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NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money

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Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money

#101

Post by volkk »

Zealotux wrote: post #24

An acquaintance of mine made 15k euros in 6 days with auto-generated artworks, he even made it to the local newspaper. I don't even know why I bother learning new frameworks and languages anymore.

i feel like everyday at this point (at least from the time i've noticed which started with the GME craze) there's some get rich quick scheme happening and i keep missing out. i'm still happy in life but there's a not so small part of me that is very FOMO-ey and disappointed/jealous with the concept of doing almost nothing and making a lot of money on what essentially just boils down to hype.

the other part of me is a bit intrigued/excited because there seems to be some amount of wealth transfer happening here. whether it is from richer to rich or rich to poor or poor to poorer is the primary question for me and what will define this movement to be dangerous (i.e poor to rich) or the start of something new and great

Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money

#102

Post by _huayra_ »

Havoc wrote: post #17
niahmiah wrote: post #3

It's stupid at face value. No pyramid required. You cannot intrinsically link real world items to tokens. The source of truth is the real world, not the token. Add an unlimited supply of unique things, and how could anyone expect to make money from this?

>You cannot intrinsically link real world items to tokens. Patents & trademarks?

With NFTs it's just like getting rid of the "shackles" of a government-controlled fiat currency: you no longer can rely on the guns and legal system of that country to enforce any sort of exclusivity.

Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money

#103

Post by SkipperCat »

capableweb wrote: post #66
SkipperCat wrote: post #54

At 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…

> The one thing we can agree is that people who want to own Bitcoin do own Bitcoin and those that don't want to spend $60k on a coin dont. Almost right. Yes, the ones that wanted to own Bitcoin badly enough have Bitcoins by now. The ones that want Bitcoin but not badly enough don't. The ones that don't want to have Bitcoins don't have Bitcoins. The error in your statement is within "those that don't want to spend $60…

The point is if you want to own one, or a fraction of a Bitcoin, you have to trade USD for it. If I want to own an image of a cat with the body of a Pop-Tart flying thru space, I can just download it and have it on my desktop. I don't care if the blockchain says I own it or not. I just want that cat.

For the SaaS example you give, you're paying for the back-end service the SaaS company provides. That's real value. If all the SasS system did was download a Javascript file that did all the work locally, I think you'd see a lot of people download that item and run it locally, bypassing the SasS payment.

Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money

#104

Post by brandonmenc »

twic wrote: post #58
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain the correct version from your perspective? It doesn’t clarify anything if you just declare someone else incorrect but won’t say why.

What capableweb said is correct. NFTs do not confer any ownership of, rights over, or special access to anything else, real-world out digital. When you buy an NFT of an artwork, you aren't buying the artwork, you are only buying the NFT. As far as I know, the inventors of NFTs do not claim that they do. But it seems like a lot of people talking about and perhaps buying NFTs don't understand that.

> When you buy an NFT of an artwork, you aren't buying the artwork, you are only buying the NFT.

So it's like a certificate of proof that you donated money to an artist that you can then trade and sell and possibly make a profit from.

If I'm understanding this correctly.

Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money

#105

Post by benrbray »

olouv wrote: post #33
benrbray wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ELI5: What can NFT achieve that a combination of Twitter + public key cryptography cannot achieve? As far as I can tell the only benefit is "decentralization" and just like BTC, the average user is beholden to bank-like entities for all their transactions anyway, so you get all the cons of existing monetary systems without the insurance.

trading?

generate new keys and announce it on Twitter

Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money

#106

Post by WJW »

IgorPartola wrote: post #94
Alex3917 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That seems like a suboptimal fraud. Why not sell a thousand different NFTs on the same bike?

Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money

#107

Post by ddeyar »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #34
ddeyar wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you say that ownership should be kept in physical contracts? There are usecases when you are the owner of something which is not in your physical possession. I don't care about that NFT stuff, collectible can make sense or not. What bothers me is to do it with so much energy consumption. When you are attracted to lose money, then just do it environment friendly. https://medium.com/tqtezos/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of…

NFTs don’t sell ownership. They sell NFTs. It’s like creating a contract that sells the contract itself. Then maybe you stamp a photo of Michael Jordan on the cover and call it a Michael Jordan contract, even though the contract doesn’t give the buyer any rights to anything Michael Jordan related, except the contract itself. Then you can go out and make more Michael Jordan contracts, because there’s nothing in the fi…

The contract would give the buyer rights to use the content. When I'm the owner of a physical Picasso then I have the right to sell t-shirts with the motive on it. If someone else would do that, I could sue him. The same idea is behind this NFT hype, you buy the right to use the content. As far as I understand it.

Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money

#108

Post by rcxdude »

gifnamething wrote: post #7
sschueller wrote: post #2

Can we stop with the environmental impact complaints of ethereum. ETH2 (Proof of Stake) is running and will be merged very very soon.

The article complains about gas fees, how will they change after ETH2?

eth2 (which is more than just proof of stake) aims to substantially reduce the fees by allowing the network to scale up (I think the current target is 100,000 transactions a second). This is partly enabled by proof of stake and partly enabled by other stuff like sharding.

Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money

#109

Post by WJW »

delaaxe wrote: post #37
niahmiah wrote: post #3

It's stupid at face value. No pyramid required. You cannot intrinsically link real world items to tokens. The source of truth is the real world, not the token. Add an unlimited supply of unique things, and how could anyone expect to make money from this?

NFTs are not meant for physical items, they’re digital certificates. People literally burnt a Banksy painting before auctioning its NFT.

Still a waste though, you could easily have auctioned the NFT without burning the original.

Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money

#110

Post by CryptoPunk »

JPKab wrote: post #98
CryptoPunk wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That has nothing to do with my point, which is that by no reasonable standard, can the people producing/buying/selling NFTs be singled out as "evil" for contributing to global warming.

You're obviously getting overly emotional, and throwing whatever you can at the people involved in cryptocurrency ("they're evil for using energy") to see what sticks.

I reiterate, it's a reckless and disingenuous way to conduct oneself, regardless of whether the underlying grievances motivating the hostility have merit.

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