Pretty much all crypto bro stuff, honestly
When my these first arrived my brother was all about them. Dude was stoked and thought he was the next billionaire. I then asked him what’s to stop someone from copying the image? He shrugged and idk man man but im going all in. It was on that day that I knew my brother was tarded
Tbh I get it from a certain point of view. We all made fun of bitcoin at first but now it’s pretty common for people to wish they could tell their younger self to get as much as they can afford.
I get the idea of not wanting to miss out on the next thing that did that.
Did we make fun of bitcoin? It was a cool currency for buying drugs on the black market at first.
I made fun of it immediately, despite also recognizing and using its ability to facilitate online purchases of contraband.
The “next Bitcoin” has just been Bitcoin every time. Right now is its umpteenth bubble.
Bitcoin is still fucking shit. That just amounts to “I wish I was there first in this this pyramid scheme”. It doesn’t change what it is.
There were enough layers in that pyramid and enough years in construction to have room for more people to make a buck.
What’s the difference between a scam and a bubble, and is the bubble more legitimate or just a bigger, longer scam?
- NFTs were a misuse of blockchain giving no real value. Plus it was very short term and really only rewarded scammers and manipulators. A true scam.
- Crypto is better thought out and actually could serve as a currency. It has a bit more staying power and even enriched a few non-scammers. Does that make it a “bubble” ?
Sure, never said otherwise, so you can see how someone could theoretically think maybe nft is the next bitcoin and want to get in early.
My first wife was tarded. She’s a pilot now.
She pilots the Tardis.
Yep! Don’t worry, scrote. There are plenty of 'tards out there living really kick-ass lives!
Why come you don’t got a tatoo??
My one regret is that I will never be able to find all the really stubborn, dimwitted assholes on reddit who were screaming bloody death-threats at me for warning people that NFT’s were a scam, and be able to just verbally ream them out, fucking rub their faces in their own shit.
I bet some of them are out there, reading this maybe, maybe they even recognize me.
If so… hi. How you doin? 😊
It’s so funny looking back at it (though it was funny while it was happening too), these new-flavor cryptobros tried so hard to convince themselves that they were in the right, they made “cartoons,” games, I think they even planned like an island resort or something around their monkey pictures.
The national news media got behind it big, which I really don’t understand.
It never made any sense.
Explanation: Money.
Whenever you see a headline or article and don’t understand why they’re lying or pushing something. The answer is that it makes someone money. And a large chunk of modern media is owned by a handful of people who’s goal is to make money, not tell the truth.
Pump and dump deep state. It’s still happening. New sucker born every minute.
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My coworker had a virtual NFT gallery full of Marvel NFTs, all laid out like a showroom. He literally spent thousands, now it’s worth close to nothing.
a Mitch Hedberg variant
NFT’s used to be stupid.
They still are, but they used to be, too.
NFTs are just beanie babies for millenials and gen z
At least beanie babies were a toy a child could play with.
Noooo! They’d lose value! (they’d go from 2 to 1.5 dollars)
Well, that’s why you get the tag protectors!
Beanie babies were beanie babies for millennials. I still have some.
Sure, but millennials weren’t the generation that brought us things like this. They thought they could horde them to fund their kids college. I know firsthand, my mom spent hundreds of thousands on them claiming they would only go up. Now she’s got nothing. God forbid she buy a fucking savings bond.
Uh oh, you’ve offended the people who are prone to falling for scams and grifts. Across multiple generations.
I think it’s also the younger users here don’t know/remember the time when all Boomers flipped their shit and thought Beanie Babies were THE ONE TRUE investment strategy. They didn’t watch their parents blow their entire retirement fund on a scam. Instead they were the ones that actually got to play with them, so naturally they look back on them fondly.
I could buy a beanie baby at an auction and then drive across town and sell the beanie baby at a different auction. I’d get around the same estimated price on the toy buying and selling, unless I found a particularly friendly/disappointing market.
