Also worth noting. The Bored Ape Yaht Club NFTs (in the thumbnail) were released by 4chan trolls with Nazi symbolism hidden in some of them. This was the most successful NFT project of them all.
I need to come up with my own scam to rinse rich idiots.
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.
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.
Unfortunately for you you don’t have what it takes. You need to be a proper psychopath to scam others.
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
This. The worst thing for any salesman to have is scruples.
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.
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.
Ya’ll are fucking stupid. There is no fall of nfts and they aren’t useless. If there is an authority who recognizes the nft, then it has the utility value of the authority. End of story. It doesn’t matter if some people traded them for outrageous amounts of money and it has nothing to do with the ability to copy a picture. All it does is tie a digital item to a hash to an owner on a ledger, for purposes of authentication. If a hash of a monkey picture gets you on a yacht, then if you don’t have one you aren’t getting on that yacht. In the future, if the nft of your house deed isn’t in your wallet, then if a judge looking at a specific ledger says you don’t own your house, you don’t own it.
A yacht full of NFT owners is just about the last place in this universe that I’d want to be.
First time bagholding?
Top shelf sarcasm if my pallet is correct
I don’t have any nfts as I don’t have a personal use-case. If an authority adopts nft for any of my assets however, yeah I’d get one. For instance transacting a deed can cost a lot, but an nft would be 10-100x less.
That feels wildly unlikely. I’ll use two transfers of property to argue my point: car titles and house deeds. In both cases it isn’t possession alone of the document, including signature of transfer that legitimizes it.
I have to go to a government office in order to complete the transfer a car title. It’s not expensive, with the American state I grew up in charging either $100 if you use the fast and privatized version, or $2 if you file through the government office. This can’t be replaced by an NFT because it includes government inspections and requires a notary confirm the seller’s signature.
House deed transfers on the other hand, are a massive expensive pain in the ass. Why? Protections. Houses are expensive, they’re the largest asset that the average person can expect to hold, and in addition they’re a residency that can be bad. If you can con someone on either side of that transaction, someone has, and many methods are now protected against. Furthermore, because of this dual nature of a house as a residence and a particularly large financial asset, people not on the deed may have rights to it whether by marriage or through financial vehicles like leins. Additionally, the house sits on land which the government registers ownership of as one of the core duties of governance. The deed transfer is expensive because it has to be audited to ensure you don’t find out later that the seller wasn’t allowed to sell the house in the first place.
So now, let’s compare this to a transfer on a blockchain. The blockchain ensures trustless (except of the system and that the system is acting with authority that extends into meatspace) verification that a transfer occurred from account a to account b. It does not ensure that account a did so willingly. It does not ensure that the legitimate owner of account a is the one to do it. It does not ensure that account a or b are able to ever access their account again. It does not ensure account b consented to receipt. It does not have a means to verify unnamed stakeholders. It does not give half a shit about the law. It does not contain an escrow period in which everyone can walk away. It more or less functions like a notary, but better in some ways (trustlessness) and worse in others (notaries actually check that you are who you say you are).
I guess what I’m really saying here, is that if my government would be so foolish as to make house deeds nfts which contain the full legitimacy of the transfer process, then I’d be demanding my credit union offer a service of taking care of that for me, because the last thing I want is to be hacked out of my house, or lose my right to the land my house sits on in a fire or robbery, or forget the password to owning my house. All of these are ways in which people have lost a huge amount of cryptocurrency.
So it wasn’t sarcasm then?
It’s just a technology even though people equate it with wildly overpriced art you can copy and paste, which is naive and reductive.
That was the most goddamn awful thing ever seen. Where are those shitheads who first sold the fucking idea?
This is the least surprising thing ever
That’s why I divested to Labubu dolls and TSLA
If you weren’t using them to launder money for a criminal enterprise, then you were doing them wrong.
…
doing them wrongfalling for a scam.
The whole NFT thing was one giant pump and dump.
Its not worth a single cent in reality
Everyone comment how much did they lose on NFTs.
