Yaaaaaay. We took the long way round to work this out. Now do AI.
[deleted]
NFTs Are – Finally – Worthless
31–40 of 53 posts
Re: NFTs Are – Finally – Worthless
#32Re: NFTs Are – Finally – Worthless
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
People always parrot "money laundering" when they see (what for them are) large amounts of money moving around. Can you explain how does one launder money w/ NFTs? Because it's absolute nonsense.
A wants to give a bunch of money to B for a reason that they want to remain hidden (e.g. a bribe, illegal purchases, etc.). So B puts an NFT up for sale and A buys it for an inflated price. Now B has a plausible explanation for the source of the money. You can do this with other assets like fine art or real estate but it is a lot more complicated. NFTs are a simple way to launder money online.
Nice opinion, too bad it's ... not money laundering.
Re: NFTs Are – Finally – Worthless
#34hmmm I'm not sure about this claim: I'm as surprised as you are tbh Exhibit A (15 hrs ago) sold for $81,187: https://twitter.com/DegenerateNews/status/170462244577940731... Exhibit B (21 hrs ago) sold for $162,795 USD: https://twitter.com/DegenerateNews/status/170453517598236304... Exhibit C (3 days) sold for $221,590 USD: https://twitter.com/DegenerateNews/status/170391046378291222... Exhibit D (4 days ago) sold for…
Seems like it'd be feasible to fake sales or use NFTs to hide laundering/transfer schemes. Getting even one rube to buy one of these would easily pay for gas?
It's also easy to buy your own for $x, to try and convince the world it has a value of $x. For assets that are not for sale, the price point of the last trade is often taken as its dollar value without question.
Re: NFTs Are – Finally – Worthless
#35finally what they always were?
Re: NFTs Are – Finally – Worthless
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Wash trading for the masses is the biggest innovation of NFTs. It is bananas how many breathless articles were typed and published about how today's crazy kids were buying stoner monkey pictures for $$$ without even a mention of this. With Bitcoin or Eth or Doge or whatever, it's hard to paint the tape. You can't move the ticker by selling BTC to yourself at a high price, because your offer to buy it at that pri…
This argument is valid word for word for art, domain names, houses... So I guess you should be willing to follow your logic to the same conclusion in those cases too.
The difference is that in those situations it's much harder to keep (convincingly) faking fresh economic identities.
Especially when some governments want to know who you are in order to get the tax-portion of transaction costs.
Re: NFTs Are – Finally – Worthless
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Wash trading for the masses is the biggest innovation of NFTs. It is bananas how many breathless articles were typed and published about how today's crazy kids were buying stoner monkey pictures for $$$ without even a mention of this. With Bitcoin or Eth or Doge or whatever, it's hard to paint the tape. You can't move the ticker by selling BTC to yourself at a high price, because your offer to buy it at that pri…
This argument is valid word for word for art, domain names, houses... So I guess you should be willing to follow your logic to the same conclusion in those cases too.
Houses have price history, but usually the identity of the owners is a matter of record and if I sold my house to myself, you could see that. I could try to obfuscate this by creating a shell company to buy my own house but that is about 1,000x more work than creating another ETH wallet and still not very anonymous.
More importantly, even if I manage to create the appearance that my house has a price history of eight million dollars, somebody looking at the physical property will note that it is in a crappy neighborhood, the vinyl siding is cracked, the deck is rotting, and the construction is generally cheap '80s on a quarter acre. There are other ways to estimate the value of the property besides looking at what it last sold for. So we rarely ever see this attempted in real estate.
This is true of domain names too. I am not going to trick anybody into thinking 643626bcaqw.org is worth as much as tesla.com for obvious reasons, no matter what wash trades I perform. Pointing to "well it last sold between two anonymous owners for millions!" fools nobody. The price history of a domain name is not even normally shown when you try to purchase one, just the current asking price.
Art is closer, which makes sense as NFTs are supposed to be a digital equivalent to art. I am not in the market for high priced art and certainly wouldn't recommend it as an investment. Unlike a house, I can't inspect a piece of art and judge how much money it might be worth. Like an NFT, I imagine when a piece of art is sold at auction it's typical for the auctioneer to mention it last sold to so-and-so at such-and-such price. The difference is that "so-and-so" might be, say, Jeff Bezos or the Metropolitan Museum of Art or something. No auctioneer is going to say "well, this piece is highly valuable because it last sold from D6EB90 to CBB0FE at 24.190 WETH"[1]. Nobody would care about a purported sale between two anonymous parties.
The NFT world is the only space I can think of where that data is assumed to be meaningful. Notice how the prominent the price history graph is on OpenSea -- it's almost as big as the image itself. Probably because there is no other way to guess at a valuation for a Bored Ape, so even though this anonymous price history is highly dubious, it's all a prospective buyer has to go on.
[1]https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061...
Re: NFTs Are – Finally – Worthless
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
A wants to give a bunch of money to B for a reason that they want to remain hidden (e.g. a bribe, illegal purchases, etc.). So B puts an NFT up for sale and A buys it for an inflated price. Now B has a plausible explanation for the source of the money. You can do this with other assets like fine art or real estate but it is a lot more complicated. NFTs are a simple way to launder money online.
Nice opinion, too bad it's ... not money laundering.
Found the guy holding the bag
Re: NFTs Are – Finally – Worthless
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
A wants to give a bunch of money to B for a reason that they want to remain hidden (e.g. a bribe, illegal purchases, etc.). So B puts an NFT up for sale and A buys it for an inflated price. Now B has a plausible explanation for the source of the money. You can do this with other assets like fine art or real estate but it is a lot more complicated. NFTs are a simple way to launder money online.
Nice opinion, too bad it's ... not money laundering.
Ok, what do you call it when someone tries to conceal the origin of money?
Re: NFTs Are – Finally – Worthless
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice opinion, too bad it's ... not money laundering.
Ok, what do you call it when someone tries to conceal the origin of money?
>what do you call it when someone tries to conceal the origin of money?
Maybe just "concealing the origin of money"? Btw, in your scenario you actually left a public, immutable record of the transaction, which is pretty much the opposite of what somebody engaging in this activity (i.e. not LARPing) would want to.
Money laundering has to do with turning so-called "black money" into clean money. In your example, that is not happening anywhere. If A's money is dirty, B will be dirty as a consequence; whereas if A's money is already clean, B should be fine, so, why bother? It's just a regular transfer of money, you just used a fancy technolord mechanism but not different, in essence, than writing a check or using venmo or w/e.
Also, for anyone thinking they could outsmart RICO[1] (or their country's equivalent) with some PNGs of badly drawn apes, that is just so stupid it's actually quite funny. Levine would have a field day with that.
Also also, congrats, all that money you "laundered" with your fancy tokens is worthless now, per TFA. Very smart.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corru...