right, and bingo bango, tax evasion charges incoming.
Who would have thought?
deleted by creator