By contrast, the NFT auction houses are all owned and operated by the same assholes trying to sell the digital merch. The prices are set arbitrarily, many of the sales are wash sales or straw purchases, with the same individual/cartel running multiple accounts to create the illusion of a market. Once you’ve bought your NFT, there’s no real way to off-load it onto anyone else. It’s purely a scam.
Tack on to the tail end, at the absolute worst you get a cute little stuffed animal out of Beanie Babies. With NFTs, you’re not even buying the artwork itself. You’re buying a link to artwork with no guarantee of continued costing. Quite a few NFTs are the victims of Link Rot, leading to the owner having gone out of pocket for some absurd fee in exchange for what amounts to a stall bit.ly URL.
Millenials had beanie babied wut
Don’t forget Funko pops
A plague upon humanity.
I really hate these things and can’t believe I wasted money on some my kids wanted.
But you do buy something. It’s not imaginary
For me it’s usually the Bitcoin guy from the “If Google was a guy” sketches
Amazing.
It’s remains sad that the name NFT is tainted by scams. In business, we start using NFTs more in various other contexts than “art”. NFT technology, without the scam marketplace, has many use cases that we only now start to see benefits from. It’s a very good way to digitize assets and use them in business processes.
How do you know a crypto scheme is a scam?
You already know, the answer is “yes”. It’s always “yes”.
The only question is, can you hold the tiger’s tail just long enough to make a mint and still let go in time that you aren’t the last one holding it.can you hold the tiger’s tail just long enough
The answer to this is also usually “no” because the people who set up the scamcoin usually don’t like to leave things to chance and have a plan for when to time their rug-pull.
Trying to get in on these grifts is like spotting a bank-robbery in-progress and trying to join the crew and get paid. Sure it can happen, but you’re not exactly playing with the best odds of success.
That’s the big question: do you recognize the scam in time to take advantage of it, and have the awareness to get out in time when there are still suckers?
I know a few people who made money on crypto in the early stages this way: recognize the scam but take advantage.
It was probably possible to take similar advantage of the Trump bribe laundering crypto scam, even without the benefit of the insider trading and market manipulation
I very briefly considered it but don’t trust my awareness to get out in time, plus participating in the scam would eat me up.
I very briefly considered it but don’t trust my awareness to get out in time, plus participating in the scam would eat me up.
Ya, one of the best pieces of advice I got was, “never gamble money you can’t afford to lose”. This is what keeps me out of trying to chase that tiger. Sure, it could be possible to make some money by jumping on one of these scams early and trying to ride sell the bump. But, it’s also likely that be the sucker losing out in the end. I’d rather not waste my money that way.
Unfortunately for them that ship has sailed. It’s not hard to get in on a scam like this of you do it early enough, i probably would have done it if i had enough money when this started (don’t judge, much, money is important when you don’t have it) and i probably would have gotten out like a bandit. Now though, it’s mostly targeting them.
Nobody is going to judge a cute and awkward baby trans girl needing cash on my watch. That’s for sure.
C-cute!? (~\\~)
Very cute and very pretty
Scam or not some of them are very useful to pay for some not so legal things
Investing in currency is already dumb, in cryptocurrency? Doubly so
I get the impression that most of the people who are swindled by crypto nowadays are aware of the scam and jump into it thinking they’re going to make money by finding a greater fool to dump their participation the scheme on for a profit.
Such people are really trying to be scammers in the scam.
That explains them invariably rushing to defend whatever scam token they’re holding whenever it gets criticized in social media: if outsider are generally made to suspect the true nature of the scam and hence become unwilling to jump in, these wannabe scammers aren’t going to find a greater fool to take those tokens out of their hands and give them a nice profit.
Of course as @ameancow@lemmy.world pointed out, these scams are done from the very start for maximum profitability of those starting the scam, not for the profit of the first ones to buy into it, so often those wannabe scammers end up being the greater fools of that scam themselves.
You are absolutely right, just look at the popular investment subreddits, they don’t talk about long-term goals and successful investment strategies for retirement, etc. They talk about what the latest fast-buck is going to be, what the newest short or pump-and-dump is doing, they report on when a rug gets pulled or a bubble bursts so that their buddies can stop working in inflating it.
