this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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The way I read the article, the "worth millions" is the sum of the ransom demand.

The funny part is that the exploit is in the "smart" contract, ya know the thing that the blockchain keeps secure by forbidding any updates or patches.

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[–] [email protected] 109 points 9 months ago (14 children)

No one is gonna buy any NFTs for millions lmao

[–] [email protected] 29 points 9 months ago (5 children)

As crazy as it sounds, some people do.

[–] [email protected] 65 points 9 months ago (32 children)

They did. For like a week last year. Then everyone realized it was a scam.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Love how the NFT hype was a big wealth transfer event. So many rich people, like wealthy oil Arabs, bought into the scam and moved so much money into artists pockets while they essentially got nothing in return.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Is there any way to confirm this? Or are there examples of artists who made a significant amount of money from NFTs? I understand its potential benefit for artists, but I mostly remember already-rich corporations (e.g. UFC) using them as another way to extract money from consumers.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago

That's not really what happened. Some people who had invested in companies that would make money if NFTs went up in value chummed the waters by buying NFTs for huge amounts, convincing a lot of people that NFTs were going to be great investments. Then celebrities with an interest in the scheme pumped up the value too.

That convinced a lot of idiots to "invest" in NFTs, then eventually the bottom fell out of the market.

As for artists, some made some money, but most of the money went into shit like "bored apes" which were algorithmically generated.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (24 children)

It's a great way to launder money.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Better than the current money laundering techniques? Using art appraisals to inflate assets and move dirty money, or straight up using banks like Deutsche or Credit Suisse (RIP) to move dirty money?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago

They're priced like police drug busts.

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[–] [email protected] 81 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Sounds like a great way to make an insurance claim on a bunch of NFTs worth "millions" that you could not convince anyone to buy.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 9 months ago (1 children)

What insurance company is dumb enough to insure NFTs?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

Ones that understand the Internet and/or technology. And believe the "secure" hype.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'd say more likely to be able to declare a capital loss on taxes.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

Can I carry that loss over for the next... 100 years or so?

[–] [email protected] 44 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I never had a jpeg stolen from me.

What a time to be alive.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (1 children)

No no, they stole the link to a jpeg, careful you will make them angry

Here, take my link to get a feeling

https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/db03eae9-a3a9-42df-8cf2-f2aa8bfa2d95.webp

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Another interpretation is that it's all an insurance scam were something worthless is "stolen by hackers" and then claimed to be worth millions for the insurance claim.

But surely nobody in the "well known as impeccably honest" NFT world would ever do something like that!

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago

I guess the millions are in the transaction fees

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago
[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago

"Potential losses". I get the feeling that NFT owners got bit by the same bug that bit RIAA executives.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (2 children)

How do you steal a hyperlink to a jpeg

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago

One of the great thing about the AI revolution is that since generating infinite number of unique random (and commonly, bad) pictures of literally anything you can think of takes only seconds, the entire concept of NFT has become completely worthless as it completely destroyed the value-from-scarcity argument. Not that it ever was a good argument to begin with.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago

I'm having difficulty with the word "worth". It appears to be doing an awful lot of heavy lifting

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Just because the suckers that bought them paid millions doesn't mean that the NFTs are worth millions.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Think of it like this, when people make drug busts and they find huge amounts of cocaine or whatever and they say oh this is 300 something mod a million is worth of stuff. No it's not. It's maybe like not even half that not even a quarter of that, they just make it up just to make their bust even bigger

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

Did they steal all NFTs?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

ITT: a handful of people starting to sweat about their NFT retirement strategy

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (2 children)

…Been a minute since I’ve seen this fark headline meme.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

There were sufficiently stupid people to pay money for NFTs. They will sufficiently stupid people around to pay the ransom.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Insurance scam? Not too be cynical, but after the price dropped a year(?) ago there were a number of thefts for which there was speculation about them being insurance fraud.

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