Remember when NFTs sold for millions of dollars? 95% of the digital collectibles are now probably worthless.::NFTs had a huge bull run two years ago, with billions of dollars per month in trading volume, but now most have crashed to zero, a study found.

    • @merc@sh.itjust.works
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      11 year ago

      But NFTs are not necessary to make that work. The reason it has never been done wasn’t technical, it was that it simply wasn’t a good idea.

        • @merc@sh.itjust.works
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          11 year ago

          Why distributed? Ownership is ultimately up to governments, as it’s something that would be decided in a court. So, what’s the advantage to having distributed records instead of just a government database?

            • @merc@sh.itjust.works
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              11 year ago

              That distributed database exists and has been up and running for years.

              But is an environmental catastrophe and has no legal value.

              There would also be the question of which government is going to run it?

              Every government would have to run their own, because every government gets to decide ownership within their own borders. Think of patents. Who owns the worldwide international patent database? Nobody, there is no such thing because each country decides on the validity of patents within their own borders. Now, there are patent treaties and things, but fundamentally if a patent dispute happens in France, it’s the French courts who decide using the French patents database.

  • @Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Started laughing when nfts were introduced, still chuckle today.

    It’s great. Love it.

    Grab the tulips! Grab them!

  • Veraticus
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    1121 year ago

    Out of the top collections, the most common price for an NFT is now $5-$10.

    Still overpriced!

      • @jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
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        261 year ago

        We have been attributing a huge value to a metal that’s mostly remarkable for being yellow and shinny for millennia, one of the biggest investment bubbles in history was over a flower, and people thought that using a loophole to profit from the arbitrage of international reply coupons was going to last forever. Hell, people paid for fake property titles for land on the Moon and Mars. It’s not that surprising that some people think that buying a random number in a distributed database is an investment.

        • @eestileib@sh.itjust.works
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          111 year ago

          Yellow, shiny, and untarnishable/non-poisonous. The latter are very nice properties to have for jewelry, as your skin will eat away most metals over time.

          People like looking pretty, that has consistent value other than using it as a medium of exchange/ store of value.

        • @bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
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          21 year ago

          True, but to be fair, them shiny metals for the longest time were reasonably rare and couldn’t be made, and served well for a means of currency. NFTs are pretty ridiculous all things considered. People also “bought” stars too, so yeah, many will buy dumb shit.

        • @Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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          71 year ago

          Don’t forget the beanie babies, which just like NFTs were created to be scarce and be seen as an investment.

          Turned out the same as well.

        • @merc@sh.itjust.works
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          11 year ago

          remarkable for being yellow and [shiny]

          Yes, but also very rare, and effectively impossible to create or destroy.

      • @merc@sh.itjust.works
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        11 year ago

        Things only have a price when two people are willing to do the transaction.

        Say 99% of NFT owners have given up and mentally written off their NFTs as a complete loss. If the remaining 1% are selling at a 90% loss and some sucker is still buying at that 90% discount, the “average price” will be whatever those two agree on.

        This is a bit different from physical goods because those can’t just be deleted out of existence. If someone had a warehouse of beanie babies they might choose to give them away (setting the price at zero) or maybe there’s some tiny value of the cloth so they sell them for a few cents per kg.

  • Cam
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    1 year ago

    Dot com boom in the 90s, NFT boom in the 20s.

      • Cam
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        -41 year ago

        Not many people had their own website in the late 90s, same as today. Domain names are useful to some just like how some see NTFs are being useful.

        Yeah people visit websites more than looking at NFTs. However some will prefer NFTs over physical collectiables. Just a preference.

        • @NorwegianBlues@sh.itjust.works
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          11 year ago

          Not many people had their own website in the late 90s

          Your post is pretty nonsensical anyway, but if anything more people had their own websites as a proportion of the web, with Geocities and Angelfire etc. This was before social media, so to have a presence on the web you had to have your own site, and people did.