It’s an entire industry of scams and cons, from crypto to the stock-market broadly, it’s all about short-term rewards at any cost.
I used to work in Tech back in the late 90s, during the first bubble and up to the Tech Crash. I also worked in both Investment Finance and Tech Startups much more recently.
I can’t even begin to describe just how angry, disgusted and dissapointed this unholly intersection between Tech and Hyperspeculative-Finance of the XXI century makes me.
The whole spirit in pretty much the entire domain of Tech back in the 90s was completely different from this neverending bottomless swamp of crap we have in the supposedly innovative parts of Tech.
Ever since the sleazy slimeballs who saw from the first Tech bubble that there were massive opportunities to use Tech-mumbu-jumbo to extract money from suckers started (immediatly after the Crash) trying to pump the Net bubble back up (they even called it Web 2.0) that the old spirit of innovation for the sake of improving things of the old days in Tech was crushed and replaced by the most scammy, fraudulent, naked greed imaginable.
After my time in Finance (which, curiously, also involved a Crash in the Industry I was working in) I started describing Tech Startups as “The Even Wilder Wild West of Speculative Finance”.
After my time in Finance (which, curiously, also involved a Crash in the Industry I was working in)
A-ha! We’ve found the cause of the market crashes.
Joking aside, I was around for the dotcom bubble burst and the 2008 crash. Both were caused by wild speculation and we seemed to have learned nothing from them. I have little doubt we’re headed for another recession and it will again, be driven by speculation. We also have a problem with private equity (I call them “vulture equity”) which likes to capitalize on businesses which are struggling . They swoop in, buy up the company in a leveraged buyout, and then start extracting as much value from the company as possible. Usually this is in the real estate that the company owns. Once all of the value is extracted, the company is spun back off, saddled with the debt used to buy the company in the first place, and then it flounders until it ultimately collapses. This was the fate of companies like Sears or Red Lobster. Once a vulture equity company engages in a leveraged buyout of a company, that company is doomed.
Yeah, well, Asset Owners and the Speculators who caused the 2008 Crash got saved by Governments all around the World with public money and that was done by taking money away from those whose income comes from their Work (notice how salaries keep getting less and less able to cover living costs all the while asset prices keep beating records).
What I learned from the 2008 Crash - being right smack in the middle of the Industry which made it happen and spending the subsequent years observing what Governments were doing to “recover” from it and trying to figure out “how did this happen” - was that politicians don’t work for most people, they work for a handful of people, and when push comes to shove they’ll sacrifice the rest to make sure those few keep on accumulating riches.
The fishy speculation that played around the line separating Legal from Fraud has in the aftermath of the 2008 Crash fully became Fraud and more, once the industry figured out that politicians from the main parties had their backs, which is why we find ourselves were we are now. This was especially so in places like the US and UK were power is a duopoly which just alternates between two groups of politicians who all frequent the same social circles and send their children to the same private schools.
It’s a big group and we ain’t in it.
Fuck. Yup. I was working in industrial automation in the late 90s, and then transitioned to network engineering at a global scale. Around 2000, the entire vibe seemed to shift. I walked out just before 9/11 and am so glad to be in an entirely different industry now.
Yeah it’s such a degeneracy……
When I worked in investments, it was all about finding the best statistical model to balance returns against risk. It was fascinating how complex the models could be, and even included currency hedging to reduce the risk of exchange rates. And most importantly to also minimize trades to control costs and tax impact. This was before lightning trading: plenty of the funds were monthly trading. Those were the good old days when a better algorithm could shave points enough to stand out but everyone was on similar footing
That’s a big part of knowing when to get out. They don’t. …… or maybe they do: I don’t know if that scam is still finding enough suckers.
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“Kids, if you really want to piss off your parents, buy real estate in an imaginary place.”
Aaaaand now I have that flute part stuck in my head again
For real cash ofc.
Gonna need a bank loan, naturally.
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Solana and Ethereum are both centralized scams that have been going down vs Bitcoin for the last year, despite the bull market.
