He bought it for the headline.

When I first learned about NFTs I figured I was simply too stupid to understand it. There was simply no way it was as dumb as it sounded.

Turns out I was right, it was way, way dumber than it sounded.

... or because he needed to sink a $600k investment loss for tax purposes

Art is money laundering for the rich.

It all make sense now, doesn't it?

how about this take? logan spent 635K on a publicity stunt and 5 years later you muppets are stilll tweeting about it, pretty good return id say

There are lots of legitimate but boring uses of NFTs, just not the kind that make the news like pictures of monkeys.

Name one... 😅

I've sold some photos as NFTs 🤷‍♀️, and I've bought some art from well known people like sabet and ame72.

It's not as ridiculous as people make it sound. It's just these headlines of the most ridiculous examples sets people's perception of the tech. It's really not much different than patreon or something, except the creator doesn't get totally screwed.

Hahaha remember when they said nfts were going to be valuable because the artists involved were so innovative and cool? Then now the next GPU-selling trend is to rip off artists.

Proves ownership that is much more difficult for scammers to steal. Banks and insurance companies can use them(contracts...etc). Reduces costs in proving ownership as well. Unfortunately art seems to be the only thing anyone knows about but it should honestly be a very secure but ultra boring technology.

And it had no discernible effect on his life.

Proves ownership that is much more difficult for scammers to steal.

How is it more difficult? A scam almost by definition makes the current owner perform some action to unwillingly give something away, why would it be harder for scammers to make victims perform actions that give away an NFT than any other electronic good?

You know how when you get scammed or defrauded there are systems in place to roll back the fraudulent transactions? By using NFTs (or anything else based on a blockchain) you throw away those systems and make it literally impossible to bring them back. For what gain exactly?

Banks and insurance companies can use them.

Why would they? It might maybe be slightly cheaper, because some infrastructure costs are externalized, but that does not come anywhere near being worth the headache of all your confidential customer data being public. Sure, they could anonymize it and have an internal infrastructure translating it back. That would negate the cost advantage and make the whole system more complex for no gain at all.

Reduces costs in proving ownership as well.

Please elaborate, because that is not anywhere near detailed enough to discuss it seriously.

Future US Senator, folks! Truly a country of serious people.

ETA: $155 is still comically high.

I’ve sold some photos as NFTs 🤷‍♀️, and I’ve bought some art from well known people like sabet and ame72.

You did not sell photos or buy art as NFTs. You might have sold photos and bought art and also given out/received pointers to the receipts as NFTs.

Why not both?

I mean, look at the bright side. Someone scammed Logan Paul out of $635,000.

We already have mechanisms for all of that. Any security it provides you can have without it, the only difference it had going for it was "it has blockchain" and that was the Arbitrary Magic Hype Word at the time - like "AI" is now and "cloud" was before. In reality that means it's a huge unwieldy system that wastes tons of resources for what's often really poor reasons.

Correction: today it's worthless and in 2021 it was worth nothing.

We do have existing mechanisms in place. More expensive and less safe options. This is definitely not a huge and unwieldy system. Very simple and streamlined and much cheaper. Nothing amazing or world changing... just some minor technological advances.

Now that you mention it, I better put on some welding equipment before looking at that side.

Is it really worth $155, tho? Did someone actually buy it for that much? Or is it actually worth nothing since nobody is willing to buy it? 🤔

That's... really just wrong

I actually had this whole period where i would be doing something and I'd think to myself "Surely i misunderstand NFTs" then I'd stop what i was doing and check.

I don't know all the tech details. I just know they use the technology. I'm not the only source of info you could search it yourself and see. There are even event ticketing systems that use it. I'm yawning just talking about this.

Isn't that like owning an original photo? There are 10 million copies of the photo and you have the original but if anyone wanted one they could just copy an online image of it and print a copy.

I don't see how it's more expensive or less safe for authentication to be signing with a private key and publishing the public key...

The concept of an NFT and the security of purchasing isn't worthless. The fact that people with too much money bid up and purchased any old crap available as a NFT was and always is idiocy. That crap reverting to worthlessness when it wasn't worth anything to start with is reasonable. Some people were able to make a ton of money with that hype. Same as they now are on AI.

Throw back to Banksy setting a trap in 2006, and springing it 12 years later:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/watch-14-million-bansky-painting-shred-itself-soon-it-sold-180970486/

"We’ve been Banksy-ed," Alex Branczik, Sotheby’s head of European Contemporary art said in a press conference after the incident. “I’ll be quite honest, we have not experienced this situation in the past, where a painting is spontaneously shredded upon achieving a record for the artist.”

