The fine folks at dappGambl are here to answer the question on everyone's mind: Whatever happened to NFTs, anyway?
The hype around NFTs peaked in the 2021/22 bull run that saw nearly $2.8 billion in monthly trading volume recorded in August 2021....In July 2023, [trading was] just 3% of its peak back in August 2021. So what happened?
....Of the 73,257 NFT collections we identified, an eye-watering 69,795 [95%] of them have a market cap of 0 Ether (ETH)....We would estimate that 95% to include over 23 million people whose investments are now worthless.
We all like to think we've gotten smarter over the years, but at least the tulip bubble folks ended up with some pretty flowers. NFTs, by contrast, never made sense even in theory. We are still just a bunch of idiots.
NFT is so last year I got almost to the end of the quote before I realized it wasn't about crypto.
So ultimately it was yet another madness/delusion of a very small crowd. But it was sired by zero interest rates, wasn't it? Hard to see something like this happening in today's rate environment.
Interest rates may have some effects on speculation, but do not prevent it. In 1929 discount rates went higher than current federal funds but had no apparent effect on the stock market bubble. Rates were very low through the 30's and 40's but there were no major bubbles.
If you got in on the ground floor of the crypto bubble your gains were so great as to make interest rates irrelevant. This is what people who buy this kind of supposedly high-flying stuff are hoping for. They aren't calculating interest rates.
Some of the $100 Trump NFTs are now selling in the $thousands. Go figure.
His followers have always been high on the "mark and shill" list.
How do you exploit the easily exploited in an ethical way is a problem society has to come to grips with.
They were the embodiment of how a lot of crypto buyers and sellers weren't into it for anything useful, but just to speculate and gamble. Purely digital collectibles with values that were often fraudulent (the product of wash trading and other scams to make them seem more valuable), dumped on whatever greedy, foolish person would buy them with the hopes of dumping them on an even bigger fool for profit.
NFTs were always powered by The Greater Fool Theory of investing.
Bingo! Also, like cocaine, an indication that you have way too much money.
🤣🤣🤣
When NFTs first came out I said - what's that. Then I read an NFT is basically a unique picture of something that you don't own and can't possess but nobody else can have that exact picture.
I thought - WOW - I will pay exactly nothing for that. Turns out to be the correct price.
Exactly. Except everyone else CAN possess that "unique" picture. You just need to right-click and "save image as..." in a browser. Technically, the only "thing" that you "own" is the link to that image file. And if that image file is every removed from that server then you're SOL.
No part of NFTs has ever made the slightest sense unless you are the one creating and selling them to suckers with money.
My favored explanation:
"You get married, and your spouse is sleeping with everyone but you. However, do you get the marriage certificate."
Excellent!
And if that image file is every removed from that server then you're SOL.
Lol! Hadn't thought about that problem. The file *location* is embedded in the blockchain, which is what you supposedly "buy," but it's just a URL that takes you to the saved image on some server. God, this whole thing is so stupid it hurts.
There was a rationale. It was mostly bullshit, but not entirely. Why is a genuine painting by a master worth more than a fake that had the experts fooled, until chemical analysis turned up a modern pigment? The picture is the same either way. Why is a first edition Pickwick Papers worth more than a second edition, much less a modern copy? You can read a modern copy without worrying about damaging the book. And so on. Authenticity is intangible, but translates to real value at auction. NFTs were an attempt to create this intangible authenticity for digital works. If collectors accept that the NFT of a bored ape is authentic in a way that an otherwise identical file is not, and that this authenticity has value, then it is as real as the difference between that first edition and a modern paperback.
There were lots of reasons why this wasn't ever going to work, and many were obvious from the start, but there was a semi-plausible rationale behind it.
But AI will be transformative! The media is hilarious these days. No credibility left. I guess they are good at telling me that there was a shooting last night, but then you never hear about it again. Otherwise it's all BS all the time.
It's a fact that information technology has been transformative, and I see no reason to believe that the technology is anywhere close to mature yet, so rapid advances in information technology can be expected to continue, and can be expected to continue to be transformative. Call it AI, or quantum computing, or quantum AI computing, or something else entirely, it's effectively certain that something "transformative" is going to happen in IT pretty much every year for the foreseeable future.
Transformative innovations have never and never will happen yearly. The pace of transformative innovations is very uneven. Unless your bar for transformative is very low.
The whole crazy thing about NFTs is that while they record that someone paid something for a digital object, they don't actually legally transfer ownership. It's like paying for a picture of a car, but not actually getting the title to the car, and then claiming it's a brilliant investment, or something. Sorry, bub. All you got there is a picture of a car. It's worth less than a cent.
Unless the picture was drawn by, say, Pablo Picasso.
Well, then you own an original Picasso, not an NFT.
"We are still just a bunch of idiots."
We? Hardly anybody had anything to do with NFTs. I'd bet most people don't even know what they are.
NFTs being worthless is the point.
Think about it. Anyone who has millions of dollars -probably- isn't completely stupid. Half of them inherited, and the other half got lucky in some arcane, narrowly focused business and they know nothing outside that business. In either case, these guys might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but they aren't under the delusion that they are going to make millions of dollars on a picture of something that they don't own.
Instead, I think NFTs are a vehicle for Veblen's Theory of Conspicuous Consumption.
Buying an NFT says "See, I can throw away a million dollars, and you can't." Not spoken aloud is "Now bow down to your Betters."
Let these defectives spend their money. It would be better, of course, if they spent it on something that made society better, but their history didn't prepare their imaginations for that.