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lol yes absolutely they are. Yes the government is allowing legal scams. Yes scammers win lawsuits. Yes congress supports scams. A government stamp doesn’t make trusting some corporate CEO a good idea; it just means they paid the bribes.
“Blue chips” typically perform well, especially relative to their risk. You’ve got all the risks of Bitcoin, plus trust in a central party that needs government permission.
It’s a solution in search of a problem. Currencies are government backed because the vast majority of people have faith in their governments’ enforcement of legislation regarding use of that currency. It’s good to be able to make class action lawsuits against scammers and most in the population will choose anything government backed if they have the option.
So if the goal is to get away from government backing, who do you give control to? In the case of a blockchain, it’s the parties with the majority of the “proof of XYZ” creation hardware. Which are not normal people. Then there’s the possibility of developers of a blockchain choosing to rewrite the ledger, causing splits. So you didn’t invent some unmodifiable currency either, the control lies with people who you probably should trust even less than the parties managing EUR/USD.
Then, it’s incredibly energy inefficient. Especially proof of work is a ridiculous waste of computational resources, at least tie the problem to something NP-hard with actual value instead of whatever reverse hashing search is usually done. But wasting resources is the design of the system anyways.
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People don’t care because crypto is literally a made up thing.
Sure, people make money off of it. But people make money off loads of things. That doesn’t change that it’s literally a made up currency that has tons of people scamming the shit out of people for a quick buck.
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🙄
Sure bud. Act like your digital picture is the same as a painting someone made.
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it’s the parties with the majority of the “proof of XYZ” creation hardware. Which are not normal people.
Originally the idea was that it WOULD be normal people using their own CPU cycle time to secure the chain and mint new blocks. Even then, as long as no one party holds the majority of hash power, the incentive is to support the security of the coin rather than subvert it. The moment that changes is the moment that Bitcoin dies, because no one will be able to trust it any more - which also means there is an incentive to make sure there are enough competing BTC farms.
there’s the possibility of developers of a blockchain choosing to rewrite the ledger, causing splits.
The blockchain is upheld by the combination of the developers and the miners. If the developers aren’t acting in good faith and the miners don’t like it, they don’t move to the new chain. Sure, you get a split, but odds are one of them is going to die.
Near the peak of the NFT craze I was gifted (as part of an initial mint) an NFT, which I turned around and immediately sold for $3k. Last I looked it was worth about $200. That’s the extent of my experience with NFTs.
Still surprised it’s worth $200. I thought it’d be worth a few cents or maybe a few dollars at most
It’s worth what someone will actually pay for it. I suspect that $200 is the price at which it is listed…
I see what’s going on here! You’re confusing market value labor value and use value. Typical noob mistake. Clearly ypu dont understand the real value of an nft!
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made money and got out so cant rlly complain tbh
damn those 17 downvotes are so salty it’s making my monitor bezels corrode
Well its fine, I understand where it comes from. But like NFTs were obviously gambling and for anyone making money someone had to lose it. Since the whole concept was and is pretty degenerate tho pretty much everyone knew what they signed up for so its not like I made anyone grandmas lifesavings. U can call me an idiot for having done that but at most I took some bigger idiots money so the ur part of the problem talk is a stretch imo. I wasnt doing it on eth either which at the time was the most inefficient chain when it comes to using energy to run. Tbf tho. I wasnt part of any solution to any problem either, that much is clear. (obviously Im just talking about having bought and sold NFTs btw, never made one never sold one to a first buyer I was just trading them for a time)
I remember reading a proposal how music artists could somehow use nfts as digital record keeping so when digital tickets are resold they could get a percentage of the sale each time it was resold. Making more money for artists and disinsentivising resale but you know ticket places would never let it happen. I’m sure you could do it without nfts but it seemed like a really great idea.
I’m sure you could do it without nfts
Yup! There were no technical problems that weren’t already solved, but NFT bros made grand claims unrelated to reality.
Techbros are still doing it. In this thread even, and people are still falling for it judging by their upvotes.
Every ticket scheme for NFTs fails because of a simple reason: contract law. Venues don’t stick with TicketMaster because they like it. TicketMaster’s store front doesn’t have any magic technology; a room of overcaffinated fresh CS grads could recreate it in a weekend of binge coding.
