Lost money on NFT

Scottex99

Malthusian said:

Scottex99 said:

What about the normal fifa game but there’s 100 gold Ronaldo’s and they are NFTs. Players can trf them directly between each other and EA takes a 5% fee of each trade?

1. That's called "pay to win".

2. There is nothing stopping EA doing that already. Multiplayer games have had unique or ultra-rare items since MUDs in the 90s and have never had any problem tracking their ownership with a simple centralised database.

3. Why would EA allow players to trade Ronaldos and take a mere 5% of profits when they could sell non-transferable Ronaldos and capture 100% of what the market is willing to pay?

4. Games using the ubiquitous "loot box" model immediately run into gambling regulation. At present a gamer can pay £10 of their pocket money for a lootbox of random footballers or guns, and it isn't treated as gambling on the (flimsy) grounds that what they pay for has no market value. As soon as the footballers have a quoted market value, that defence, which is already paper-thin, evaporates entirely.

Now you can pay £10 for a lootbox in the hope it contains a Ronaldo or at least a Rashford or two and you can immediately sell the contents on the market for more than £10. That is indisputably gambling. That means EA has to register with gambling regulators in every jurisdiction it sells the game in, comply with the relevant laws and follow its duty of care to potential problem gamblers.

No problem to solve here bro, maybe next time.

While "pay to win" is a lucrative niche, that niche consists entirely of crappy mobile games terribly translated from Chinese. Both the mass market and the hardcore gamers detest being killed purely because some rich kid spent thousands of dollars on a gold AK47.

What we are seeing here is the classic problem of living in brospace and seeing everything through gold-tinted glasses. Bros say "wouldn't it be great if you stuck NFTs in computer games so everyone could have a chance to get rich quick while they played". What they have missed is that gamers aren't interested in getting rich quick, they just want to play. Explaining this to a bro is like explaining to a street preacher why I'm not interested in going to Heaven. Why on earth wouldn't I want to go to Heaven? Does not compute.

1. And? Now we have play to earn too.

2. centralised can be bad. Actually the creator of Ethereum started questioning centralisation when blizzard or whoever makes WoW altered some spell and made him cry and quit the game. Now he’s a mega billionaire.

3. Depends on the price, maybe is 10% and each one is worth 10m

4. Lol. NFTs and Crypto isn’t all about getting rich. Last game I played was RDR2. Had gold guns and jackets made out of raccoons, the lot. Now wouldn’t it be cool if those items could be transferred into RDR3? Assuming they build that compatibility blah blah. Or I sell them to another Cowboy with a deep voice who continuously talks about his “plan”. Also cool.

The fixation on things not solving problems is also a limited argument. Is that how all innovation and progress happens? Or could it be people just like building new stuff and see what happens? Could be both, bro

barnstar2077

Scottex99 said:

barnstar2077 said:

Alexland said:

Scottex99 said:

Now I’m not saying that that automatically guarantees that my “original” on the ethereum blockchain has more value than a saved image someone else has on their desktop by in theory it does.

But is there anything stopping me making a higher quality scan of the Mona Lisa as a new digital image file and creating a new NFT of that and arguing that mine is more valuable than yours? The whole thing seems such a pointless waste of time and buyers money - has humanity run out of worthwhile problems to solve?

This occurred to me too.  What is to stop me from changing one pixel of an NFT and relaunching it?  It's all a bit crazy.  I can see why some might enjoy collecting them, as some people do cat statues or football cards, but other than that it is all a bit silly.

Nothing at all. You could take a BAYC that has current value of $500K (in ETH) and put a pink hat on it and list it. The difference is you would be selling it on your own OpenSea account, or whatever NFT exchange you were using. You wouldn't be verified as the official project and therefore the value would be close to zero, or whatever someone wanted to pay you for it. Maybe $5. 

There's big communities of fans behind all of the big projects, their Twitter pages and Discord's etc all have many many followers and all of them would separate your new NFT from what the deem as an original.

In fact most new projects have copycats pop up on the likes of OpenSea. I think OpenSea deletes them or they just fade away as most people realise they haven't been created by the original team.

Your response made me lose faith in the future of humanity.

Scottex99

Meh, people looked at Gates explaining the internet in 1995 the same way they do now when they hear about the Metaverse

Scottex99

https://blockworks.co/nft-creators-stole-1-3m-from-investors-then-vanished-sources-say/

Apt for the headline photo too...

Malthusian

The most entertaining part of the story (which is otherwise same old same old) is that the "victims" are crowdsourcing their own recovery scam.