Conspicuous consumption/collection was part of it, yes.
>>Buying an NFT says "See, I can throw away a million dollars, and you can't." Not spoken aloud is "Now bow down to your Betters."<<
See, I understand that in the art or collectibles market. If you have a $6 million Frazetta painting on your wall, or Action Comics #1 under glass. But how does that work with an NFT? Nobody knows you have it unless you tell them and you would have better bragging rights telling people how many shares of Apple you own. The collectibles market is strange anyway, but NFTs are the strangest of all to me.
There are way too many folks out there that are so easily snookered. I have to wonder what proportion of them are repulsives, those who are so easily taken in by idiocy.
I'm guessing that by far, the most of them are XY humans.
And by the way, Melanoma is said to be back into selling NFT's. She got caught last time and was shut down when the orange idiot was in office but she is back at it again.
Pornhub still makes her videos freely available.
Well yeah, duh, NFTs were always essentially worthless. There is some misunderstanding in the comments here though about how NFTs were just a picture that you can "own" and nobody else could have a copy of (except that somebody could save-as the picture so therefore you didn't own it...) - that's a fundamental misunderstanding of what an NFT is (was). It's like having the original Mona Lisa vs. a print of the Mona Lisa. Or like having an authentic ticket to a concert vs. a fake one. Only the person who actually owned the bit of code that was the actual NFT had the authentic copy of the ticket.
Having the original theoretically unlocks certain things for you, or could. The problem is that NFTs didn't actually do anything useful and were never going to. Yeah, sure, some of them were part of some games and stuff, and that has some value for entertainment, but still nothing useful.
Hmmm...could you take a "capital gains" loss on then? I mean you typically think of a capital investment as an investment in, well, something.
I wish people would stop referring to anything crypto as an "investment". It is a wager on, as others have pointed out, that there is a bigger fool.
NFT's are (at least according to a recent streaming series starring Kiefer Sutherland and Charles Dance) an excellent way to launder money.
Meh. Money launderers have it easy nowadays, ever since crypto hit the scene.
Two years ago bitcoin was worth nearly $70k. Then the market crashed, and some people began to speculate that it might actually hit zero. I didn't think that would happen because bitcoin, unlike NFT's, has a steady base of real demand. Drug cartels, dirty oligarchs, and hackers with successful ransomware, are all keeping bitcoin at around $27k today.
Bitcoin has failed as a medium of exchange, and has been too volatile to be a store of value, but as a money laundering tool it has been a smashing success. NFT's, not so much. Too many of them are worth zero now.
It was always about money laundering. Medium of exchange and other uses were just excuses.
That would be sad. That would mean that many brilliant people like Vitalik Buterin and Charles Hoskinson are wasting their talents.
Right now, BTC's market cap is around 1/2 trillion dollars. That pales in comparison to other investments. The market cap of gold is 13 trillion. Someone at Blackrock (a company that I do not admire) thinks that one day, Bitcoin's market cap will catch up to gold's market cap.
Remember those low-budget Christmas Amazon commercials from twenty years ago, which consisted of people in sweaters singing on a cheap set with bad lighting?
hmmmm........One never knows, do one?
Does anyone remember the school lunchbox craze of the 1970s or Beanie Babies i the late 1990s? People use Bayesian reasoning for decision making. How do you tell a bubble from a boom? If you invested in plastics or automobiles or computers or tin cans at the right time, you could have a good long term investment at a modest price. In the 1920s, there was a tin can bubble. There were big trusts trying to corner the can market based on new production methods. If you even wrote a proposal to form a tin can company, you'd be surrounded with offers to buy you out. A lot of people made money. A lot of people lost their ass. Tin cans remained popular for decades and are still in production.
A ways back there was a very interesting guy on Colbert who had written a child's book on (as I recall) the history of humanity. He said the great thing about humans is their ability to accept nonsense as facts to live by. Like I have a slip of paper with some fancy green printing on it, and if I give it to you, you will give me a meal to eat in exchange.
Assuming "slip of paper" is a reference to money notes, it works close to 100% of the time to the satisfaction of both sides, and therefore it is not nonsense.
Cannot say the same about NFT.
It's not nonsense. We collectively decided to designate it as an easily quantifiable measure of value. That's just a symbolic efficiency.
The problem with your claim about money is that almost everyone needs to pay taxes and the government always will take those slips of paper to relieve you of the threat of prison. Hence they do in fact have real value. (As opposed to gold which really doesn't have any intrinsic value.)
"Like I have a slip of paper with some fancy green printing on it, and if I give it to you, you will give me a meal to eat in exchange."
A very bad example that only libertaians and their ilk would believe. Or at least, pretend to believe. Though they're efforts to fake sincerity is only perfenuctory at best these days.
I am going to Church now to pray to our invisible cloud being (that billions of humans agree is a real part their lives) to forgive you for calling me a libertarian.
Well, there's a simple remedy for that: Don't post bullshit libertarian tropes.
"perfenuctory ?" Violet, we have minutes to edit. Well, you don't seem the type prone to making errors in spelling. And I, too, have missed my editing window at times.
I don't know anyone who thought NFTs were worth anything that wasn't already invested in them.
Yeah. It's like trying to buy proof by induction.
Which, if anyone wants to, it's a beautiful idea and I'll make you a good price.
All I can say, as a Dutchman with the authority to speak of a national trauma, is that I'd rather see billionaires buy tulips than farmland, because when they start doing that we're all screwed. And if Jeff Bezos puts his assets into toilet paper, the rest of humanity will have to wipe their asses with old newspapers. For a thousand years.
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