• Arotrios@kbin.social
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    9 months ago

    The news here is that, contrary to popular belief, 5% of NFTs actually still hold some value.

    • jarfil@beehaw.org
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      9 months ago

      The real question would be: how many of those 5% can be sold for more than the initial asking price.

      …but NFTs were never for the buyers, they were for the creators: even if they fall to 1/1000000th the initial value, a 2.5% cut on every sale is still more than 0.

      • festus@lemmy.ca
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        9 months ago

        If the values fall low enough relative to transaction fees then there won’t be any transactions at all for creators to collect royalties. Also values can drop to literally $0 if it isn’t even worth a buyer or sellers time to deal with the NFT (i.e. seller can’t find buyer at any price or doesn’t bother trying).

    • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
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      9 months ago

      It’s sad, I remember when bitcoin was new and the people interested were actually interested in breaking the state control of money. Now >99% of crypto people are just grifters and people trying to get rich quick.

      • bermuda@beehaw.org
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        9 months ago

        bitcoin skyrocketed and suckered in a lot of people to the gold rush. they didn’t want decentralized currency or anything. They just saw that it was ~16,000 dollars a bitcoin and wanted in.

      • anachronist@midwest.social
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        9 months ago

        Most people were grifters back then too. I had a friend who was a libertarian porcfest free-stater and he was against bitcoin because he was afraid everyone would lose all their money and not be able to complete the free state project.

    • jarfil@beehaw.org
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      9 months ago

      Shitcoins and GIF NFTs are complete scams, nothing to argue there.

      Also Papal Indulgences, stamp collections, carbon offsets, the USD… we can go on 🤷

      • Uncle_Bagel@midwest.social
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        9 months ago

        If the price of rare stamps craters you can always just use the stamp to mail a letter to your friend. They are onysical items with actual scarcity and legit demand from collectors. Loads of people have collected stamps, coins, and baseball cards for decades and even centuries

        • jarfil@beehaw.org
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          9 months ago

          Rare stamps collections include stamps from countries that no longer exist, are no longer valid, or are only commemorative and were never valid in the first place. Same thing for coins and banknotes, some you can only use to look at them.

          They’re items with scarcity… that is no always all that scarce, and there are a lot of scams going around. Some are fake, some are so good of a fake that are unique and valuable again… 🤷

          (but… “use the stamp to mail a letter”? What century is this? 😉)

          • Uncle_Bagel@midwest.social
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            9 months ago

            I send a check to my trash service because they want to charge a fee for me to pay online. That requires a stamp, and my mom sends me card a every few months despite us texting regularly.

    • Euphoma@lemmy.ml
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      9 months ago

      Cryptocurrency has its uses as unregulated currency, though that makes it easy to scam people with it.

      • upstream@beehaw.org
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        9 months ago

        The biggest problem is people trying to peddle it as currency.

        It isn’t currency, never will be. Much more alike to bonds.

        It’s an investment object with a speculative value, and no tangible value. The only value it has is what the next guy is willing to pay for it.

        While currency is deflationary by nature, crypto is entirely based on demand and supply, and sure, as long as people think it will be worth more tomorrow - sky’s the limit.

        Like any pyramid scheme it pays out to get in early, and get out before it collapses.

        Relying on crypto is high stakes gambling, and people being people is the only reason I can find for it not having collapsed totally already.

        • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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          9 months ago

          The problem with using it as either a gamble or an investment is that the person/people holding control over the currency are doing so with the intent to make money. More often than not your money is gone the instant you pay in if they decide to make it hard/impossible to cash out. This is what Logan Paul’s scam crypto ended up doing. Say what you will about the US dollar, their main incentive is to stay in power which backs up the legitimacy of the currency. They’re not just going to rugpull the dollar because it would run counter to that goal.

          It’s fundamentally impossible for crypto to fulfil that role because everyone involved is just there to make a quick buck.

        • ConsciousCode@beehaw.org
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          9 months ago

          It’s fiat, I won’t argue it was ever going to be a good currency with built-in deflation, but that’s what it was originally meant to be. It’s long since become too volatile to be anything but a speculative asset, though. It does seem curious to me what that says about the actual distinction between legitimate currencies, stock options, and pyramid scheme buy-ins.

