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NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money

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111–120 of 268 posts

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

#111
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For even better efficiency, sell the NFTs to yourself to pump the last sold price to $10,000+, with cryptocoin proof that the "last buyer" thought the price was worth $10,000.

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

#112
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's the same problem that always comes into play for crypto: either people have to accept the crypto as currency (which almost no institution that must buy things and pay taxes can do; the IRS doesn't accept bitcoin...) or there have to be gatekeepers to interact with the blockchain.

This can either be a crypto exchange (regulated on conversion to fiat, lest they get shut down by some SEC thing) or on those "vote on the blockchain" or "verified supply chain on the blockchain" things: eventually some non-blockchain entity has to be trusted enough to set state on the blockchain (e.g. "party A did indeed fulfill the contract to party B. please fulfill this smart contract", or "your food ingredient was prepared in accordance to your green/bio label's requirements").

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

#113

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.

This is like feeling bad that your friend had a lucky streak at the blackjack table.

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

#114
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Is it even a fraud? What rights does holding the NFT give to the source object?

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

#115
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A house is linked to a title. The title is a paper token.

That proves too much. There’s nothing inherent in the paper that grants any rights and privileges. It’s the legal system that does that. A digital token is either meaningless (if the legal system doesn’t recognize it) or massive overkill (if the legal system treats it the same as a wet signature).

It's not only the legal system, but the military / police components of a country that enforce private property too.

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

#116
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A house is linked to a title. The title is a paper token.

That proves too much. There’s nothing inherent in the paper that grants any rights and privileges. It’s the legal system that does that. A digital token is either meaningless (if the legal system doesn’t recognize it) or massive overkill (if the legal system treats it the same as a wet signature).

The legal system will recognize it, and attribution protocols are being built. Removing middlemen like title companies is an efficiency, not overkill.

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

#117

Let people do whatever the F they wanna do with their money. If they lose it, shrug , it’s their money. I hate this idea of people telling other people what to do or what’s good for them.

It's called "Lassez-faire" [0], from French "let do".

Take a look at the "criticism" section of the linked wikipedia source.

Besides that: I think that some form of laws and regulation is necessary to prevent bad actors from taking advantage of people.

In that sense, I strongly disagree with your approach.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laissez-faire

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

#118

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…

>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…

Agreed. It reminds me of diamonds. They're super expensive because the DeBeers family convinced everyone it's a sign of love and marriage. They're really not that rare and can be made in a lab. Aside from industrial grinders, there's really not much use for them.

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

#119
post #91

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.

Did anyone point out the environmental impact of concerts?

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

#120

Don’t forget the wash trading aspect: Since this occurs on the blockchain, it’s trivially easy for someone to create two wallets and then “sell” an NFT to themself for whatever amount of money they have. If you have $10K in ETH, you can buy a $1 NFT and then trade it among your own wallets for increasing amounts of ETH up to $10K. Now your $1 NFT is “worth” $10K and you only spent as much money as the gas costs at th…

Sure you can do this. But keep in mind that "wash trading" is illegal, and you still need to declare where the money comes from when you want to cash out. Yeah, any asset that can artificially propped up. Cryptocurrencies doesn't make this harder nor easier, they simply make it possible to do without a central authority. We still have laws people need to follow in their countries, and up to government to act against…

> Yeah, any asset that can artificially propped up. Cryptocurrencies doesn't make this harder nor easier

Cryptocurrencies and NFTs absolutely make this easier.

If I want to inflate the price of my product on eBay, I have to go through with a lot of expensive eBay transactions to register a lot of fake sales. At 10-20% cost each time (eBay fees + taxes) that gets expensive quickly, and eBay is going to catch on if I'm buying and selling from the same shipping addresses.

With crypto, none of that applies. I can create as many crypto wallets as I want from home. I can move funds around for the price of gas. I can buy my own stuff from my own wallets and shuffle the money around through exchanges so that no one can tell.

> If anything, blockchains makes it easier for local governments to spot things like this, because the centralized exchanges need to corporate

Obviously the scammers aren't going to prefer their local exchanges for criminal activity. They're going to use a foreign exchange or just use a distributed exchange protocol.

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