The market for the digital items plummeted after their glory days in 2021 and 2022, and they’ve proven to be not only an artistic and aesthetic disaster, but a shortcut to financial ruin
    • Alpha71@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7 days

      The best scams are either holistic/psychic stuff or Hi-fi Audio.

      • BioDriver@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7 days

        High Fi audio is actually legit to a point. Over $300 (well, $400 now with tariffs) is when the scam begins

        • REDACTED@infosec.pubEnglish
          7 days

          Not necessarily. For headphones it can go higher. I’m currently looking at hifiman unveiled.

          • CaptSneeze@lemmy.worldEnglish
            6 days

            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… then you become a sucker.”

            …

            “Actually… you’re not a sucker at all if you spend a bunch of money on this shit. Here, take my money!”

            • REDACTED@infosec.pubEnglish
              6 days

              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

          • BigBrainBrett2517@lemmy.worldEnglish
            6 days

            If you’re talking about the Susvara unveiled or whatever they’re currently 15k aud. That is fucking wild.

            • REDACTED@infosec.pubEnglish
              6 days

              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.

      • captainlezbian@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7 days

        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.

    • Agent641@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7 days

      I’m working on the grift of all gifts, if you want in, you can buy shares of my grift for $100 each.

      • Atropos@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7 days

        And if you don’t trust this guy, I offer grift insurance for only 15% of expected value!

    • entropiclyclaude@lemmy.wtfEnglish
      7 days

      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:

      1. Collect money
      2. Don’t build anything.
      3. repeat

      When they come screaming for proof and receipts and refunds… Just gaslight them and buy a politician.

    • utopiah@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7 days

      Unfortunately for you you don’t have what it takes. You need to be a proper psychopath to scam others.

      • Canaconda@lemmy.caEnglish
        7 days

        This. The worst thing for any salesman to have is scruples.

      • tio_bira@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7 days

        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

    • vane@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6 days

      Add “AI Agent” to something everyone’s doing like “Tooth brushing AI Agent.”

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6 days

    Etherium was run out of the offices of JP Morgan Chase and NFTs were a gimmick to boost the deal flow of their then-underperforming crypto offering.

    It was, by and large, an enormous investment in sales and marketing on top of a ton of insanely shady business practices. Case in point, the infamous Beeple NFT that sold for $69.3M was purchased with Etherium to showcase Christie’s auction house accepting cryptocurrency for auction bids. The winning bidder for artwork was an early crypto adopter and marketer named Vignesh Sundaresan who was flush with these tokens, but lacked any kind of liquid market to sell them into yet. That’s before you get into the Congo Line of largely clueless celebrities going on Late Night comedy shows to plug their online pogs.

    It’s trite to say that the whole thing was a scam because… duh. But I think people read this as “just dumb people being stupid with their stupid dumb money” and ignore the layer upon layer of market manipulation and con-artistry that went into making cryptocurrencies what they are today.

    The fact that Donald Trump is using them to launder bribes from Middle Eastern dictators and East Asian kleptocrats should illustrate how deep these rabbit holes can go. It’s so much more than just peddling bad clipart to dumb bros.

  • arc99@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6 days

    Digital ownership tokens could work if there legal framework imbuing digital property with the same attributes as physical property, i.e. legal ownership and the right to sell, trade, donate, loan or destroy it just as with a real thing. And tokens would have to be maintained by a single platform with legal weight behind it. If there were such a thing and platforms were compelled to support it, then it could work.

    But NFTs were not that. They were a scam from the get go. I truly wonder how anybody could be stupid enough to believe a URL pointing at a machine generated picture would ever be worth something let alone appreciate in value. Or buying content in dogshit NFT based games like Legacy or Earth 2. Or that scam game Logan Paul endorsed. Or buying real plots of land such as on “Satoshi” (Lataroa) Island - a malaria riddled jungle that was sold as libertarian asshole utopia before it flopped. But people did. Because people are stupid.

  • TheObviousSolution@lemmy.caEnglish
    6 days

    NFT just served as a training opportunity for the people behind it to learn how to get away with legally scamming people, not surprised the Reddit admin was all in on it when it came out.

  • BlackLaZoR@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7 days

    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.

  • lechekaflan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7 days

    That was the most goddamn awful thing ever seen. Where are those shitheads who first sold the fucking idea?

  • mcv@lemmy.zipEnglish
    6 days

    I would replace “dramatic” with “predictable”. Everybody knew it was bullshit. It was like tulip mania, but without actual tulips.

  • phutatorius@lemmy.zipEnglish
    7 days

    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.

    • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7 days

      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.

  • Lemming6969@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7 days

    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.

      • Lemming6969@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7 days

        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.

        • captainlezbian@lemmy.worldEnglish
          7 days

          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.

          • Lemming6969@lemmy.worldEnglish
            7 days

            Probably is, but the concept is sound. The inspections and other things aren’t always necessary, but even if they are, an nft transfer can likely be setup to be digitally signed by the recognizing authority. This creates a record on the public ledger rather than a private one, which can be a nice thing. For better or worse nft confers ownership of recognized by such an authority, so there is no concept of not allowed to sell. This is a fundamental feature of blockchain… Enforced control and ownership

            • captainlezbian@lemmy.worldEnglish
              6 days

              Ok I think I need to reframe what authority means here. An authority is a government or an organization or individual that a government authorizes to act on its behalf. It is the decision maker when it comes time to physically remove a claimant from the premises.

