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The vast majority of NFTs are now worthless, new report shows
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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NFTs were the perfect technology to identify people who didn't understand crypto. The only reason Bitcoin et al. even almost work is that nearly anything can be a medium of exchange... so long as it's fungible. Which is the F theses Ts are N.
But if all you saw was numbers going up, and you don't know what a Ponzi scheme is, yeah sure it makes total sense to buy a genuine commemorative plate of the Brooklyn Bridge. Why's everyone on your case? It must be worth money! It's (a receipt for a link to a picture of) the Brooklyn Bridge!
Fanbros compare stocks, but stocks are slices of a real company. You control one-zillionth of an actual business. If you own enough, that company will do what you say, because you are literally their boss. No amount of "authentic" Brooklyn Bridge tokens will ever mean you get the bridge.
Everything signifying that the exchange was worth your money is a fiction created by the people who took it. That's how scams work.
Awesomely described - you have a way with words... mindbleach.
The value of tokens on the Blockchain are ostensibly related to the value of the apps that stake/work supports. NFTs were just another attempt at creating some real app/service value which didn't have all the difficulty or intrinsic value problems that being a payment processor does.
The core problem is the same though. Speculative value of the tokens can't really exceed the actual intrinsic value of the underlying Blockchain apps. For such apps to actually work as intended, more thought needs to go into anti-speculation mechanisms.
NFTs were a drunken hackathon project that got wildly out of hand. They don't even do the one thing they intended - storing tiny images. They had to settle for links.
Payment processing has literally nothing to do with NFTs.
Y'know how Inglorious Basterds spends ages humanizing individual Nazi soldiers? You get whole-ass backstories for some of them. Meanwhile the allied hit squad and resistance saboteurs are brutal, merciless, dishonest, petty, and sometimes just plain dumb. It's like making a whole movie about the casual war crimes at the beginning of Saving Private Ryan. By giving audiences every possible opportunity to empathize with these enemy forces, Tarantino was asking if there was any point where they'd feel bad about about killing Nazis, and the answer is a pretty resounding "no."
NFTs are like that for scams. Every possible excuse for taking them seriously has been stripped away, and some people simply do not care. You don't get anything. You don't really control it. It has no intrinsic function, purpose, or value, beyond what you already had before paying for it. It's a receipt for a link to a thing that does not matter in the first place. But you slap words like "genuine" and "decentralized" on there, and it breaks people's brains.
There really is an "official" NFT of the Brooklyn Bridge. Which means nothing. There's no relation. It's technically not the classic bridge-selling scam inasmuch as nobody's selling you the bridge, but they are absolutely taking your money in exchange for fuck-all.