The current bid is 1.69 ETH or $4077 USD.

Fuck all of this NFT bullshit.

Incredible to think someone "own" a photo with a copy-pasted anime chick for $6,860.31USD.

I still don't get the hype of NFTs

Doesn't posting this here just highlight how meaningless the NFT really is? All you're doing is paying thousands of dollars so some neckbeards' computers will say that you "own" it, but all you really have is a link to a picture. You don't have any rights over the image. Heck, you don't even have any actual, physical copy of it. And what happens if the server where that image is stored goes down? You've now payed thousands of dollars so some neackbeard's computers will say that you own a dead link.

Ipsi said:

I still don't get the hype of NFTs

Maybe you can tell this emperor has no clothes.

Ipsi said:

I still don't get the hype of NFTs

A combination of high-profile sales in the beginning of the year ginning public interest and NFTs being a theoretically perfect store of value (being non-fungible, i.e. unique, and digital, each token should be immune to depreciation of value due to degradation or an increase in supply, which is how like 99% of things lose value). The latter part would have been especially appealing in the wake of rising fears of inflation as a result of money printers going brrr to fund covid relief.

Ipsi said:

I still don't get the hype of NFTs

I suggest you to watch/read "Ready Player One" and The Metaverse and How We'll Build It Together -- Connect 2021. Here is a 10 minute resume.

However and just like it happened with the "dot-com bubble", this speculation will burst any time. As this techcology adapts to society, creating crisis, bankrupts and new things to come... if a 3rd world war doesn't come first.

Kaktus_Lata said:

Doesn't posting this here just highlight how meaningless the NFT really is? All you're doing is paying thousands of dollars so some neckbeards' computers will say that you "own" it, but all you really have is a link to a picture. You don't have any rights over the image. Heck, you don't even have any actual, physical copy of it. And what happens if the server where that image is stored goes down? You've now payed thousands of dollars so some neackbeard's computers will say that you own a dead link.

The image is not the source of the NFT's value, that lies in the blockchain "signature", the image serves more to distinguish the NFT from other NFTs.

Think of the dollar. If you printed an image of a 100$ bill on a bill-sized piece of paper, that doesn't mean you actually printed 100$. the value of the bill comes from it being printed by the government and them saying that it is legal tender and worth 100$, the images on the bill has no influence on its value, other than communicating that the bill is, in fact, a 100$ bill, and not, say, a 50$ bill.

Kaktus_Lata said:

Doesn't posting this here just highlight how meaningless the NFT really is?

It's about as meaningless as any kind of collectible like stamps, old comics or magic the gathering cards, but most people don't feel like publically stating how much they don't care about them every 5 minutes. The communities that do will still trade them for thousands or millions of dollars anyway.

marcymal said:

The image is not the source of the NFT's value, that lies in the blockchain "signature", the image serves more to distinguish the NFT from other NFTs.

So people are paying thousands of dollars for a serial number.

You may as well place more value on dollars printed in 2000 than 2020.

[deleted]

marcymal said:

The image is not the source of the NFT's value, that lies in the blockchain "signature", the image serves more to distinguish the NFT from other NFTs.

Think of the dollar. If you printed an image of a 100$ bill on a bill-sized piece of paper, that doesn't mean you actually printed 100$. the value of the bill comes from it being printed by the government and them saying that it is legal tender and worth 100$, the images on the bill has no influence on its value, other than communicating that the bill is, in fact, a 100$ bill, and not, say, a 50$ bill.

A better allegory would be to shares of stock. (Just of a really sketchy fly-by night company.) Dollars are useful because they don't fluctuate wildly in value, and when they do, they become like Zimbabwe dollars. Stock shares' volatility is the source of their value to most investors, however. Through shorts or longs, investors who predict the future can make money whether the market goes up or down, and in many cases, the value of a stock can have nothing to do with anything but people's vague idea that a company is going to be worth money in the future.

The thing about NFTs and cryptocurrency (which are basically the same thing), is that NFTs are even less easily exchangeable and more dependent upon the ethereal association they have with some other piece of data, like a picture or a square on a grid.

A good example of how NFTs work is with Earth2, the NFT exchange not-game where they put a grid over Google Maps and then started selling "real estate" along with a promise that it would eventually be "a MMO literally the size of the Earth with the detail of Red Dead Redemption". (I think they didn't actually go quite as far as to also promise it would be full-dive and your own waifu, but it was everything short of that. Surprisingly, there has been nothing but delays on even the slightest effort to make any actual gameplay elements to the NFT marketplace.) It's all just squares on a grid, but the ones near famous monuments like the Statue of Liberty sell for thousands of dollars. Oh, and it's all a pyramid scheme, but with the added twist that you can't sell the squares on the grid back to the company you buy from, you can only sell to new "investors". People who got in first and left fast made money, but no matter how many people try to leave, because they can't sell back to the main company, the main company cannot actually lose money.

People don't buy NFTs because they actually want them most of the time, they buy them because they KNOW it's a scam, but that they think there's some other sucker at the table dumber than them, and that they can unload the garbage they just bought while the market's still hot on someone else before the pyramid collapses. That's why you can tell people until you're blue in the face that this is an obvious scam, and they still go out and buy some - they think they're going to get to be the scammer, not the scamee.

This is all the more likely to happen when there aren't enough real investment opportunities and there are people with money they have nothing better to do with than throw into the stock market. This is the exact cycle that leads up to every single market crash - there aren't enough good investments for investors, so they start funding obvious scams, and take bigger and bigger risks that are blatantly obviously ruinous in hindsight, but people forget that crashes can happen when everything keeps making money. (In 2008, they wanted to bet on mortgages, but ran out of people who could pay mortgages, so they went to ever-more ridiculous mortgage terms. Now, with Crypto, you have stuff like friggin' Doge Coin, a literal meme money, getting pumped and dumped by Elon Musk of all people. NFTs are just the next bubble.)