The way I read the article, the “worth millions” is the sum of the ransom demand.
The funny part is that the exploit is in the “smart” contract, ya know the thing that the blockchain keeps secure by forbidding any updates or patches.
No one is gonna buy any NFTs for millions lmao
As crazy as it sounds, some people do.
They did. For like a week last year. Then everyone realized it was a scam.
Love how the NFT hype was a big wealth transfer event. So many rich people, like wealthy oil Arabs, bought into the scam and moved so much money into artists pockets while they essentially got nothing in return.
Is there any way to confirm this? Or are there examples of artists who made a significant amount of money from NFTs? I understand its potential benefit for artists, but I mostly remember already-rich corporations (e.g. UFC) using them as another way to extract money from consumers.
Beeple made a lot
There are curated NFT auction sites where only selected artists are allowed to sell their work. And you can see for how much they sell their pieces. During the hype many sold items for thousands to tens of thousands or more. Also there is Beeple who rode the hype early from the start and he became a millionaire.
That’s not really what happened. Some people who had invested in companies that would make money if NFTs went up in value chummed the waters by buying NFTs for huge amounts, convincing a lot of people that NFTs were going to be great investments. Then celebrities with an interest in the scheme pumped up the value too.
That convinced a lot of idiots to “invest” in NFTs, then eventually the bottom fell out of the market.
As for artists, some made some money, but most of the money went into shit like “bored apes” which were algorithmically generated.
My favorite is Murakami, who after selling NFTs he made paintings after all all of them. So which one is the “original”? The actual physical painting, or the digital NFT?
Technically, the NFT. In reality, the physical. Is a lot harder to brag about your art assets if you have to log into your pc to show them off.
I do see potential use for them, but not in the way they are currently being used. I could see uses like door keys, tickets, memberships, etc being of practical value, but not stupid little pictures.
Tickets, yes, door keys, no.
Besides the obvious of your door lock needing to be connected to the internet, and that could be a problem, what else do you see as being an issue with using it for door keys?
How exactly would that work? Keep in mind that the blockchain is by necessity not secret.
Right, but all the lock is doing is checking whether you own the NFT or not. If your house was in NFT, people could see that you bought a house, but not where it was as long as it was generic like house #40000
Another question is: why would you need it for a key?
Long-established public/private keys and signatures are used in this way all the time to control access to servers around the world. No blockchain needed. Blockchain is helpful when we all need to agree on a series of events.
Homes are a nice example of where you can have an isolated system which knows what it needs to about you (e.g. a public key) without sharing or cross-checking anything with the world.
The chain would be used to establish who owns the home.
I thought of it as a good way for artists to earn a living by more tokenized artworks, but then it gets hijacked by this shit.
Im sure you dont keep up, but NFT market cap still pretty big rn at 5.5bn
I think of it like timeshare values. They’re really high …. Until you try to find someone who will actually buy it
It’s a great way to launder money.
Better than the current money laundering techniques? Using art appraisals to inflate assets and move dirty money, or straight up using banks like Deutsche or Credit Suisse (RIP) to move dirty money?
The smart criminal understands the value of diversity.
I mean yeah, it’s better to launder money using a difficult to trace digital ledger. But no, the things you mentioned won’t go away, because there’s also money in the laundering, and double dipping is the name of the game
Mmm, considering NFTs are all on transparent blockchains, I don’t know that I would choose that particular method to accomplish that.
The transparency is the feature that makes it great. I can buy drugs or whatever, and exchange you buy an NFT from me of equal value. Now when the bank comes and says “where did this >$15k transaction come from?” I can point to the blockchain and say that I sold my fancy monkey pic.
This has been a thing in the physical art world for a while, https://complyadvantage.com/insights/art-money-laundering/, this just made it easier.
Yeah, I know it’s happened for a while, but my big question would be why are you having to put your money back in the bank instead of leaving it on a blockchain such as Monero. The dollar is about the biggest scam around along with all other government fiat currencies.
Because sometimes even criminals need to buy things that aren’t illegal, I guess. And the legitimate people who have those things don’t want to play games dealing with fake internet money.
If I want to buy a jetski, the place I buy it from isn’t going to take crypto because the people that sell the parts for it don’t take crypto and the people who build it can’t pay for food in crypto.
Crypto is only useful for rug pull scams, money laundering, and black-market transactions. It’s real innovation is undoing centuries of banking regulations so that people can learn the hard way why all those regulations exist.
For now, sure. However, i will say that i have been buying food woth crypto for over a year now and havent starved yet. And if i wanted a jetski and wanted to pay in crypto i could do so. Fundamentally, crypto and banking are two totally different things because with a bank somebody holds your money. With crypto, you hold your money.
why are you having to put your money back in the bank instead of leaving it on a blockchain such as Monero.
Because my mortgage company, supermarket and power company only take real money.
The mortgage I could see being a problem. As for groceries and power, I can pay for those with crypto.
Good and services are still primarily purchased with fiat in most of the world. You need to be able to actually use it for it to be useful, so whether or not blockchain is theoretically better doesn’t matter there if there isn’t wide enough adoption.
True, thanks to the internet if the good is not immediately available in my local area for crypto i can order it online and have it delivered. Depending on exactly what the service is makes that an option too.
Hahahahahahaha!
I’m being serious when I say this: you don’t understand what you’re talking about. I know that’s dismissive, and I’m sorry.
*did
wouldn’t the above article still point out that people do?
Nope!
Seth Green has entered the chat
Those who buy art and pack it in a safe until it’s worth more?
Im glad that doesn’t work as well in digital.
They’re priced like police drug busts.
People buy them for millions or their value would not be in the millions
First, DO people buy them for millions, in the present tense? I know that people did in the past, but I thought the price on most of these took a huge hit.
Second: do people BUY them for millions, in the sense that they trade things of well-measured value (like fiat currency or gold) for coins to buy these? Or do they buy them for millions of dollars in equivalent coins that they already have, and don’t want to actually sell for real goods or money because they’d realized huge losses if they actually cashed out, so they have to keep them circulating within the blockchain to maintain a hope that they’ll return anywhere near their previous value? Because if you have 10 million dollars worth of etherium that you bought at 20 million and an NFT of questionable value, can’t you just buy and sell it to a few wallets you own to make it look like it’s recently been purchased for a few million to create the illusion of value without actually ever giving or receiving anything?
No
One of the great thing about the AI revolution is that since generating infinite number of unique random (and commonly, bad) pictures of literally anything you can think of takes only seconds, the entire concept of NFT has become completely worthless as it completely destroyed the value-from-scarcity argument. Not that it ever was a good argument to begin with.
Just because the suckers that bought them paid millions doesn’t mean that the NFTs are worth millions.
I’m worth millions, but I’m paid jack shit :(
Accurate headline:
Millions of dollars lost as NFTs worth a total of $0 stolen
There were sufficiently stupid people to pay money for NFTs. They will sufficiently stupid people around to pay the ransom.
…Been a minute since I’ve seen this fark headline meme.
Must be a real old-head if you know what fark is. me too
ITT: a handful of people starting to sweat about their NFT retirement strategy
Yeah the contract is how a few exchanges got stolen from in recent years
Lol “worth”… that word is absolutely meaningless. This chewed gum I have is “worth” $2.7 billion dollars!!!
Can’t even read the website, as the third modal, the newsletter modal, refuses to close. Yeesh.
I guess the millions are in the transaction fees
Did they steal all NFTs?
Sounds like a great way to make an insurance claim on a bunch of NFTs worth “millions” that you could not convince anyone to buy.
I never had a jpeg stolen from me.
What a time to be alive.
