Nah man, pogs are where it's at. Pogs!

Back in the mid-90s I had a friend who inherited $40,000 from her grandmother and spent all of it on $75 Fossil watches, the kind that were based on old cartoons like Popeye etc. And it took her a while to do it since she would drive to malls within a few hours of her and clean out the department stores that carried them. That's over 500 watches, a few at a time.

She was adamant that this was an excellent investment, but these are on eBay now for $50 to $60. At parties she would pull out the collection and start showing them to people (no touchy, of course) as if there was something intrinsically interesting about a cartoon Fossil watch. The sad thing is, with $40,000 in hand she probably could have bought two or three times as many from a wholesaler and maybe eventually actually have made some money.

At least with beanie babies there was a physical object.

A lot of those transactions is just to up the price so dumb asses think they are worth it. The other half is just dumb asses ofc.

There was the bit about Sotheby's misrepresenting FTX as a buyer, but that doesn't make me any more sympathetic to their situation. Which, now that I've typed that, is extremely cynical when I like to think of myself as empathetic. I'm gonna try to change my take here. I like @db2's take that the money should be invested in public education.

The 50k value is itself propped up by fake transactions anyways. Since these sales are public, they can just push some around between two paid off clients to give the impression this is their worth.

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.

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

NFTs are not a terrible idea it's just another way of adding a signature to something. If a famous artist made a beautiful work of art and made an NFT of it and said "this is the only one I am selling" then I can understand how it might hold some value to collectors because it's just like how their signature adds to the value of their artwork.

My dog just took a shit outside and if I put my signature on it the value would still be that of a pile of dog shit. Dumb pictures of apes generated for the sole purpose of making more pictures of apes to sell that hold no value to begin with don't magically become more valuable after they have a signature on them.

How much are NFTs worth? Not a Fucking Thing!

Nonono you didn't read the article, the company behind says these are unique, and they were promoted by famous people, and auctioned at Sotheby's.

Trust me, clearly they are very valuable, honest! Somehow they are claimed to still be worth $50,000!! I bet in another couple of years they'll still be worth way over erh let me think, they may still be worth something, maybe a couple hundred? It's the future, it's a sure thing!!

Idk about revolutionary

The technology's still out there, can do whatever you want with it.

they are only greater fools if they come from the greater fool plains of the US, otherwise it's just sparkling bagholders.

In fairness, they didn't buy the monkeys, they bought a spot on the blockchain that says they own the hyperlink to the picture of the monkey.

Conmen typically target people of low intelligence in scams because it increases the chances of said scam being successful, like the classic Nigerian Prince scam littered with spelling inaccuracies aimed at duping the idiots.

buy stupid NFT

pitch TV show about said NFT

get investors to pay for it

take out insurance on NFT and TV show

never bother to make TV show

just collect salary as passive income

“leak” private key a few days before “release”

collect insurance to repay investors

profit