• BilSabab@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    i fucking loved NFT startups in 2021. it was the definition of easy money. I had like 20 clients like that in 2021 alone and it was the shit. the funniest bit is that literally none of these companies or projects were around by the time 2023 started - all wiped out and most of these entrepreneur bros just moved on to do disposable AI startups instead with equally nothingburger results. what’s baffling is that these motherfuckers still manage to raise investments for some bullshit pie in the sky but actual techies with ideas struggle to get a quarter worth of financing even though their ideas actually have legs

    • They have the resonating rhetoric, charisma, personal connections, and delusional enthusiasm necessary to wow investors. Wooing investors is a skill unrelated to technical understanding.

      • BilSabab@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        and its fucking annoying that these folks get the best opportunities - in a better world they would’ve been shoved away in the sales department doing the good deed but nah ain’t happening

  • Tattorack@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Get fucked.

    We had this ruining the art world right before AI started taking its shot.

    NFTs died miserably.

    Now it’s AI’s turn.

        • taiyang@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          I also saw $150 million, which is more than he deserves but it’s mostly because of ownership. Wealth snowballs so even if you make terrible life decisions after the initial investments, you usually come out with even more money.

  • NullPointerException@lemmy.ca
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    4 days ago

    Nah, it’s genius. A fantastic way to laundry money. It’s like buying paintings but you don’t even need to pay someone to appraise it or a good painter with some sort of good technique.

    • dohpaz42@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      Yeah, but do paintings typically lose almost all of their value? I thought the idea was that the value should either stay the same or go up.

      Either way, in this case, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

      • BigFig@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        The point here is say you are in business with X party but it’s illegal. X party can buy an nft worth nothing or generate one. You buy the NFT for the amount of your bill with X party. You’ve now technically not paid them for whatever illegal thing, instead you bought an nft from them. You could also break this down into multiple NFTs, buying 100 $100 NFTs from various “owners” that don’t link back to X party through shell companies, and you’ve now paid them $10,000 “for pictures of chimps”.

        NFTs only exist for money laundering and illicit transfers. Once they’ve been transferred their value no longer matters, the business has been done.

        • Ms. ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.zip
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          4 days ago

          NFTs only exist for money laundering and illicit transfers

          And at least to some degree scamming people even if that’s not the main focus. I know a few people that got full on scammed by it

        • anonklay@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          Thank you! Now for the first time, i finally see the slightest sense in NFTs. I really didn’t get it from the start. I heard various explanations and they never made any sense to me. Left me confused every time until now.

          Its just a mask for a deal in the background. Ok now i get it.

          • moobythegoldensock@infosec.pub
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            3 days ago

            Yep.

            My buddy once went to a farmer’s market where they weren’t allowed to sell beer, but they were allowed to give it away. So he did the oldest trick in the book: scooped up a bunch of rocks in a box, put up a sign that said “Rocks $5,” and “Free beer with purchase of rock.”

            NFTs are just the rock.

      • Khanzarate@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        For Logan Paul, yes, he wanted it to go up.

        But if this painting was laundering at work, the important part is that the seller can point to this transaction as “real”. The IRS or the FBI might be looking into his sudden gains of half a million dollars, but when they do, they find that he sold Logan Paul half a million dollars of art.

        The NFT part makes it incredibly easy to generate said art. Before NFTs, rich people would mark up paintings, and those had to go up in value, because they would buy them at 100,000$ and sell them for 200,000$, so the government would see 100,000$ of profit, but the next guy with the painting, he’d have to sell it for 300,000, claiming 100,000$ in profit, and the next guy, 400,000$, you get the idea.

        NFTs can lose value in a way real art isnt allowed to because anyone can claim that’s the price, and after the sale, they can be discarded as trash, essentially. New ones can be made in bulk for no effort, and its alright to sell 1000 NFTs at 100$ each, because you can just keep making them and “selling” them and no one has to care about their value in the same way because they’re mass producible without that crashing the market.

        • uienia@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          It is also important to mention that you don’t actually own any art with NFTs. You own a link pointing to the art, but the art itself is not owned by the owner of the NFT.

          • Khanzarate@lemmy.world
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            3 days ago

            I don’t think that’s actually all that important. It’s fundamental to an understanding of NFTs, but not their role in any sort of money-laundering, since you can also just make NFTs using some AI-generated art or make 5000 NFT’s from one low-effort art you do own.

            All money laundering needs is the non-fungible part, which is easy to do, just stamp the corner with a limited-edition numbering mark and the 500 fungible digital tokens of a single art become 500 nonfungible tokens.

          • Khanzarate@lemmy.world
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            4 days ago

            You can also just never sell it, but buying it doesn’t help you launder your own ill-gotten money, just other people’s. The issue is creating it. It’s not that big an issue, but NFTs are way more efficient.

    • Jackhammer_Joe@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Who with a clear mind and IQ above 0 would fall for that? Seriously!?

      In Germany, we have a great saying for such stupid people: “As dumb as a five-meter (~5.5 yard) dirt road.”

      • tetris11@feddit.uk
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        3 days ago

        you don’t grift a shitty product because you think it’s worth something, you grift it because you think someone else will.

        The ones hoarding toilet paper during the pandemic didn’t do so because they thought it was an intrinsically sublime product. They did it for the grift

  • F_State@midwest.social
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    4 days ago

    $155 looks a little high to be honest.

    The very idea of NFTs were wild. You don’t own a physical image, you own something kind of like a copyright to an image but you don’t in fact own the actual copyright. But it’s gonna cost you alot of money and somehow make you even more money someday.

  • drath@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    To be fair, there are active buy offers for that one for ~$5k. The $155 figure is a collection offer, meaning someone is ready to buy anything in that collection, no matter how shitty it is. And, at practically zero liquidity (only one of those ever sot sold after minting), the concept of value becomes meaningless, he could accept the offer and take back $5k, he could list it at something like $20k and it’d likely quickly sell, or he could bullshit one of his rich friends to buy it from him for a million… or he could print that out and jerk it off to it, the therapeutic effect of which might be worth millions for his entertainment business, who knows.

  • Bleys@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    no one else going to point out that Logan Paul is somehow not the worst person in that picture

    • GalacticSushi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      4 days ago

      For anyone wondering, she’s a conservative influencer who worked with BlazeTV, Toilet Paper USA, contributed opinion pieces to RT and, unsurprisingly, has ties to the Russian government.

      • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        More specifically, she and her husband founded tenet media, who ACTUALLY FOR REALS laundered Russian money to shitheads like Tim pool and Dave rubin.

  • khánh@lemmy.zip
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    3 days ago

    Can confirm, I took one look at NFTs back in 2021 and immediately said “that’s fucking stupid.”

    • Th4tGuyII@fedia.io
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      4 days ago

      Certainly my guess. No way he was actually dumb enough to pay over £600,000 just for an image someone could “steal” 1:1 just by copying and pasting.

      It was almost certainly a way to move money somewhere while retaining plausible deniability, just like with all the other scams projects he’s been part of over the years

      • Klear@quokk.au
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        4 days ago

        I think it’s the exact opposite - no money actually changed hands. They just sell worthless crap to each other to make it look valuable to suckers.

      • Sc00ter@lemmy.zip
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        4 days ago

        I mean, this is the same guy who bought a pokemon card for 5 million… but he just turned an 11MM profit on that