          • @Moobythegoldensock@lemm.ee
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            21 year ago

            You’re both correct. In the late 90s it was common to have your own webpage as a subdomain on someone else’s site, but not super common to have your own domain.

            Facebook and Instagram are still basically web pages on someone else’s domain.

        • @atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
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          21 year ago

          Not many people had their own website in the late 90s, same as today. Domain names are useful to some just like how some see NTFs are being useful.

          That’s… Not what the dot-com boom was.

      • @merc@sh.itjust.works
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        11 year ago

        Yeah, it was a bubble. Dot com companies were worth less than investors hoped, but not worthless.

        Many of the dot-com companies that survived the crash exceeded their bubble valuation. Amazon, for example is worth far more than it ever was in the bubble days. Same with eBay, Priceline, etc.

        Yahoo is widely considered one of the biggest flops, but it survived the dot-com crash, dropped to just a few dollars a share, then eventually climbed back up over $40/share. Despite being massively overvalued in the bubble and then massively mismanaged after, it fundamentally had some value and people used it for years.

  • @pavnilschanda@lemmy.world
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    541 year ago

    Does anyone else think that NFTs are an allegory/miniature version of how art is easily commodified by capitalism? IIRC, NFTs were there to help finance artists who work on a purely digital medium, but then grifters coopted the NFT space and try to sell sets of same-looking artwork. Complete with “fandoms” and drama, as well.

    • @Empricorn@feddit.nl
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      01 year ago

      NFTs were there to help finance artists who work on a purely digital medium, but then grifters coopted the NFT space and try to sell sets of same-looking artwork.

      I’m curious if you have a source for this. I haven’t heard it anywhere else…

    • @yata@sh.itjust.works
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      71 year ago

      IIRC, NFTs were there to help finance artists who work on a purely digital medium

      That’s not true at all. They were a con from their inception. The “helping artists” bit was something they made up to further that con. Just like when they claim cryptocurrency is an actual viable currency alternative to fiat.

    • IninewCrow
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      1 year ago

      It is an allegory for the whole financial system … it’s all made up imaginary money, funds and amounts that don’t exist and never will … it’s all based on trust, faith and belief. If enough people wake up tomorrow and stop believing in a segment of this entire system, it can all quickly collapse.

      I remember reading about ten years ago that if all debt was stopped all over the world and all of it was to be repaid … it would take the world several million years to do so.

      There is wealth in the world but we’ve created very complicated, imaginary ways to make it seem that wealth is worth millions of times more than there actually exists.

      I see it as a modern day religion … it exists because we all believe in it … if the faithful ever lose faith, the religion dies.

      • @MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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        41 year ago

        God I cannot wait for the religion of capitalism to die. Markets are rough enough without greedy fucks institutionalizing their greed.

          • @MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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            11 year ago

            Really, it’s impossible. Most children are very selfish. Only some never grow out of it. Distinguishing between the two would be a very good way to appear to be far worse than a few greedy pieces of sh*t to the uneducated who do not realize the grief greed brings to others.

    • @aleph@lemm.ee
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      271 year ago

      Nah, NFTs were always about the grift first and the art second.

      After all, all an NFT token is is a digital receipt which links to an image hosted somewhere off-chain, not the image itself. All the “art” does is help to persuade people that the tokens are actually worth something and hype up the price even further.

    • @fubo@lemmy.world
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      501 year ago

      NFTs are simply a straightforward con, without the financial hullabaloo of cryptocurrency. The con is simple: convince someone that something is valuable when it’s not. Selling a brass ring as gold to a mark too naïve to check, has been around as long as there have been gold rings.

    • @Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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      21 year ago

      Yeah it was huge in the art world, all the art magazines had articles about how it was the next big thing and how to mint your own nfts - which of course all turned out to be ‘pay my buddy $200 and we’ll turn your jpg into an nft!’ which was a scam within a scam.

      Artists generally aren’t tech minded and honestly often pretty surface level in their understanding of things because that’s where their focus is, they’re looking at the visual not the mechanical. There’s nothing wrong in that because life needs a wide range of people.