I will start: $0.
Also I made: 0$
I found value in shitting on people buying them. $0 monetary gain, but at least $10 in schadenfreude.
I trolled people by setting their NFT as my avatar in the chat rooms they were in. Im going to value that at $100.
Best use of an NFT I’ve ever heard of!
I’ve been watching a lot of Antiques Roadshow clips and I imagined one of the appraisers doing a valuation of your shenanigans.
“You bought this magnificent piece sillyness when and for how much?”
“oh I just copypasted it to my profile for no money at all”
“Well that was very good deal indeed, because on in todays money the entertainment value alone is in the hundreds of pounds.”
Better hope they don’t sue you for copyright infringement.
/s
My favorite bit was how basically none of the NFTs included copyright ownership. Like, if it was a quick and easy way to publicly deal in copyright ownership, maybe pointing to a .gov site showing the transfer of ownership to the holder of that specific nft then it would actually be useful and maybe even worth something. But nah, they were treating digital assets like physical paintings and hoping rarity of an infinitely copiable object was value.
Putting a dollar figure on your schadenfreude? Do you want a block chain based “prediction market” for schadenfreude? That’s how you get a block chain based “prediction market” for schadenfreude.
Yes, as long as I’m on the receiving end of the pump and dump. In the end, I’ll only be taking money from people that clearly have too much. I’ll donate some to some good charity so it’s not a bad thing
Damn, I lost twice as much as you did.
I actually got a free NFT in some kind of sweepstakes. It’s probably worth negative money now.
It did get me 3 free drinks at a music festival so there’s like +50 bucks in value right there.
I actually made money from NOT putting any of my investment money in NFTs and instead putting it somewhere else.
Then again, from the very start the NFT mania looked like a more obvious and dumb version of the Tulip Bulb mania, so I can hardly claim great wisdom from not having put a cent in it.
$0
Isn’t it pretty obvious this was 99% a money laundering scheme?
If it wasn’t in the beginning, it was after Folding Ideas/Dan Olson released “Line Goes Up”.
Only to people with brains.
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.
Had me in the first half, not gonna lie.
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?
Nah, A large portion of it was idiots attempting to lose money as quickly as possible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Blcokchains aren’t even worth a shit as implementations of a distributed ledger.
but like, man, like… its totally new, like, and like, totally amazing man. you just, like, cant comprehend, man!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Who could have thought 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.
The dude literally has a 100 trillion dollars, it’s fine
Tell that to Whitney Houston.
Great advice, but I’ve been doing cocaine rarely for decades. Think I’ll be right thanks.
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.
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.
The existence of people stupid enough to pay for them is what makes NFTs worth something in the first place
What? You mean digital art that infinitely reproducible, can’t actually be owned, WASN’T the next big thing? Oh jeez. I hope the metaverse succeeds and if not then AI surely will RIGHT?!?!
Hey! You be fair to the NFT owners.
They never owned digital art, just a link to a specific instance of one!
Hey but this cryptographic key says that I own it because I paid made up currency units for it or something
Hey but that made up currency I worked for by burning electricity, I mean MINING it.
Hey, but the recent changes means I earned that made up currency by proving I own more than you!
OH! It’s an epeen thing! Got you! All the rich win. Congrats to them.
It’s an epeen thing!
Does that require proof of wank?
My favorite thing is there are certain NFTs that are viruses that as soon as you do ANYTHING with them, they go and transfer all of the contents of your wallet to another wallet. Even deleting them triggers this action. So if you have unknown NFTs in your wallet you can’t touch them lest they trigger this virus.
How could this not be the future of commerce?
WHAT?!? I’ve never heard of that! That’s nefarious! WOW!
I got it from a Folding Ideas video (the problem with nfts one)
But here’s a link actually detailing it https://www.gate.com/learn/articles/beware-of-unexpected-nfts-and-assets-in-your-wallet-they-could-steal-all-your-funds/7682
Edit: for those that haven’t seen the video it’s worth the 2 hour watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
