The funniest thing about NFTs is all the real companies that fell for that shit
The most obvious stupid scam ever conceived and they actually managed to hook a bunch of actual corporations
Square Enix, Nickelodeon, Coke, KFC, and more fell for this shit while regular people were laughing about how obvious a con it was.
Really puts into question the capitalist myth of the genius entrepreneur and the idea that these corporate types are rich because they are smart or deserving in some way.
funny thing about the bourgeoisie. All through the 1800s most bourgeois economists were convinced that labor is the source of value in commodities. After all, that is what Adam Smith and David Ricardo thought. Then Marx comes along and takes that fact to its logical conclusion (while adding nuance that it was labor power and not labor, but I digress): Proletarian revolution and the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the abolition of wage labor and the capitalist mode of production. The construction of socialism. So from that point onwards Capitalists began increasingly inventing and embracing subjective (i.e. useless, non-materialist, non-predictive) theories of value, in order to distance "mainstream" economics from Marxist conclusions. This, coupled with the creation of fictitious capital, leads to them huffing their own farts more often than not, especially during recurring economic crises. Hence, nonsense like NFTs.
I was learning 3D art and videogame design when NFTs became popular, I uploaded some renders I made for fun as art proyects to a NFT site, some idiot bought it for 1ETH, around 1000€, LOL
No need to use the past tense here. I have a friend who is still slinging NFTs. I haven’t talked with him in years but I stalk him every now and then to check in on him. He invested in bitcoin early on and then dumped it before the pandemic. If he’d held on to it (and then dumped it at just the right time), he’d be a billionaire now. So I think he’s reluctant to let go of NFTs. His big break is just around the corner. And he’s also a millionaire and his parents are hedge fund managers so he wins either way, at least until the revolution comes.
This is one of those moments where you realize these companies aren't jumping on these trends things for us, but they're doing it to placate an investor class that doesn't know any better and wants them to be into the new, hot thing among these twitter brained friends.
This happens all the time among the MBA crowd. They are afraid of not doing something they think everyone else is doing, even if they don't understand it. The head of my group at work has been talking about AI for months while all of the use cases for it have basically nothing to do with our work outside of writing emails. He did this before with crypto and we have a whole product offering that is useless now because the whole rypto market sublimated overnight.
Really puts into question the capitalist myth of the genius entrepreneur and the idea that these corporate types are rich because they are smart or deserving in some way.
More than that, it calls into question the very concept of economic rationality - that the market behaves rationally based on the rational business decisions of rational actors acting in their own rational self interests.
It's funny "ha-ha" but also funny "damn this sucks dude".
Square Enix, Nickelodeon, Coke, KFC, and more fell for this shit while regular people were laughing about how obvious a con it was.
That's one of the big things I think the NFT craze highlighted. When the suits at MEGACORPS saw a potential way to make money off intellectual property they jumped at it. IP law is really bad, and IP financialization is even worse. They thought they saw a whole new way to create new sort of "premium" product and they all went feral like they were consumed Spirit of Greed from Weird West. They really believe they could make a gazillion dollar from nothing, they either truly thought that or convinced themselves that they did.
Really puts into question the capitalist myth of the genius entrepreneur and the idea that these corporate types are rich because they are smart or deserving in some way.
Big time! It also really highlighted how everyone is despite to get out of the capitalist trap. I really felt kinda bad for regular people who got duped into NFTs and crypto as a whole. I'm not trying to say they are dumb people or have no agency, just saying lots of regular people lost their hard earned cash cause they bet on NFTs and crypto being "the future". Lots of regular people lost cash on the Robinhoods, the Coinbases, and the crypto dotcoms of the world. All of the "smart" "business people" were telling you NFTs and crypto was the future. Just yet another vampire scheme to siphon the lifeforce from working people =,
Heads up, we have a genuine cryptopeddler (don't say it's about crypto, because the goalposts keep moving even as the peddler argues for NFTs and related grifts) in this thread, and the entire carnival barker routine is now in play, including "beat capitalism's casino by doing a newer shinier capitalism casino" and messianic "this will change the world and revolutionize everything" speeches.
Some are stupid enough to drink the coolaid but most actually realise that its stupid but want to cash out on the other stupids then duck out. But the thing is they also have to tell everyone else that its actually really cool and good to get that stupid in to buy the thing.
Square is the funniest example of drinking the coolaid though. I wonder what they're even going to do now.
there's degrees to "falling for that shit" though. the cost of minting an NFT is literally negligible for the coca cola company, and the upside is enormous if it becomes an irrational market like bitcoin was. otoh, making a game centered around NFTs is sad as fuck, those people got screwed hard.
also, this is just my perception, but it could've been the other way around even. bitcoin became an irrational market because there was some purity to its conception: it was merely an unfeasible currency theory put into action, so libertarians could masturbate over it. as lousy as the theoretical pinnings of bitcoin are, there were no companies getting in on the action from the getgo. it wasn't meant to be a casino, it just devolved into one. companies getting day one onto the NFT train just made it way more obvious that it was meant to extract profit from compulsive gamblers, and the unsightliness accelerated their demise. it was just too on the nose for most people.
The real kicker is that there are plenty of good theoretical applications for blockchain technology and all we get are shitty investment commodities and grifts
The technology never gets employed to a productive end because the entrepreneurs are in charge of deploying it
There was a time when Russia had an Occultic Research Department, and America got one.
Did anyone actually believe in Magick?
Did anyone wanna take the chance to be the guy who laughed at magick only to see America brought to its knees by something "Close enough" to psychic spies? Well that situation, no matter how unlikely would be worth a demotion.
Eventually it became a contest to see which nation could get the other to overspend their budgets on healing crystals.
Allegedly the CIA got some real psychic shit involved with project Star Gate, but.... ehh.... can anyone other than the CIA get magick to work? No, so....
My point is, it's not that they thought NFTs were this goldmine. They were worried about being left outside the gate if the hype paid off.
Ya gotta remember, these people do not know market trends, they do not know computers. They know "My great grandkid talks about this Video Game thing, maybe we should do a Nintendo? get Atari on the phone!"
I'm sure more of those companies were aware that it's a shitty idea than you're giving credit for. That doesn't matter though, what matters is whether they can convince other people to pay for it before everyone else figures that out. Most marketing is about getting people to buy shit that they wouldn't buy otherwise, this is no different.
They saw what happened to cryptocurrency and they were not willing to pass on the next new thing called "crypto" using a similar technology. With bitcoin producing results many tens of thousands of percent in increased value it was something they were all willing to commit to.
Had cryptocurrency not happened the NFT concept simply wouldn't have drawn the interest it did.
I sometimes think that FOMO in the tech world is a real fear that keeps these tech execs up at night. Even if it was obvious dumb bullshit I think a lot of these guys have seen so many tech empires rise and fall so rapidly to the point they're barely even remembered and I think there's a fear that they could be the next short sighted dummy who writes off the new technology as a fad and completely misses out on the next game changer.
Would anyone care to explain the difference between NFTs and crypto? Or more specifically, why crypto still has some following since both are the same grift.
You could force all billionaires to register all their property as NFTs otherwise they have no private property protections. Then you actually know their wealth and can tax them appropriately.
Tokenized securities would eliminate global financial fraud. Calling them NFTs would be a death sentence however as nobody pictures anything but JPEGS.
This is going to be unpopular here, but NFTs aren't going to go away for a long time.
They are NOT investments, more a technology that capitalism used in the dumbest manner possible (of course). But web3 has the chance the revolutionize the world and everything about the distribution of wealth.