Isn't it pretty obvious this was 99% a money laundering scheme?
That's easy to say with the benefit of hindsight in 2026. However, back in 2021, it was easy to say without the benefit of hindsight.
Had me in the first half, not gonna lie.
I think it was even easier to say in 2021, because more people knew about it and the scam was even more obvious. Now, in 2026, most people's hindsight doesn't go back that far, it was quickly forgotten as it should be, and people are like "huh? NFT?"
The only good thing out of NFTs was that I learned what fungible means.
Everyone comment how much did they lose on NFTs.
I will start: $0.
I actually got a free NFT in some kind of sweepstakes. It's probably worth negative money now.
It did get me 3 free drinks at a music festival so there's like +50 bucks in value right there.
Under a grand. Is there anyone really stupid enough to think this is still worth anything at all?
I would actually pay like $100 to say I own the EFT some moron paid millions of dollars for. I've bought dumber things. I paid real money for a 100 trillion dollar zimbabwe bill that is completely worthless. Great for cocaine! I've also paid hundreds of dollars for 1 night of cocaine, dozens of times, and have nothing to show for any of them.
Pro tip: don't do cocaine while you still can choose.
The dude literally has a 100 trillion dollars, it's fine
Yeah i was thinking that the other day when they were talking about an 11 million dollar EFT now valued at 100 USD.
I was like, shit, I'd pay 100 USD for that one.
What? You mean digital art that infinitely reproducible, can't actually be owned, WASN'T the next big thing? Oh jeez. I hope the metaverse succeeds and if not then AI surely will RIGHT?!?!
Hey but this cryptographic key says that I own it because I paid made up currency units for it or something
Hey but that made up currency I worked for by burning electricity, I mean MINING it.
If you weren't using them to launder money for a criminal enterprise, then you were doing them wrong.
... ~~doing them wrong~~ falling for a scam.
The whole NFT thing was one giant pump and dump.
I need to come up with my own scam to rinse rich idiots.
The best scams are either holistic/psychic stuff or Hi-fi Audio.
Ok - hear me out.
We get idk 1000 of us poors to buy some cheap land in the Midwest. Up in Appalachia.
We sell “Rapture Survival Communities”
They’re $999/month and you’ll get a hidden bungalow community complete with bunker. We’ll fill it with doctors and pastors and birthing women.
BUT YOU CANT KNOW THE LOCATION UNTIL THE RAPTURE HAPPENS. You don’t want any pesky liberals finding it and gaying up the place with their liberal demonic child sacrifice transness.
We will deliver coordinates via analog radio and Morse code once the rapture has started.
By business plan makes Sam Altman hard in his butt:
When they come screaming for proof and receipts and refunds… Just gaslight them and buy a politician.
Unfortunately for you you don't have what it takes. You need to be a proper psychopath to scam others.
but for a brief period of time, some people made some money, while most participants lost
edit: do AI next
This describes our species’ entire existence 👌
As with everything crypto this was a huge scam. Besides the obvious profiting from gullable idiots, the other use case is to illegally funnel money.
Also worth noting. The Bored Ape Yaht Club NFTs (in the thumbnail) were released by 4chan trolls with Nazi symbolism hidden in some of them. This was the most successful NFT project of them all.
This is the least surprising thing ever
A grand is still 1000 dollars too high a price for these things.
I think most people don't understand cryptocurrencies. On one side it's all hyperbolic about being your own bank and financial freedom and new tech, on the other side it's hyperbolic about how there is no underlying value, it's all going to 0, scams, drugs, terrorism, money laundering,...
But the fact is that crypto does have an underlying value. It's gambling. Gambling is a huge industry.
Also drugs.
I always said as long as crypto can be used to buy drugs, it will have value.
When everything we know in the world is gone and we're using rocks to make spears again, people will still want drugs, the value is eternal.
Speculating on the value of an investment based on an asset that doesn't exist is similar to scammers offering to sell certificates of ownership of dogs' souls.
Capitalism tends over time to create increasingly abstract forms of ownership. And what could be more abstract than ownership of something that isn't there at all? They're selling GUIDs that point to nothing.
This was never anything aside from a scam designed to separate the tech illiterate from their money.
How could it possibly be worth more than pennies?
Who could have predicted this? Literally impossible without hindsight and that's the revisionist history I'm sticking to.
Who could have thought it?
Anyone with the most basic common sense knew it was going to end up like this.
Etherium was run out of the offices of JP Morgan Chase and NFTs were a gimmick to boost the deal flow of their then-underperforming crypto offering.
It was, by and large, an enormous investment in sales and marketing on top of a ton of insanely shady business practices. Case in point, the infamous Beeple NFT that sold for $69.3M was purchased with Etherium to showcase Christie’s auction house accepting cryptocurrency for auction bids. The winning bidder for artwork was an early crypto adopter and marketer named Vignesh Sundaresan who was flush with these tokens, but lacked any kind of liquid market to sell them into yet. That's before you get into the Congo Line of largely clueless celebrities going on Late Night comedy shows to plug their online pogs.
It's trite to say that the whole thing was a scam because... duh. But I think people read this as "just dumb people being stupid with their stupid dumb money" and ignore the layer upon layer of market manipulation and con-artistry that went into making cryptocurrencies what they are today.
The fact that Donald Trump is using them to launder bribes from Middle Eastern dictators and East Asian kleptocrats should illustrate how deep these rabbit holes can go. It's so much more than just peddling bad clipart to dumb bros.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
