I see this and wish I’d taken advantage of it for the exact period of time. I feel like the next UnderArmour/Apple/Google is hidden somewhere in all of this AI development. Just a question of knowing where to place bets.
It’s like bitcoin. A shitty idea I wanted no part of yet I wish I’d been willing to take advantage of at the time it took off.
So many crazy opportunities I passed up. Many of them turned out to be bad. Some, like Bitcoin, if you get out at the right time, you’re set for life.
The way money-laundering works, you take ill-begotten funds and somehow churn it into legal tender in ways that can’t be traced back to the source. Another angle is to create corporate entities that show loss against gains, so you can deduct and don’t have to pay taxes on your windfall profits.
In the olden days, these were physical, degrading assets. Like strip malls, real-eestate, and dodgy, money-losing businesses that somehow stuck around forever. At the end, you were stuck with physical entities you couldn’t unload.
Crypto and NFT were just digital variations of the same financial model, minus the hassle of having to manage the property.
How could it possibly be worth more than pennies?
This is the question!
Isn’t it pretty obvious this was 99% a money laundering scheme?
That’s easy to say with the benefit of hindsight in 2026. However, back in 2021, it was easy to say without the benefit of hindsight.
I think it was even easier to say in 2021, because more people knew about it and the scam was even more obvious. Now, in 2026, most people’s hindsight doesn’t go back that far, it was quickly forgotten as it should be, and people are like “huh? NFT?”
The only good thing out of NFTs was that I learned what fungible means.
Is a thing with null value fungible?
Had me in the first half, not gonna lie.
Nah, A large portion of it was idiots attempting to lose money as quickly as possible.
If it wasn’t in the beginning, it was after Folding Ideas/Dan Olson released “Line Goes Up”.
Only to people with brains.
Oh no! I’m shocked!
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.
AI wasn’t the NFT killer, right click > saveas killed it at the very moment of conception.
Digital scarcity is a complete joke.
Sure you can copy the image, but you can’t have the same machine-readable hash indicating ownership in my private system!
Dramatic? I found this an entertaining example of dumbness 🍿🍿🍿
For sure. This is comedy, not drama.
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.
Not absolutely everything in crypto is a scam, though 99% of it is, and I will definitely agree with you there. But there is 1% that is actually trying to do something useful, and you’ve got to be able to find that 1% and not throw it out with the bath water.
There are great uses for crypto, just like there were great uses for Ithica_hours. A place holder for goods and services without physical constraint is a useful idea.
But it wont work. Because people want to leverage that to make fiat. They don’t care about usefulness, actually earning it, or trading for it.
They want to get some, hold it, and sell it back for their fiat. Because of that exchanges came into being so they could capture some of the wealth in the process. And from then on it was never going to be useful. Just a way to hope the next sucker would buy what you had.
Since the government hates Monero so much, that’s actually not as big of a problem with Monero because people want to earn it and trade it for goods and services in the real world. Also, people who use Monero are incredibly against centralized exchanges and would like to see it banned from every single centralized exchange on Earth so that decentralized exchanges would be the only place you could obtain it or through permissionless atomic swaps and peer to peer. The Monero community also mocks number go up people and calls them state plants.
yeah, the cryptoleftists community has found some decent actual use
Link please! I’m very skeptical but hope to be wrong.
I’d wager even the 1% is the stereotypical “solution in search of a problem”. Seems to be a reoccurring theme as of late in the tech industry.
Having a currency not backed by a government or different currency is actually something the world could benefit from. Iranian currency was backed by USD, the US caused a shortage of USD there, and their currency value dropped to under 3% of it’s former value. 90 Million people.
That said, I think most of us have only ever used crypto to buy drugs off the internet.
Yeah, but a currency practically needs a military and an economy to back it.
Who is going to stop me from fucking with the bitcoin supply if I own the US economy?
That’s the point of crypto - unless you can alter 51% of the blockchain, you can’t.
You misunderstand, if I own the GDP of a world power, what’s preventing me from buying a ton of Bitcoin and fucking with the supply that way?
Crypto nowadays looks like a pump and dump free for all.
How is buying the asset fucking with the supply?
If you mean hoarding it, that’s pretty much all Bitcoin is good for.
Yeah, it also needs to derive its value from somewhere. Any stable nation’s fiat derives its value from the fact that the government is believed trustworthy in matters of printing money and that in order to deal with that government you have to use that currency. An Australian could do all their financial life in etherium assuming everyone takes and offers it, right up until tax time where they have to convert a lot of ETH values into AUD, then trade some ETH for AUD in order to pay taxes. And if they receive any money from their government you bet your ass they aren’t being given ETH. If they trust the Australian government even a little they’re probably not jumping through those hoops.
the 1% is the people who say “well, sure, 99% is a scam, but theres a legit 1% thats totally real!”
