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Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

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131–140 of 262 posts

Re: Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This comment could be talking about all art. Here's what I predict we'll find out: * Some high-value traditional art sales are "wash trades and money laundering." * Nearly all high-value NFT sales are "wash trades and money laundering." There's an important different between some and nearly all , but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader to work out.

Yeah, high art will have proportionately less money laundering -- because it has proportionately more tax avoidance, and that's a much larger industry.

Also some part of tax avoidance requires real deals. That is keeping valuations of artists works high so that other works already owned have "realistic" market value for tax reasons. Unless entire supply is owned by same group. If not they have to pay money for any pieces that enter to market that they don't own.

Re: Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

#132

From another article on the same topic https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/apr/14/twitter-n... : > Man who paid $2.9m for NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet set to lose almost $2.9m > ‘This is the Mona Lisa of the digital world’, says crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi who bought the NFT in March 2021 This is a good example of why so many people don't take cryptocurrency seriously. It full of hype men who spout tr…

Sometimes you're on the wrong end of the pump & dump.

Re: Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

#133
I knew some very respectable people who were shilling NFTs with all of their might. These were not crypto people with any kind of understanding of the technology or implications, but they were high level people in their fields. It was sad to see so many people get taken in by it, and even more, to transform into the hosts through which this idea spread. It was like watching some kind of mind virus. It was a short period of loud obsession, but they haven't mentioned it since.

Re: Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

#134
post #26

What's the story here? This is normal market dynamics for collectibles where people paying what they perceive the value to be. I'm sure there are plenty of Beanie Babies (and other Collectibles) that are nearly worthless compared to what someone payed for them previously. Note: I'm not for or against NFTs. I'm just trying to point out the dynamics of the Collectibles market.

A NFT is not a collectible, it's a pure vehicle for financial speculation. The object being collected no longer exists in any meaningful sense.

Not to disagree, but the question of what a thing is independent of the meaning we attach to it is worth thinking about. There was this interesting passage in this book about the art world, "The $12m Stuffed Shark"-- which I recommend btw-- that went sort of like this:

A famous conceptual artist died. People going through his apartment found things in his closet that were maybe lost works, maybe junk he collected.

It's funny to think about but the difference of interpretation amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars. One of the things you learn from that book is that if a famous art collector pays a lot of money for something found in that closet it will continue to be valuable and maybe end up in museum. If they don't, it's trash and never meant to be a work of art.

Re: Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

#135
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NFTs of jpegs are scams. NFTs that are linked to real-world assets (through intermediaries that you have to trust, yes — unlike everybody else on the blockchain) like stock, real estate or anything else are not.

Can the people downvoting this explain why this comment is not valuable?

Sure, there's no difference between an NFT of something in the real world and a contract that you write on paper and mutually agree to. If you had the NFT of a jet nationalized by Putin well, you'd still be screwed.

Re: Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

#136
post #52
post #27

Pardon me. I never understood NFTs and never planned to be on board. But from my nascent understanding of what NFTs comprise, I couldn't understand why first tweet ever is a real NFT. The tweet is publicly available so there is no exclusivity. Anyone can look far enough & find it. The second being ownership. The tweet was always time stamped & in Jack Dorsey's name. Buying it as NFT will not really change its attribu…

All NFTs contain a public URL inside them, as the thing the sellable token points at. You can go look at other peoples NFTs all you like, at any time.. they can’t stop you. NFTs aren’t contracts for the rights, so this is as real an NFT as any other. An NFT is essentially a text file, that only one person can prove they own via the blockchain, where the file has a URL written inside. Nothing more, nothing less.

> NFTs aren’t contracts for the rights, so this is as real an NFT as any other. An NFT is essentially a text file, that only one person can prove they own via the blockchain, where the file has a URL written inside. Nothing more, nothing less.

This is the most succinct explanation I have across. Thank you. Now, this amazes me more that people are willing to invest & trade on text files with some URL in a Blockchain. The naive me now thinks this is bonkers. No wonder so many people are critical of its worth.

How does one view list(s) of NFTs?

Re: Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

#137
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Peter Thiel quote - "The something of somewhere is often the nothing of nowhere."

Hindsight is 20/20, which is why you never see the crystal ball flying at your head until it's too late -- also Peter Thiel, probably.

He made a great talk at the Bitcoin conference last week:

https://youtu.be/wmBieQpuysM

Re: Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

#138
post #31
post #27

Pardon me. I never understood NFTs and never planned to be on board. But from my nascent understanding of what NFTs comprise, I couldn't understand why first tweet ever is a real NFT. The tweet is publicly available so there is no exclusivity. Anyone can look far enough & find it. The second being ownership. The tweet was always time stamped & in Jack Dorsey's name. Buying it as NFT will not really change its attribu…

Jack Dorsey sold it; it's not like some random made a jpeg and tried to sell it.

Jack Dorsey sold a token with a link to a jpeg, the point being, that token with a link to a jpeg (we all know what a token is, we generate tokens all the time) is worthless. There is no jpeg in the token itself, just the link to the gallery that hosts the jpeg.

By the way, the token could contain any sort of short information, the address to a C++ pointer in the memory of my computer for instance.

Re: Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how taxes in the US work. If he sold it now he'd only be able to take the loss on his 2022 taxes, and even then he better hope he has a lot of gains or else he'll need to carryover the loss.

More importantly: losing actual money to save on taxes is hugely inefficient. If he was doing this to save on taxes, he would have taken a paper loss via depreciation -- meaning, not actually selling it, just changing the book value of it -- with the intent of paying capital gains tax at some future date (well, more likely, borrowing against its "true" value indefinitely).

But it's not actual money? The NFTs space seems to just be an extension of the old art appraisal scam: the asset can have whatever value happens to be convenient at a given time.

Re: Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a genuine question - should anyone take cryptocurrency seriously? To me, the only purpose of it is to make money. It's the stock market, but with less rules, and it's 24/7. People will say that crypto is important because it's decentralized and non-fiat or whatever, with the implication being that it's not controlled by a government. But we have seen time and time again that that isn't true, and if a governme…

> should anyone take cryptocurrency seriously? To me, the only purpose of it is to make money. It's the stock market, but with less rules, and it's 24/7. It's not the stock market at all. Not even close. The stock market is a system that enables the buying and selling of shares in productive business - businesses that provide goods and services, that generate revenue and (ideally) profit. As a shareholder you own a f…

> The stock market is a system that enables the buying and selling of shares in productive business

Ostensibly, yes. But in practice stocks are often pretty disconnected from business realities by algorithmic trading and high-frequency trading. Even manual trades made on a snap basis like a mass sales on a company posting a slightly less than stellar quarter on the back of a proven long-term, solid, growing business: is that company really "worth" 10% less today? Especially since that "value" is then often recouped even before the next quarterly report.

Most companies can't even explain many of their own stock price moves.

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