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Remember when NFTs sold for millions of dollars? 95% of the digital collectibles are now probably worthless. (markets.businessinsider.com)
submitted 3 years ago by [M, B] to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Remember when NFTs sold for millions of dollars? 95% of the digital collectibles are now probably worthless.::NFTs had a huge bull run two years ago, with billions of dollars per month in trading volume, but now most have crashed to zero, a study found.

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[–] 51 points 3 years ago (14 children)

I'm honestly amazed they're worth anything at all.

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  • [–] 26 points 3 years ago (9 children)

    We have been attributing a huge value to a metal that's mostly remarkable for being yellow and shinny for millennia, one of the biggest investment bubbles in history was over a flower, and people thought that using a loophole to profit from the arbitrage of international reply coupons was going to last forever. Hell, people paid for fake property titles for land on the Moon and Mars. It's not that surprising that some people think that buying a random number in a distributed database is an investment.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 years ago

    Yellow, shiny, and untarnishable/non-poisonous. The latter are very nice properties to have for jewelry, as your skin will eat away most metals over time.

    People like looking pretty, that has consistent value other than using it as a medium of exchange/ store of value.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    I didn't get the "arbitrage of international reply coupons" reference. What's that one?

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    That's what Ponzi told people he was doing. And in the beginning he was, and it was working, but then he started paying investors with other investors money.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    And in the beginning he was, and it was working

    I might be wrong, but to my recollection, he never got it to work; in the beginning, he merely believed that he could eventually get it to work, and that the first fraudulent payouts to early investors were originally intended as a temporary way of buying time without losing investors.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    True, but to be fair, them shiny metals for the longest time were reasonably rare and couldn't be made, and served well for a means of currency. NFTs are pretty ridiculous all things considered. People also "bought" stars too, so yeah, many will buy dumb shit.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    Things only have a price when two people are willing to do the transaction.

    Say 99% of NFT owners have given up and mentally written off their NFTs as a complete loss. If the remaining 1% are selling at a 90% loss and some sucker is still buying at that 90% discount, the "average price" will be whatever those two agree on.

    This is a bit different from physical goods because those can't just be deleted out of existence. If someone had a warehouse of beanie babies they might choose to give them away (setting the price at zero) or maybe there's some tiny value of the cloth so they sell them for a few cents per kg.

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