this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Leopards Ate My Face

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The Sotheby's auction house has been named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by investors who regret buying Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs that sold for highly inflated prices during the NFT craze in 2021.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Wait...the article says they're still worth $50k each.

Really?

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (4 children)

You're vastly overestimating the reasoning ability of prospective NFT buyers.

They couldn't accurately identify a picture. Instead of concluding "I can just copy and paste this", they overrode their common sense to convince themselves that a digital picture of a monkey was unique. Unerringly, truly, exceptionally unique. A digital monkey picture.

It's pretty great. NFT dimbulbs are the flat earthers of crypto.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (3 children)

NFTs remind me a lot of the international star registry.

You're paying someone a lot for them to record some unofficial bragging rights in some unofficial database that literally no normal person cares about.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wait...but the star is named after ME. It's mine, right?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Omigod how do you know my name? Do you work for the star people?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Very much like that, including how there can be multiple registries, like International Star Registry, Universal Star Database, The International Registry of Stars, Universal International Star Registry Database, etc., all 'officially' naming the same stars.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I dunno. That’s kinda neat. Maybe in like 20,000 years humans will be exploring the Mongostein system.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You missed the part where literally nobody else will look to those registries to see what random people named them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Doesn’t NASA do it? I dunno. I always thought it was kind of neat, but ultimately pointless.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nope. The names are entirely unofficial. No one uses them.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

I've got a 50,000 dollar picture of your nephew

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

The bet a lot of people made was basically, since we can have a market of these random things, and they are actually non-replicable at the actual ERC721 assignment level (I know you can copy and paste the actual pictures), that those ownership assignments just become part of the greater pool of "currency", with some having greater value than other.

They will probably retain some value indefinitely, in the same way Beanie Babies have managed to hold on to some value even today. It's of course just not even close to the peak bubble value, because a lot of people were behaving irrationally purchasing them with the whole fear-of-missing-out attitude, driving the price up further, vicious cycle.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wasn't into NFTs, but I did crypto for a bit when it was spiking just because I could. Don't underestimate greater fool theory. Plenty of people who bought either of these "assets" realize that they're only worth what you can sell them for and just flipped them during the initial bubble. The problem with that being that every asset that gets flipped results in some poor butthole holding the bag when the bubble pops. THAT is usually the true believer, the guy who honestly thought that he was just gonna keep this picture of a monkey in a hat and watch the value go up and up and up until he retired.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I appreciate those buttholes.

Solid quote.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It would be cool if each buyer has a unique hash and elements of the art are AI generated (like the background or texture) using some chaotic process with the hash as the seed, so that everyone gets a unique version. I would pay maybe a couple of bucks for something like that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That is a good idea, having a dynamically generated portion of the art dependent on a hash. That would actually be an NFT then, haha.

I still don't think I would pay a couple bucks for one, but I like your idea.

Shoot. Maybe I'd sell them for a couple bucks? Let's get on this.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's the spirit 🤣 The challenge is building a team with both technical and artistic know-how to build something like this.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

From what I've learned about online digital currency, we only need one exceptional department, and that is marketing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Collective delusion of people who still think they're holding onto something worth anything

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

It just means some moron is willing to pay that much

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Yup!

My vinyl collection is "worth" $50k. I just have to find someone deluded enough to believe me and buy it.

In reality it's worth ~$1k because they're old and play music instead of being ugly pictures of monkeys.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Presumably they're still useful for money laundering. Makes sense to keep some kind of price floor.