The group is working on a wrapped contract for the project, which would return stolen funds into the hands of their rightful NFT owners.

Bro to English translation: the group is working on a way to convince the particularly stupid members (or new suckers) to pump more money in, enabling a lucky few to get their money back.

No funds are going to be returned, scammers don't leave the money lying around.

This is a really small-time scam in any case - $1.3 million with an average loss of c. $1,000 or less is chump change. The most likely outcome is that everyone will just forget about it and move on.

User232002

barnstar2077 said:

The Mona Lisa is painted in oils on a poplar panel, it is easily distinguished from a print.  It could however still be forged, but not with the click of a mouse, so it is not the same as the millions of images on the internet that are identical to the NFT of the latest meme someone just bought.

A print, no - but a forgery is still somewhat easy to produce. Hence why I said it would take a few thousand to produce a good copy. If your argument is that the copy cost of an NFT is 0 and the copy cost of a mona lisa is 0.001% then that seems incredibly tenuous.

As I said, provenance is what matters.

oz0707 said:

Just read this thread. Still don't have a clue what an nft really is 

Very few other people do either because they are conflating 'NFT's with 'profile pictures.' Non-Fungible Tokens just allow tokens to represent specific things in contrast to things like currencies and shares where a fungible quality is preferable.

Malthusian

Scottex99 said:

2. centralised can be bad. Actually the creator of Ethereum started questioning centralisation when blizzard or whoever makes WoW altered some spell and made him cry and quit the game. Now he’s a mega billionaire.

As previously discussed, if you buy an NFT that represents a spell that deals 100,000 damage the game developers will still be able to nerf it, rendering it worthless.

If the developers are unable to rebalance it because "we can't upset the NFT hodlers", nobody is going to play the game because it will be unfair, unbalanced and unfun. Apart from the existing crypto / NFT mob who don't care about playability. Developers don't constantly tweak the rules instead of hitting the beach and counting their money just because they want to annoy future billionaires. They do it because they want people to keep playing.

Creating a balanced and enjoyable video game is incompatible with creating a money game that people will pump money into. You can do one or the other but not both.

Gamers, like most people, aren't interested in getting rich quick. They just want to play.

4. Lol. NFTs and Crypto isn’t all about getting rich.

If you say so. FCA research and these threads confirm that most crypto punters are interested in one thing, getting rich quick. Any time someone in a money game tells you it's not about money, it's about money.

Last game I played was RDR2. Had gold guns and jackets made out of raccoons, the lot. Now wouldn’t it be cool if those items could be transferred into RDR3?

Like when I transferred my Eye of the Beholder party into Eye of the Beholder 2 in the early 90s? Apparently it wasn't cool enough for it to be worth the developers making the effort in this particular game, namely the task of ensuring that the game was still balanced for those who could import saves. (I.e. not ludicrously easy as you mowed down early-game mobs with your imported late-game gun.) But it's been an option available to developers for every sequel since the age of floppy disks.

I don't mind if game developers throw crap at the wall in the hope that some of it sticks, but if they start claiming that said crap is going to be worth millions and make everyone rich, they should expect to be laughed at. Likewise if they start claiming that games will be more fun if you can spend millions to buy an instant-win spell that the developers can't nerf.

lozzy1965

Scottex99 said:

I also have bought some stupid cartoon mushrooms where the dev team had a cool website, had all this cool utility planned and then they just disappeared, the value went to 0 of all them. Few hundred quid down the drain, no biggy. I'd rather have fun looking at all this stuff and crypto in general than sit on the sidelines saying its all useless and a scam.

Of course some people have fun by calling out things that don't logically make any sense   And that costs nothing.

solidpro

My analogy about NFT is Banksy goes back to art school and pees in a bottle, sticks a QR code on it (that goes nowhere) and calls it a RWA (rare work of art).

A few other students look over his shoulder and do the same thing and suddenly there are 100 RWAs for sale. Each one of a kind. Banksy's one sells for £1500, and the crowd rush in paying £2k, £5k, £10k for RWAs.

Once everyone actually works out that an RWA is a bottle of piddle, the bottom falls out the market and all but one RWA is worth anything. 

The person who bought Banksy's successfully sells it on for £10k thanks to the hype, prestige of Banksy and the fact there is only 1. Everyone else is left with a worthless bottle of pee wee.

If someone is selling Nyan Cat NFT, I'll buy. 4000 monkeys - no thanks.

lozzy1965

No different to buying the big toe bone of a saint.  It has no value but makes the owner feel good about owning it.