Thre might be a recognizable item of food in a turd, but I’m still not going to eat it.
Ethereum has the potential to carry real world assets on its chain. Why does an share of stock have to go through a clearing house when it could be an L2 on ethereum? A company having a total of 1 million shares is no different from a L2 coin having a total number of 1 million coins. They can even be fractional too.
Literally every cryptocurrency supports this. But if the real world assets can be seized with a court order, then what’s the point of a blockchain and not just a legally compliant database?
but like, man, like… its totally new, like, and like, totally amazing man. you just, like, cant comprehend, man!
It’s like, the public record, but without the government to enact or enforce and on your computer
Bitcoin doesn’t support this. It’s what is being mirrored, yes. But, Ethereum is kinda like the distributed operating system/network that could/would allow 24 hour trading without having a clearing-house middleman.
You’re talking about real-world assets carried on-chain, right? Bitcoin has supported this for a very very long time.
The true libertarians and anarchists in the room would call out the fact that they are attempting to build a world where governments don’t run courts because governments don’t exist and that all courts would be arbitration courts and decentralized and run by the community. If I have a problem with you, I tell my arbitrator about it, and my arbitrator tells you that I have a problem with you. If you don’t like my arbitrator, then you choose your own arbitrator, and if I don’t like the arbitrator you choose, then the arbitrators choose a third party arbitrator that they both agree on, and we agree to be bound by what that arbitrator says.
Edit: If you are willing to watch a 22 minute video, this might be of interest to you.
What’s the point of an arbirator when there’s no means to enforce compliance with their decision? And what could that system actually be? Functionally, it’d be identical to a government.
I’m assuming you didn’t watch the video, because it did discuss that.
Alice, who is a subscriber of Dawn Defense, was murdered by Bill, who is a subscriber of Tanner Justice. Dawn Defense is pro-death penalty for murderers and Tanner Justice is not. Therefore, each company does a calculation to figure out how many users and how much revenue they will lose if their side is not upheld and the side that is likely to lose more pays the other side to stand down. In the case of the video, the assumption is that if Dawn Defense loses, they will lose one million currency units worth of customers, where if Tanner Justice loses, they will lose 500,000 currency units. So, Dawn Defense pays Tanner Justice 800,000 currency units to stand down, which is more than the 500,000 they would have lost, and less than the 1 million that Dawn would lose if they weren’t able to enforce the death penalty on Bill.
These stand-down arrangements would be known beforehand, and therefore, when Bill subscribes to Tanner Justice, he would be informed that if he murders a client of dawn defense, that he will not be protected from the death penalty.
If your organization is decentralized, then its assets can’t be seized by a court order. For example, darknet market admins (arbitrators) and their drug dealers don’t even know who each other are. They’ve had a polycentric legal system for years.
But corporate stock remains centralized. They have a known headquarters with a known board of trustees. Their assets aren’t carried on-chain; only some guy’s promise to those assets.
My point is that an anarchist economy needs to be built from the ground up, circumventing the state’s legal system. Slapping a blockchain on top of an already centralized system won’t make it decentralized and thus provides no benefit.
Yeah, blockchain adds nothing to an existing economy. It could be useful as a means of distributed public records between anarchist communities, but it is documentation, not ownership. Ownership is an extension of political power and grows from the same barrel of a gun
Oh, absolutely. But that’s because the way we’ve always done the stock market is through centralized systems. If a company were to be formed today and only ever issue their stock tokens on a decentralized system such as Ethereum, then the Ethereum system would be the final arbiter of who does and does not have shares in that company.
Blcokchains aren’t even worth a shit as implementations of a distributed ledger.
There is no provable way to show that any claim of ownership on Ethereum is legitimate, unless that person has some real-world proof of ownership, in which case the Ethereum link adds no value. It’s just another step with another middleman.
In today’s world, we are moving from analog systems to digital systems, and therefore, physical proof of ownership supersedes electronic proof of ownership.
If a company is digital native and issues their shares on a blockchain without ever issuing any kind of analog shares, then the electronic proof would supersede the physical proof, no matter what happened.
Say Alice has a hair salon that’s called Alice’s hair salon, and she issues one million tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, and each token represents one one millionth of the company, Alice’s hair salon. Well, since she never issued any stock on the analog systems, the Ethereum system would be the final arbiter of who does and does not own any of those Alice’s hair salon tokens.
The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.
In case anybody sees this and doesn’t know the context, this is the note that was published in the Genesis block of the Bitcoin blockchain, Satoshi wanted to engrave forever the fact that at this time the chancellor was on the brink of second bailout for banks. It was a call-out against the fiat system, and it’s one of the best call-outs in history. and will be there forever more.
If you happen to have an original copy of this newspaper, it is a genuine artifact, and you can make absolute tons of money on it. No bullshit.
