I work in tech and know just enough to not be an enthusiast about any of it, so while I understand the concept of NFTs, I don't really understand how any of it works in practice.
I keep seeing these pictures, like a monkey cyborg or the ugly cartoon lions, that have sold for huge amounts. I understand people are paying in Ethereum or whatever, so it's not exactly like they're selling for millions of dollars, but what is stopping me from making a bunch of crappy art, turning it into NFTs, selling it all for Ethereum, and cashing out the Ethereum? Is there some special significance to the NFT art I'm seeing that makes dumbasses want to buy it? Like the artists are well known, or the images are well-known memes or something? I'm guessing I can't just start doing it too because if it were that easy everyone would already be doing it. Help me understand
you still have to get noticed amongst the ocean of crap. same old marketing-your-art problem, but now your audience is crypto freaks. might require some collecting and promoting on your part to join the COMMUNITY. all that typical spammy/scammy shit.
some markets are open, some are invite-only/curated. some have options to offset costs of minting your gifs onto the buyer or until after the sale etc, but then your listing options might be more limited or less appealing to buyers or whatever. there's a non-eth market too but its less popular, less whales
i'm trying to get in on the grift but also i dont know shit about crypto or social media marketing so i'm probably doing it the hard way tbh. all i've done is post a bunch of art, i guess i'll drop "nfts coming soon" eventually idk lmao :shrek-blob:
if ur smart you build up hype about your forthcoming nft game where the lil creatures fart on each other. that way your nfts have UTILITY and they can EARN crypto for the COLLECTORS etc etc, then u disappear after selling your jpgs sry losers no game
get noticed
Draw an incredibly shitty hammer and sickle eith poop on it and flies and scrawl “communism iz stinkey” under it
They won’t be able to resist I guarantee it
I wonder if you could do something similar to ebay scams where the listing is like "This is an empty PS5 box. You are only purchasing the box." I'm talking out my ass bc I know nothing about this but I imagine the NFTs must incorporate a fingerprint of the original file, so you can't just right-click-save-as the original image and mint a NFT from it. But you could take a screenshot of the original, or alter a single pixel, and mint that into a NFT. Then you could sell it to an unsuspecting rube who didn't look closely enough at what they were buying
imagine the NFTs must incorporate a fingerprint of the original file, so you can’t just right-click-save-as the original image and mint a NFT from it.
im not certain but i think this is in fact possible, they call minting shit that isnt 'yours' like copymint violation or something. the market platforms purport to monitor for it and use reporting tools etc bc i guess they must to have any sort of investor confidence
I don't think it's a coincidence that crypto completely jumped the shark when the art world got involved. The fine art market is infamous for price manipulation, money laundering, tax evasion and monopoly/cartel behaviour. Here are the kinds of things that people could potentially be doing with NFTs:
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I owe you $50 million for a shipment of cocaine and sex slaves. I can't just transfer $50 million to your bank account, because people will probably start asking questions about why I'm gifting huge amounts of money to a suspected human/drugs trafficker. So instead you make some crappy MS Paint art, we get our friends to generate loads of buzz around it, we hold an auction, our friends bid at various prices, and I swoop in and buy it for $50 million (and if some idiot comes along and outbids me, that works out even better for both of us).
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I create an NFT and sell it backwards and forwards between different accounts and fake identities, making it seem like it's worth $1 million. I donate it to my charitable foundation which teaches kids to code. I now get to deduct $1 million from my income when I calculate my tax payment.
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I create a series of NFTs and get a bunch of accomplices to buy most of them for huge sums of money, which I pay back to them. Then some gullible people come along and assume that the remaining NFTs in the series must be worth huge amounts of money too, and buy them.
The reason why this works is that it's very hard for anyone to tell the difference between a piece of art whose price has been inflated for nefarious purposes and a piece of art that just has a lot of hype around it. You couldn't do this with, say, oil, because everyone knows how much a barrel of oil is worth.
but what is stopping me from making a bunch of crappy art, turning it into NFTs, selling it all for Ethereum, and cashing out the Ethereum?
I think you generally have to pay to create it and market it, and the vast majority don't sell for very much or at all. What you definitely shouldn't do is spend large amounts of money buying NFTs and hoping that their price will continue to go up. At some point the market will almost certainly crash. There were people who invested their life savings into Beanie Babies and got caught out when that market crashed.
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Dude don't do it. Your chances are better holding eth or btc. What they are doing is buying their own NFT or having a buddy buy it to create hype and then sell it off to anothe suckers. No one will give a fuck about these things and you will be left holding the shit bag.
That makes sense to me, I've definitely seen the "just bought this NFT" posts
Its kind of dumb though, because if you've already got that much social media clout it seems like it would be way easier to just hawk those shitty ray jay earbuds or whatever.
Can't wait for crypto linkrot to start making some of these NFTs dissapear.
maybe they will be characters in a new online game, or you can destroy them to get an IRL artifact, or there is a development team who is going to spend lots of money on advertising
important bit here is that these things don't actually need to happen, what matters is that you say they will
there is some NFT scam literally promising a trip to the moon and people bought into it, just let your imagination run wild and make a pretty graphic
nobody's making money out of it per se, it's all "greater fool theory", that's why any asset no matter how obviously dumb and overpriced will eventually be bought with the expectation that foolishness has not been maximized yet
Because minting it, which is the process that makes the NFT a part of the blockchain, can cost considerable amounts of money.
They're not. They're selling them to themselves to create a value and then a few morons are actually buying them. From what I've seen on opensea there is no way anyone is transacting this kind of money legitimately.
