Jacob Collier was going to sell an nft that granted lifetime access to any of his concerts.
That seemed like a not terrible use case for an nft.
He changed his mind when people pointed out the environmental impact of cryptocurrency.
NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money
91–100 of 268 posts
Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pyramid scheme or Money Laundering instrument? In any event I can’t see authorities keeping a blind eye on this.
That was my thought on it. What easier way to launder money than with virtual items of arbitrary value? "Man pays thousands for bicycle tire" would raise many eyebrows. "Man pays thousands for NFT picture of bicycle tire" just makes people laugh and shake their heads.
https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/7y3cdi/cmv_mo...
why bother with involving a computer and a hard to modify paper trail?
Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money
#93At first I thought Bitcoin and crypto currencies were bunk. Totally useless compared to USD or any other national currency. Although I still believe I'm correct, I've pretty much been shown that a lot of other people disagree with that premise because I've seen Bitcoin go from about $10 to $60,000. I still think it's a total bubble but have to admin there's a lot of other people who disagree. The one thing we can agr…
>I still think it's a total bubble but have to admin there's a lot of other people who disagree.
It doesn't matter if they disagree; a pyramid scheme is a pyramid scheme no matter how successful. And if it somehow still ends up as the world reserve “currency”, then it'll have made a lot of profoundly incompetent, undeserving, and shady people rich. We'd be no better off, even worse off than before. Bitcoin fuels the fire it was set out to extinguish: greed induced financial crime. https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cryptocultscience.html
Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You cannot intrinsically link real world items to tokens. The source of truth is the real world, not the token. This is also why every project do to X but with blockchain (like solving counterfeiting/authenticity, copyright, etc) is either stupid or a con using a buzzword to try and solicit investment or media attention. The reason blockchains work for cryptocurrencies is because the source of truth is the blockcha…
Blockchain doesn’t need to make it impossible to counterfeit real-world items to be useful, it just needs to reduce counterfeiting levels by reducing the profitability. It’s more than capable of doing that. If you can only sell at most one counterfeit item per authentic item, that’s already a multi-trillion dollar innovation.
I have a bicycle. I sell you the NFT for that bicycle. I then sell the bicycle to my neighbor. How did that work out?
Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money
#95I wrote my first Fortran program in 1969. I have been active in the field of computing since then, both as an academic and as a programmer in industry. During this time, there have been several times when I first heard about something new, something potentially game changing. I remember some of them very clearly: 1. Around 1971: a Wang desktop computer. Imagine: a computer that fit on a desk! 2. Visicalc (spreadsheet…
As with any technology we only see its impact with the pass of time.
Bitcoin is holding pretty strong after 12ish years, you can't deny facts.
You can question the practical applications but technology is often used in other ways than it was originally intended.
In the case of Bitcoin it may prove to be useful only as a cross border digital store of value instead of an every day currency.
Same with NFTs, you can dismiss the hype but that doesn't mean there are no practical applications that people may end up adopting.
Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money
#96Suppose I was someone with money to launder. I'd draw a cat's arse, and buy it with my anonymous BTC wallet "money". No one would ever know where the money come from, especially if I anonymise transactions with one of the many services (e.g.: from what i read, some buy mining services, pay with the dirty money and viola, "clean" coin, while other services just make thousands of transactions to distribute payments and…
Seems plausible if you can cover all traces of where your crypto came from, and considering NFTs stay unregulated by legislation/governments. If NFTs remain a thing after all the hype & fake demand fades then I am sure regulation for NFT purchases will come into effect to combat such practices.
Letting people in law enforcement, and the banks deputized by the AML enforcement agencies, monitor all private financial interactions, in a warrantless dragnet manner, to make a 1% dent in crime [1], is a terrible trade-off.
[1] https://www.ledgerinsights.com/anti-money-laundering-has-les...
Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
So now we have no Banksy painting but someone has a crypto token that says “This represents a Banksy painting” in the code? Since there’s nothing to own or even point to, what’s stopping a second party from claiming they actually have the original Banksy NFT and selling their own? Just the time stamps on the blockchain? What a miserable destruction of real art to profit on a trading frenzy.
Private keys are what's stopping other people from selling unauthentic NFTs for the same thing.
How does that work, what links a private key to an object in such a way another private key can't be linked as well?
Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
So they not only destroyed art, but also wasted energy on creating the NFT, adding to global warming. If there's anything that's not absolute evil in all that, I fail to see it.
Please, stop calling any non-essential use of energy that you're looking to smear, "evil". Are movies, which consume energy in their production and consumption, also evil? Video games? No, because you personally see the entertainment they provide as redeeming? If people want to expend their own resources on NFTs, that's entirely their right to do so, and calling it evil because the process consumed energy is absurd.…
I really resent the community of grifters like yourself constantly pushing the stuff and defending its excesses.
I recently saw Twitter thread where a big pusher of NFTs was moaning on about how the real issue is we didn't create enough nuclear power plants and now we're blaming NFTs for this.
It's blatantly obvious that this is all a pyramid scheme capitalizing on people's complete ignorance and optimism with crypto. Enjoy your pyramid scheme and I hope you make out like a bandit and eventually develop a conscience for the people you're grifting.
Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money
#99Someone once said that there's a sucker born every minute.
It doesn't matter who said it but if you look back at the time period when it could've been said by the person it was initially attributed to, PT Barnum, then you have an approximate period between 1835 when he began his sideshow of oddities tour and 1850 when he shifted focus to theaters and a new audience.
If during that time period it was true that there was a sucker born every minute, then today it is probably reasonable to expect that the number of suckers born every minute is firmly in the double digits and maybe higher when the difference between the number of women of child-bearing age available then versus now is considered.
Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money
#100this might mark this cycles bubble top