              A blockchain is a leger, a document. What you’re proposing sounds to me like legally defining it as the final say in ownership. To do that is more or less a complete rewrite of property laws in a way that would have far reaching effects, especially on marriage, government enforcement, and lending. On lending this would basically eliminate the capacity to use your house as collateral without a full conditional sale, and in that case I really hope you trust your banking institution. For government enforcement, this would eliminate leins as a means of compelling payment of owed money, which means other methods would be required (this is especially an issue in contexts like child support, where debtors can be particularly hostile). And for marriage this will really screw with inheritance and divorce proceedings. The fact that you can’t cash out and sell the house asap when your partner requests a divorce is something I personally think is good.

              Additionally, in every democratic nation to my knowledge, the existing registry of land is public. Public of course when referring to ownership by the collective of citizens, something the blockchain is less so. But it’s also publicly visible, just like the blockchain, except instead of having to download it you go to the appropriate store of public records and request to see it or to obtain a copy. At the very least in my country there’s a ton of information you can get in such places for asking. Property transfers, court records (unless a judge has sealed them, usually because sensitive information is contained within), building and digging permits, birth and death certificates… Most people only get what’s relevant to their life, but some people (like investigative journalists) have to look through public records for a living. Could it be valuable to digitize it all and upload it? Yes but not without risks, which also apply to blockchain here.

              So yeah. This leads into a famous question: What is Property? And ultimately that’s a fairly deep rabbit hole, of its own. So what is ownership? The ability to direct the state to utilize its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence in defense of your right to control something. No ledger can confer that. A state can declare a ledger the ultimate record of ownership, but it can just as easily take it away.

              • Lemming6969@lemmy.worldEnglish
                6 days

                I mean, I definitely agree on this specific use-case that it’s problematic. I think some aspects can be resolved with smart contracts or multi-signature requirements, but it really fails here when it comes to compulsion.

                If a court cannot compel someone to transfer, because the court doesn’t have the keys… Or you lose the keys and cannot… Obviously this falls apart.

                There is a reason people deride nfts, mostly it’s due to ignorance and spectacle lemming behavior surrounding the ape pictures, but the legitimate criticism is really there aren’t many use-cases. But we don’t and shouldn’t wait to build things until a use-case exists. Nfts could be important eventually for preventing things like naked shorts maybe. There are likely very valuable use-cases.

                • captainlezbian@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  6 days

                  Yeah I’m totally in favor of inventing things for the hell of it. But i don’t think that hating a technology because of how it was pushed on society is necessarily bad until it develops a legitimate use case. I dislike them because I still see people thinking “this cool technology must have a problem that it solves” rather than looking at problems and asking what technology could solve them. But at the same time it’s also been a serious case of tech lovers not caring to understand the problems they wish to use tech to solve. That was annoying a long time ago, but now I live in a society that’s been made worse and worse by that specific problem over the past 20 years.

          • Lemming6969@lemmy.worldEnglish
            7 days

            It’s just a technology even though people equate it with wildly overpriced art you can copy and paste, which is naive and reductive.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6 days

      If there is an authority who recognizes the nft, then it has the utility value of the authority. End of story.

      My man has been doomed off by the Anarcho-Capitalist fairy and is currently circling the planet Heinlein.

    • deathbird@mander.xyzEnglish
      7 days

      Yeah as a record on a ledger it’s fine. I think a lot of people wanted them to be more than that though.

      • Lemming6969@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7 days

        Fortunately our unfortunately that’s all a blockchain is lol. It’s not really different than an exchange pointing to a blockchain and people agreeing 1 bitcoin on that chain is worth X. You always need consensus from multiple entities, but the difference is these ledgers are public, and secured by math. That’s it.

    • AstralPath@lemmy.caEnglish
      7 days

      A yacht full of NFT owners is just about the last place in this universe that I’d want to be.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6 days

      Walking up to a game of Three Card Monte and saying “It’s pretty obvious he’s palmed the Queen” mostly just gets you heckled and chased away.

      Part of the problem with digital spaces is that you’ve got your person setting up the scam, and then you’ve got your layer of people marketing the scam, and then you’ve got your first layer of suckers who think they are coming out ahead on the scam, and then you’ve got the second layer of suckers who all know a tier-one sucker who just got rich. And then you’ve got the bots and the ideologues and the contrarians and the know-it-alls, all repeating the line that the person who set up the scam encourages them to say.

      And it’s over all that cacophony that you announce “It’s obviously a scam”. Then Reddit boots you for violating terms and conditions of the platform.

    • timroerstroem@feddit.dkEnglish
      8 days

      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.

      • cecilkorik@piefed.caEnglish
        8 days

        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?”

      • BassTurd@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8 days

        I found value in shitting on people buying them. $0 monetary gain, but at least $10 in schadenfreude.

        • Wilco@lemmy.zipEnglish
          8 days

          I trolled people by setting their NFT as my avatar in the chat rooms they were in. Im going to value that at $100.

          • VoiHyvaLuojaMitaNyt@lemmy.worldEnglish
            7 days

            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.”

        • WesternInfidels@feddit.onlineEnglish
          8 days

          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.

          • BassTurd@lemmy.worldEnglish
            7 days

            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

    • The_Almighty_Walrus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8 days

      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.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      8 days

      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.

  • galoisghost@aussie.zoneEnglish
    8 days

    Under a grand. Is there anyone really stupid enough to think this is still worth anything at all?

    • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8 days

      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.

      • leoj@piefed.zipEnglish
        8 days

        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.

        • prettybunnys@piefed.socialEnglish
          8 days

          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.

          • leoj@piefed.zipEnglish
            8 days

            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.

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
          7 days

          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.

      • underisk@lemmy.mlEnglish
        8 days

        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.

  • ozoned@piefed.socialEnglish
    8 days

    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?!?!