Venues stick with TicketMaster because they are contractually obliged to do so. NFTs do not and cannot change that legal reality.
I quite enjoyed supporting artists like Ame72 and Sabat by purchasing their digital artwork. 🤷♀️
I don’t see how it’s much different than Patreon. You pay creators that you enjoy, you get a digital collectable, and access to discord of you care about that sort of thing. NFTs allowed many people to do art full-time.
yeah exactly I still haven’t heard a single explanation of what makes NFTs a “scam”. People just shout that word and expect you to accept it. Seriously, which part of a consensual transaction between two well-informed parties qualifies as a “scam”?
There is undoubtedly a huge number of rugpulls, vaporware, empty promises, and outright scams with NFTs. But this is true of any nascent technology, any sort of project like this. The reason so many people know about it and are aware about it is because of the permissionless and open nature of crypto which allows people to see these projects in realtime.
IMO it’s neither good nor bad. It’s just nascent tech. For an artist like Sabet, it’s obviously good! It gets people exposed to his art, with a low entry barrier, and allows people to support him. For people like Trump, it’s pretty clearly bad, and it just allows him to scam/rugpull people easier and faster.
You didnd’t purchase their artwork though. The fact that you still haven’t figured that out says a lot about what kind of customerbase was needed to get NFTs off the ground.
So if somebody buys my digital photos off Deviant art, they didn’t “purchase my photos”? Geez, I better go call that TV studio that used some of my work and let them know they got scammed.
When I hired a wedding photographer 15 years ago and got the digitals, did I get scammed?
Are you against people buying anything digital or just the underlying technological platform?
It’s having a legal contract that passes the intellectual property to your name and a Legal System backing that contract with the power and willingness to enable the use of Force to confiscate the property of contract breakers, that give you de facto ownership rights.
That’s the essential difference between your example and NFTs.
Thinking that a mere “ownership certificate” which is not legally recognized is “ownership” is just a variant of the Sovereign Citizen delusions only with “magical” bytes instead of “magical” words - techno-magical mumbu jumbo for people who can’t understand that symbols not backed by enforcement structures mean nothing in a society.
An “ownership stamp”, no matter how technically advanced, which is not recognized or backed by a Legal System gives you de facto no ownership rights because nothing will back you up when others disregard your claims of ownership asserted by that “ownership stamp” and if you yourself try to enforce it that Legal System will likely turn against you depending on how you try and enforce yourself your ownership claims (for example if you do something legally deemed Theft or Assault it’s you who ends up in facing the might of the Legal System).
That’s the essence of the complete total idiocy of thinking NFTs are ownership: ownership is not merely having a “certificate of ownership”, it’s there being societal structures that recognize your ownership and will back you up when you want to assert ownership rights. In fact, most ownership does not require any certificates, digital or otherwise, just an entry in a database of the appropriate Legal Registrar of ownership.
As I said, thinking it’s some made up certificate of ownership that gives you ownership rights is Sovereign Citizen “logic”
bruh it’s really not that difficult. Fan sends money to artist. Fan receives some magical bytes in return. Could fan have right clicked and downloaded the artwork without paying? Of course. But fan wants to support artist. Because fan likes artist’s art. It’s how any digital “marketplace” works, NFT or not. All this “legal system” and “ownership” and “legal registrar” nonsense you’re pulling up is completely irrelevant. You’re reading too much into it.
“Bruh”, your problem is exactly that in your mind it’s all simple even though you live in a Society right next to millions of people and you somehow think that what you believe because you read it on a website gives you “rights” that those millions of people will respect just because you say so.
It’s like thinking that a toilet needs not be connected to a sewage line to handle your shit or the electricity for your house appears by merelly having power lines rather than coming via them from where it gets generated via a complex infrastruture to get it to you.
It’s the Soverign Citizen kind of take on the world, and the results are pretty much the same for techno-deluded kind of Soverign Citizen as for the document-deluded ones: nobody else respects your claims to having certain rights hence the only worth you can extract from such “certificates” is from finding and swindling even greater fools to sell those “certificates” to.