Based on this headline and the fact that Satoshi mentioned digital cash in the white paper as much as he did, you can clearly tell that he was frustrated with the fiat system and all the excesses that came with it and wanted to create a whole different system that was out of the hands of governments and corporations. He came close to succeeding but didn’t quite finish the job because he couldn’t figure out a way to add privacy into his ledger, which makes the entire thing completely transparent to law enforcement and government crooks.
However, on April 13th, 2014, the final puzzle piece was added with the launch of Monero, which has a fully private blockchain that does not have sender, receiver, or amounts being shown.
If you ever happen to read this comment, Satoshi, thank you for your great work. We will be forever in debt to you.
The fact that there is corruption in the financial system doesn’t automatically mean that every other system is honest.
Oh, for sure. I saw another video somewhere yesterday that said you needed like seven pillars for a decentralized society. Decentralized communication, food, contracts, law, physical manufacturing, energy, and money. While I agree with that list, I think that an eighth one should be added, and that would be education. You might be able to fit education under communication, but I feel as though it doesn’t properly fit there.
What do you mean by honest in this context? Both Bitcoin and Monero prevent bailouts, they’re FOSS, and they’ve been working smoothly for years.
The silver lining is that after the obligatory exploitation by grifters, every new technology of this caliber finally gets a more positive use in our lifes. Maybe somewhat naive, but I think we (ie. our societies) have payed ~50% of the tuition fee as far as crypto is concerned. So hopefully we’ll be able to absorb the tech in our collective lives soon.
Ps: Different topic, but using the same metaphor for AI, I’m afraid we’re just at the begin of its initial fallout.
I think the rise of Monero over Bitcoin is a very positive sign. Since it has privacy, the government absolutely cannot stand the fact that it exists, and therefore, institutions don’t want to touch it. This means the “number go up”, “to the moon”, and “compliance”, shmucks are all driven away in horror and you are left with the real core who want to see a better money in a digital world. If that sounds interesting, you might want to listen to “darknet Market Maximalism” a manifesto by xenu. You can listen to the audio version of it on YouTube.
Edit: I’ll save you the trouble. Here’s the link directly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ogNg20rGTU
every new technology of this caliber finally gets a more positive use in our lifes
Yeah, sure, that’s why we’re all riding Segways.
The reality is that quite a lot of new technologies have no significant real-life use case and vanish without a trace.
I tried to make clear that I’m talking about tech with potentially significant impact, case in point: blockchain. Are you suggesting that a quirqy twowheeler is somehow on the same level?
Unless trolling is all you’re about, I can recommend refraining from such offhand dismissive remarks. Sarcasm has its use, but rin an anonymous online discussion it is easy to misunderstand. It does not contribute to a meaningful exchange of ideas.
Who could have predicted this? Literally impossible without hindsight and that’s the revisionist history I’m sticking to.
This is the least surprising thing ever
That’s why I divested to Labubu dolls and TSLA
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.
Also drugs.
I always said as long as crypto can be used to buy drugs, it will have value.
When everything we know in the world is gone and we’re using rocks to make spears again, people will still want drugs, the value is eternal.
I mean it’s also really really good at money laundering and other financial securities scams that are otherwise illegal in real currency. IDK why OP is being so dismissive of that.
As long as the gov refuses to regulate it, it’s going to be useful for crimes. On the off chance we ever get a government willing to actually do anything but war crimes and graft, regulating it would destroy a lot of its utility and value.
I think it’s an exaggeration of its crime utility. Normal money is king for crime.
Normal money can get you a visit from the SEC when you do securities fraud with it. Has that ever happened with a crypto pump and dump?
Yes.
SBF wasn’t doing securities fraud with only crypto, if that’s what you’re thinking of. Also it was a pyramid scheme and not a pump and dump.
Congrats, now you understand fiat currency. It only has value because we agree on it.
No. I mean you can get all philosophical and say that everything has value only because that’s a human concept, but thats not really something I would answer to.
Fiat has value because it’s enforced. Because we have institutions that enforce it and because all of our lives are intertwined with it. We buy food with it and we are paid with it. It’s everywhere. It doesn’t make it immune to manipulation and fraud and crime, but we can take legal action because law is also intertwined with the same system.
Crypto is , with a couple of exceptions, a really terrible casino.
Fiat has value because the government demands taxes in it. If you don’t pay your taxes, they put you in jail.
As opposed to the USD, which is backed by nothing, and therefore has no underlying value, but is not gambling for some reason?
The USD is backed by a state who demands their taxes be paid in their currency, ensuring there will always be demand for said currency.
Also, literally, tons of gold
This is also why people who complain about how “our tax dollars” are spent are missing the point. Their tax dollars don’t fund the government or any of its activities. Taxes are just an inflationary control measure; money is created when the government spends it.
Under a grand. Is there anyone really stupid enough to think this is still worth anything at all?
