When they were first blowing up, I thought sure, I’ll turn a couple old unreleased tracks of mine into NFTs. I signed up to some site I forget the name of, uploaded the tracks, and then then found out I had to pay something like $500 a track to turn them into NFTs. It was a pretty duh moment for me. Of course the content doesn’t mean shit, it’s just the money. I never paid them a dime and deleted my stuff.
When I first heard of NFTs I thought the media was encoded within the blockchain - in that case sure, I wouldn’t necessarily buy one but I understand how that’d be interesting.
Ten minutes later when I was told they are just proof of purchase that points to a URL hosting your monkey image somewhere, I knew they were a total scam
Okay but how are nft’s different from the deed to a house? Checkmate, filthy commie.
Now that i have defeated you in single combat, you must tell me the seed phrase for your largest bitcoin wallet.
hunter2
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
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? 😊
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??
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.
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.
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.
The “next Bitcoin” has just been Bitcoin every time. Right now is its umpteenth bubble.
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.
I had too much money once. I bought some nft Reddit avatars for like 2k and it is still there somewhere but I am too lazy to even check on that
It’s somewhere there some kind of nft safe they have or something like that. It’s all very clunky.
I think I had to note down some access code at some point or something like that, it’s all too tiring to remember and unclear if there is anything you can do with it
what the fuck
It’s just money right, it’s not like there’s a shortage.
At some point it only goes up and up, multiplicating like some kind of sex starved horny rabbits. Population of which you are informed monthly by some clean but boring site: -0.67%, 2.27%, -1.23%… which for some reason is trying hard to appeal to you and that fake tone seeps through every second word on their butt licking reports.
Please use our services, oh maam please. We are here for you please use us
a Mitch Hedberg variant
NFT’s used to be stupid.
They still are, but they used to be, too.
We will need an immutable signature for content at some point moving forward since AI is going to be so prevalent and it will be easy to make fraudulent clips, podcasts etc. NFTs would be perfect for this.
What would be the advantage over current digital signatures?
The idea of NFT was not as much a proof of authenticity, but more like a way to sell and but those signatures.
In the context of AI I don’t see an advantage to having a easy way to sell your private key sort of speaking.
Amazing.
For me it’s usually the Bitcoin guy from the “If Google was a guy” sketches
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)
Pretty much all crypto bro stuff, honestly
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
Millenials had beanie babied wut
I actually would say it’s harder to say now.
It was easy at first because it was obvious.
But NFTs are still a thing… so even though it’s still a scam, it now makes you question humanity.
Pyramid schemes are still a thing too.
Amway and Herbalife should have been shut down decades ago. But the DeVos family made a lot of money on Amway.
The SEC should have intervened on crypto and NFTs, but again, it’s qui bono. Things that help rich people grift are always allowed.
Had Hillary won they might have. Was never going to happen with Trump 1.
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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.
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.
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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 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.
Pump and dump deep state. It’s still happening. New sucker born every minute.
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.
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.
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.
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.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
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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
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.
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
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.