You’re putting words in my mouth. I didn’t say shit about “rights” and “respect”. The guy in the original comment mentioned nothing about it either. You said that. You’re bringing this idea into the conversation and then arguing against yourself. Seriously, what is your endgame here?
I genuinely have no clue what you think I “read on a website” about NFTs. To set the record straight, my understanding of NFTs is that you have a ledger where your public key is associated with a
tokenshort string of characters, and every computer participating in the ledger agrees on that. that’s it. All of these ideas of “ownership” and “rights” and societal analogies is bullshit you brought into the conversation.As per another poster higher up this thread:
You didnd’t purchase their artwork though. The fact that you still haven’t figured that out says a lot about what kind of customerbase was needed to get NFTs off the ground.
You seem to have chosen a very specific, very “curious” cutoff point for contextual relevance of responses not alligned with your opinion in this thread in order to claim my response to you is some wild unrelated “bullshit”.
Further, you responded to my comment criticising NFTs as a means of guaranteing ownership, with an example usage that has nothing to do with ownership and were NFTs do literally nothing useful at all (you can just send the money to the artist if indeed your objective is to “contribute to the artist” no NFTs required), so per your own logic your post is bullshit you brought into the conversation.
Your example provides no support for the idea being discussed by everybody else in this thread, so either that post of yours is bullshit you brought into the conversation (since it goes out on a tangent and doesn’t support the points I was replying to or made in my comment) or you wanted to support the idea that NFTs are useful and failed miserably and now are just criticizing me for following you down your irrelevant tangent to the points being discussed in the thread.
Seriously, what is your endgame here?
Seriously, what is your endgame here?
They just really really really hate NFTs/crypto for some reason. I can’t imagine ever getting so worked up about a technology like people do today about crypto. I want to support an artist so apparently I need to have a PhD in contract and IP law in order to do so.
It’s having a legal contract that passes the intellectual property to your name and a Legal System backing that contract with the power and willingness to enable the use of Force to confiscate the property of contract breakers, that give you de facto ownership rights.
Here’s an excerpt of the “Holder Rights” explicitly outlined from a very very very large and well known music artist who released music NFTs:
“[Redacted] token holders have full commercial rights to their unique version. They can remix and release it, play it publicly, or use it in other content like videos.”
“[Redacted] includes the ability to render full quality audio files and to render individual tracks as Stems to make edits and remixes easy.”
“Holders do not have exclusive rights, meaning they cannot remove their version from [redacted] or stop it from showing up in NFT marketplaces like OpenSea.”
“If you do use a version commercially, you should not sell the token. If you do, you will transfer the rights and may need to obtain permission from the new owner to coninue your use.”
“Every buyer will be responsible for their own copyright claims.”
Do you think this would hold up in a court of law?
That’s pretty much a standard non-exclusive commercial licensing contract, same as you get from places that license musice for commercial use like Envato - it makes that token a tranferable license for that work with the licensing rights defined there and no more than that, and legally gives you no ownership (i.e. the copyright being yours) of those works.
Per those terms the copyright owner (which is not the person who has ownership of the token, as per those terms that only gives them a commercial license to use that work) can license it to other people under whatever terms they want.
Oh, and all of that is backed by Copyright laws, not by whatever technical solution was used for the NFT - they could’ve just as easilly used a seashell or a piece of paper as ownership “token”.
If you bought an NFT which is a token for this work as per these contract terms, thinking you own the music, you’ve been had and should’ve had a lawyer check it out first.
So your chief complaint is mainly a semantical one related to the terms outlined, and not the underlying platform. Got it. Thanks for the responses. ☺️
You did not make the case that NFTs add value over a standard non-exclusive commercial licensing contract with your example and instead showed us an NFTs which even when actually backed by a contract does not provide “ownership”, thus confirming my point and that of previous posters that NFTs by themselves don’t given ownership.
Beyond that, if you think legally defined intellectual contract language elements like “ownership” and “licensing” are just semantics, you’re going to be sorelly dissapointed when trying to assert your ownership of those assets.
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