          • jarfil@beehaw.org
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            9 months ago

            High volatility is not a problem for a currency:

            • work January, get paid $1000, pay $1000 in due bills
            • work February, get paid $25000, pay $25000 in due bills
            • work March, get paid $50, pay $50 in due bills

            Volatility is irrelevant to a currency, unless you want to treat it as an investment.

            • Sas [she/her]@beehaw.org
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              9 months ago
              • work January, get paid 1000, pay 600 in bills and lay 400 aside for potential emergencies
              • work February, medical emergency comes up but medical bills now cost 10000 so you can’t afford them with the 400 you set aside and you also can’t work because of the emergency so you take 20000 debth to repay the medical cost and other bills
              • work March to repay your debth, but you only get 50 while still having a debth of 20000
              • jarfil@beehaw.org
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                9 months ago

                Volatility is irrelevant to a currency, unless you want to treat it as an investment.

                can’t afford them with the 400 you set aside

                Meaning, you treated currency as an investment. What did I just say?

                • Sas [she/her]@beehaw.org
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                  9 months ago

                  What you just said was a thing that you can only do in an idealised world where you never get sick and all your bills are always payed in the month you get them. Nice of you to completely ignore the rest of the answer that kind of points to why in the real world you have to set aside money and why in the real world a volatile currency is useless

    • ComradeKhoumrag@infosec.pub
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      9 months ago

      I would argue 99.99% of crypto and nfts are complete scams. But Blockchain is a change in how we manage and distribute data, and can remove centralization of power from humans that we would otherwise need to trust for managing autonomous systems like the data in a banks public ledger.

      • GunnarRunnar@beehaw.org
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        9 months ago

        Could you describe a case example how that applies in practice?

        Because yeah I understand that when we all have our own copy of the data someone can’t falsify all our independent copies but is data being tampered like that even the problem?

        • cassetti@kbin.social
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          9 months ago

          I personally envision a future where we use blockchain technology to create a new direct democracy party in which every member has a unique identifier and the blockchain ledger system used to track polling data. Every individual member of the party would have one vote in each poll at ever level (federal, state, regional, etc) - for every single thing that gets a vote, and the elected politician representing that party would be required to vote based on the polling data.

          Everyone would have access to a copy of the ledger to confirm their votes are counted accurately, and they can review polling data to confirm their elected politicians are voting based on polling data, and the representative would be replaced if they do not adhere to the results

          • jarfil@beehaw.org
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            9 months ago

            Why a party? You don’t need a party for direct democracy, just 1 person = 1 vote. Either vote yourself, or authorize someone you trust to vote in your name, be it for a time, or on a certain topic, or whatever, if you’re too busy to vote on every poll.

            • cassetti@kbin.social
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              9 months ago

              I’d love to see that happen, But it’s because America won’t switch to a direct democracy. Instead we have a Kleptocracy run by corporations and the 1% who have power over both parties in America. However if it were possible to create a third political party where every member of the party earns only one vote maybe it would give people power back over corporations. But it’s a pipe dream, I know it’ll never happen.

              • jarfil@beehaw.org
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                9 months ago

                The problem I see with it being a third “political party”, is that it would still have to get past the gerrymandering, the FPTP, and the general issue of financing.

                In representative democracies, that “representative” part is so often set up with extra hoops in a way that counters any attempt at direct democracy. It’s… a curious coincidence.

    • alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPM
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      10 months ago

      i can only presume the remaining 5% is owned by NFTs Georg, who lives on the blockchain and is an outlier who should not have been counted

    • addie@feddit.uk
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      9 months ago

      Hey, just because 95% of them are worthless, doesn’t mean the other 5% aren’t too.

    • LanternEverywhere@kbin.social
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      10 months ago

      No, you can’t paint that broad of a stroke. It’s true that crypto INVESTING might be no better gambling, but crypto wasn’t invented to be an investment tool, it was invented to be a financial transaction tool, and in that regard it has some real utility.

      • davehtaylor@beehaw.org
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        10 months ago

        But that’s not how most people use it anymore. It’s become almost entirely a speculation market. Plus, transaction times for payments on Bitcoin e.g. make it totally infeasible for use in any retail application.

        It’s just a bunch of people passing Monopoly money around to each other at this point, trying to pretend they’re making bank.