I would actually pay like $100 to say I own the EFT some moron paid millions of dollars for. I’ve bought dumber things. I paid real money for a 100 trillion dollar zimbabwe bill that is completely worthless. Great for cocaine! I’ve also paid hundreds of dollars for 1 night of cocaine, dozens of times, and have nothing to show for any of them.
Pro tip: don’t do cocaine while you still can choose.
Great advice, but I’ve been doing cocaine rarely for decades. Think I’ll be right thanks.
The dude literally has a 100 trillion dollars, it’s fine
Tell that to Whitney Houston.
You can just say you did that without having to pay the money, the only thing you’d be missing is a website (that probably won’t be around much longer) confirming you did that. That’s kinda why NFTs didn’t work.
Pro tip: lie to the people around you about stupid stuff.
The real LPT is always in the comments.
Yeah i was thinking that the other day when they were talking about an 11 million dollar EFT now valued at 100 USD.
I was like, shit, I’d pay 100 USD for that one.
T’would be funny if this kind of demand drove the prices back up. Not to money laundering levels, but like to like $180 or something.
Plus imagine if another bubble came and some donkey was willing to pay a ton for it again for some dumb reason.
A 100 dollar meme like that would be worth it IMO.
feels akin to my GME shares, I just wanted to be included in the fun LOL.
BRB gonna go buy all the rump coins from the bag holders.
The existence of people stupid enough to pay for them is what makes NFTs worth something in the first place
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.
They can be used to launder money though.
That’s why art is so inflated. It’s used as a means to launder, because it’s the value is so arbitrary.
I need to come up with my own scam to rinse rich idiots.
Ok - hear me out.
We get idk 1000 of us poors to buy some cheap land in the Midwest. Up in Appalachia.
We sell “Rapture Survival Communities”
They’re $999/month and you’ll get a hidden bungalow community complete with bunker. We’ll fill it with doctors and pastors and birthing women.
BUT YOU CANT KNOW THE LOCATION UNTIL THE RAPTURE HAPPENS. You don’t want any pesky liberals finding it and gaying up the place with their liberal demonic child sacrifice transness.
We will deliver coordinates via analog radio and Morse code once the rapture has started.
By business plan makes Sam Altman hard in his butt:
- Collect money
- Don’t build anything.
- repeat
When they come screaming for proof and receipts and refunds… Just gaslight them and buy a politician.
If I were an “angel”, I’d go with you. I like the cut of your jib. You have what it takes. If only 1) me business angel 2) you pitch-deck. We would clean-up the business space.
Unfortunately for you you don’t have what it takes. You need to be a proper psychopath to scam others.
This. The worst thing for any salesman to have is scruples.
Sometimes i observe so many ways to get easy money and don’t have to hard work, than i remember than my parents raised my scruples and moral… Would be so easy if i wasn’t
The best scams are either holistic/psychic stuff or Hi-fi Audio.
A good scam is all about finding a way to bypass bs detectors. Appealing to greed or fear while adding a sense of urgency are the classic ones for good reason. But you’ve got others like appealing to in group/out group dynamics, distrust of institutions, ego, desired self image, laziness, carelessness so much more. You’ve also got those selecting to trigger anyone with a bs detector to only spend time on those without one.
High Fi audio is actually legit to a point. Over $300 (well, $400 now with tariffs) is when the scam begins
Not necessarily. For headphones it can go higher. I’m currently looking at hifiman unveiled.
If you’re talking about the Susvara unveiled or whatever they’re currently 15k aud. That is fucking wild.
Lol no, that is entirely different category, those are essentially limited edition engineering pieces. The consumer one is Ananda unveiled, which in my local shop goes for €460.
Oh thank goodness. Cool, I’ll check those out. I’m interested in getting some audio-cans for my head!
This sequence of comments has me cracking up.
“I need a thing to make suckers out of morons”
…
“You should sell them audiophile shit”
…
“Well… some audiophile shit is ok… up to point… after that, you’re def a sucker!”
…
“Actually… you’re not a sucker at all if you spend a bunch of money on this shit. Here, take my money!”
Wanna start a headphone company with me?
I get what you’re saying, but there are basically only 3 companies whose headphones are worth 300-600€. Said companies took decades, mountain of innovations and patents to get where they are now.
If you can actually get that kind of immersion and quality cheaper - I’m all ears. Literally
No judgement intended, and I agree! Trust me when I say that I have an unhealthy amount of money “invested” in headphones and amplifiers. I saw way too much of myself in both sides of that comments thread to not laugh.
I’m working on the grift of all gifts, if you want in, you can buy shares of my grift for $100 each.
Wanna help me convince maga that citrus makes people gay? I think we could solve a lot with that.
And if you don’t trust this guy, I offer grift insurance for only 15% of expected value!
Add “AI Agent” to something everyone’s doing like “Tooth brushing AI Agent.”