Now that... that's fuckin' art right there.

I love the rest of the article entirely missing the point of Banksy doing that being a surprise.

There, you idiots, frame that image.

I first heard about NFTs and I thought "wait...so you don't have any control over who sees it or any copyright of it...you're only listed as the owner." then when those pictures of the monkeys with glasses and hats started being sold for millions I thought, "oh so this is a game of hot potato...last person who has it loses"

Sometimes I need a blank piece of paper so I hit the START button on my copier without something in the tray.

But what I get is a copy of a blank piece of paper. It looks blank, but it's just a copy

You don't get it. It's on the block chain, it's a chain of blocks man, like it's decentralized finance man, we're calling it defi, like hifi but defi, it's gonna be huge.

why is lemmy obsessed with nft’s?

I wouldn't be surprised if someone at the top of the scam pyramid paid influencers to "buy" NFTs to try and kick off sales.

Today it’s ON SALE for $150. In reality it’s worthless.

I still think we could've used then to provide game ownership rather than just rentals

They need people to feel superior to.

I'd guess that 100% of its worth is down to Logan Paul having owned it.

No there isn't. There's lots of ways you can shoehorn NFTs in, but it's always a poor fit. People always try and claim that NFTs will solve some sort of problem that is already solved with existing technology.

There is no problem NFTs can solve that can't also be implemented much more cheaply and effectively with an SQL database from the 90s.

You're yawning? You're the one that brought it up.

So how is he laundering money now with it?

Could be such a simple thing as getting rid if an overflow for tax reasons, but I'm not well versed in USA taxes except it's horrible so don't take it as fact.

This fake art for sure, and so much that people start to think monetary value is what is important in art.

Follow the money.

Logan Paul owed somebody $635,000. He paid them.

It went the way it usually goes if anything is used exclusively as a subject of speculation. NFTs were meant to represent things, but people inscribed "value" in the representation instead. As if the housing market suddenly exploded the day someone invented writing its owner on a piece of paper.

There was an experiment where someone set up a high class shoe store in a nice location. They took cheap shoes from discount stores and marked them way up and put them on some nice display racks. People bought them.

Expensive = good...to some people.

In your opinion, how is that functionally different than when I sold photos on DeviantArt, and they got an email instead of a token? Are NFT-haters upset that art is being sold at all? Or are they upset about the delivery system?

bought art and also given out/received pointers to the receipts as NFTs.

I have NFTs with assets on chain as well, so in fact those ones aren't just "pointers".

At least someone is happy with the USA then.

NFT-haters love to point out that the thing you 'own' is the blockchain token, not the actual art asset itself. I always find this argument silly since:

1. the token is the whole point. The NFT revolution (or mania, if you want to call it that) is because the tokens are the enabling technology. Where the art itself actually lives is just secondary. Nobody is getting excited about the JPEGs themselves, not really (let's be real, most of the "art" is dogshit). People got excited about what the tokens enabled. Just one example, I can send all owners of my photos (the tokens) additional art as a bonus thank you. I know exactly who has my tokens. I can also gate premium features (similar to Patreon) to token holders. This functionality is how Ticketmaster is exploring NFTs

2. If I buy my digital wedding photos, or something on DeviantArt, or wherever, and if I lose that asset (computer wiped, whatever), I can just go and redownload it. It's a copy. Of course it is. We live in a digital age. I don't really understand why NFT-haters rave all the time about owning copies of the assets. Of course it's a copy. Even onchain art assets are just 'copies' since it's decentralized over 1000s of computers

Isn’t that like owning an original photo?

Anybody who's ever used the technology will understand this immediately. Anybody who has actually bought/used NFTs understand how silly these 'well technically...' arguments are.

What a good argument would be would be the distinct between ownership and possession:

ownership = rights (human law, rulings/opinions, enforced top down. i.e. titles)

possession = control (physics laws, math, enforced bottom up i.e. car keys)

crypto IMHO was never about the former. "Ownership" will always live in the layer of social agreement. What crypto gives is “possession”: control above the TOS and paper rights that web 2 gave us. The first time the user can possess the keys to his stuff on a database that's shared with other people (and not just the illusion of). This distinction is the reason why even though you do "own" your digital song/videos/game loot on amazon or PS5 via their TOS, you cannot trade it, swap it with a friend, resell it.... The key never left your digital landlord, they just let you in to play. You had the papers for your car, but not the key. You never possessed what you owned.

And Love Is In The Bin became more valuable than Girl With Balloon at a subsequent auction, too, by a factor of 18x.