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The Almighty Buck

'CryptoPunk' NFT Sells For $11.8 Million At Sotheby's (reuters.com) 34

phalse phace writes: A non-fungible token of a digital artwork called a "CryptoPunk" was sold for $11.8 million on Thursday, according to a tweet by auction house Sotheby's. The NFT was sold as part of the Sotheby's online auction "Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale," which runs from June 3-10 and features work by 27 digital artists. CryptoPunks are a series of 10,000 unique pixel-art characters made by Larva Labs in 2017. The individual one sold by Sotheby's -- "CryptoPunk #7523" -- is of the sought-after Alien variety with blue-green skin, and wearing a medical mask. Two other Alien CryptoPunk NFTs have sold for more than $7 million each in previous sales. According to Reuters, it was bought by Israeli entrepreneur Shalom Meckenzie, who is the largest shareholder of digital sports company DraftKings.
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'CryptoPunk' NFT Sells For $11.8 Million At Sotheby's

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  • by Anonymous Coward
    Really, I don't. I want to take a digital photo of a morning dump and make an NFT out of it. Maybe I can raise a few million quid.
    • Yeah, the whole thing makes zero sense.

      Yawn.

    • You might have missed the window but you could. You might even be better off with a low res pixelated version. Pull some kind of publicity stunt then release the NFT. Might be an Eric Cartman quality plan but it seems thats all it takes. You might have to play the long game.

    • It's just people setting money on fire.
      • It's just people setting money on fire.

        So is paying taxes.

        Perhaps now you understand the value and purpose; money laundering.

        • by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
          If I pay taxes then some services can be provided and I can drive to the supermarket. I am hard pressed to see how spending money on an NFT allows me to do that. Maybe you could explain the steps.
          • If I pay taxes then some services can be provided and I can drive to the supermarket. I am hard pressed to see how spending money on an NFT allows me to do that. Maybe you could explain the steps.

            I am hard pressed to see how a launderer, finds themselves caring about taxes or services they could be providing. If Ethics trumped Greed, we wouldn't have trillions sitting in tax havens.

            Paying taxes for services? That's what plebs are for.

    • by daten ( 575013 ) on Thursday June 10, 2021 @08:04PM (#61475376)
      It's money laundering. Like grey market "fine art". They're not really paying millions for the digital asset alone.
      • by dohzer ( 867770 )

        What ever happened to laundering via $100k Beanie Babies on eBay!?

        • The purchaser has an estimated net of 1.6 billion. It would take a lot of beanie babies for that to be worth anything.

          I wonder if these assets are being used over conventional art because the sheer number of ultrawealthy has increased so much. Conventional financial vehicles either have too little volume to be worth it or are too widely known to avoid legal problems with various incarnations of the RICO laws.

          To give an idea just how many new ultrawealthy are now in the world. In 2020, there were an estimate

        • by Toad-san ( 64810 )

          Oh, so you still have some of those too? Me, I was no fool: I invested in tulip bulbs!

  • by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Thursday June 10, 2021 @08:13PM (#61475392)

    I can only hope and pray the blockchain that literally creates value for the more prominent NFTs, is compromised and destroyed.

    Perhaps then we'll finally be able to convince the ignorant masses who believe in this NFT shit-ware.

    • The only ignorant thing about people spending this kind of money on NFTs is you thinking that people are doing it to buy NFTs. You don't get to amass a wealth like this without knowing exactly what you're doing with your money such as laundering it, using it for tax evasion, or bribery.

      NFTs are nothing more than an extension of the art world. 90% of people who buy art for millions of dollars don't give a **** about art.

  • by cjonslashdot ( 904508 ) on Thursday June 10, 2021 @09:00PM (#61475472)
    And now I have it too - for $0!!!! Suckers!!!
    • by jythie ( 914043 )
      Now all you have to do is give it a value, transfer it to someone else, and claim the 'loss' on your taxes.
  • couldn't they come up something more exiting like ArtCoin or Coinye?

  • I think you'd get more buying a fart-in-a-bag. At least you get a bag.
  • What I REALLY want to know is; how where did these NFT idiots get their money from?

  • Theres no way a collection of pixels no ones that familiar with is worth millions. This smells like a scam and is probably just money laundering.
  • I'm given to understand that CryptoPunks, unlike other NFTs, are actually stored in the Ethereum blockchain. That's why they're such tiny images--because it's expensive to store data in the chain. The other NFTs that are huge images work around that by storing a URL in the chain. The URL (and consequently, the actual meaning of your NFT) can disappear or change whereas the punks will be there as long as the blockchain exists.

    Still crazy of course, just marginally less.

    • According to the official web site [larvalabs.com], only a *hash* of a composite image of all the punks is stored on the chain. So I guess the token is actually an index in to the composite, which is a vastly more efficient way to do this--but utterly obscure to an observer of the chain unless they actually know what was hashed. This is *not* like the brief message in BTC's genesis block which you could actually read if you hex-dumped it.

      So yeah, still marginally less crazy; but not as less crazy as I thought.

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