NFT Market Surpassed $40 Billion in 2021, New Estimate Shows (bloomberg.com) 34
Nearly $41 billion worth of cryptocurrency was sent to two types of Ethereum smart contracts associated with NFT marketplaces and collections from the beginning of 2021 through mid-December, according to a new estimate from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis. From a report: The metric revises an estimate the firm included in a December report on NFTs that was based on data through mid-October, said Maddie Kennedy, a spokeswoman for Chainalysis.
That's a lot of money laundering (Score:3)
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If you know the "art" world, there are many very complex ways to launder the money through buying expensive "art".
Just ask Hunter Biden.
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Wish I had mod points right now to mod you up.
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Ah, you must be middle class. The idea that you have to sell an asset to liquidate it. How quaint.
If you give it away, and get a government to reimburse you, you can avoid all that tacky "commerce" stuff. Plus there are parties with lots of champagne and prostitutes, and maybe they even put your name on a wing or something.
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The problem with that idea is that it assumes that if you'd rather want your money back, you need to find someone willing to buy this here sooper speshul "NFT" thingy.
That really only works as long as that market remains in existence at all, and... that's not a given.
The buyer could be the same person or organization as the seller. There only needs to be enough of a legitimate market to act as plausible deniability.
I have no idea how much of the NFT market is money laundering, but it's likely neither 0% nor 100%.
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The problem with that idea is that it assumes that if you'd rather want your money back, you need to find someone willing to buy this here sooper speshul "NFT" thingy.
Well, with actual money laundering, the person putting the money in is usually okay with taking a loss on the investment because the original money was illegally obtained anyway. 75% of your investment, now with verifiable money trail is better than 100% of something the IRS might be interested in. And this is better than traditional laundering schemes, because all it takes is a separate account, a link to an image on the web somewhere, and you're in business.
I predict in 2023 we'll see some Family peop
Re:That's a lot of money laundering (Score:5, Insightful)
Correction: NFT Market worth $0 in 2021, New Estimate Shows
NFT's have no tangible value. It's a grift designed by cryptobros to inflate their "property" by selling it to each other and then hoping some idiot wants their garbage.
The vast majority of NFT "artwork" is either
a) Stolen (not the "minter"'s property to begin with)
b) Algorithmically generated (read, no creative value)
If someone wants to own a receipt to garbage, let them, but let's not fool ourselves into believing that an image of a computer generated monkey with one pixel or color different is a unique image. It's just a game right now, and anyone stupid enough to buy-in, is going to find no way to get out.
Re:That's a lot of money laundering (Score:4, Informative)
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Now you know how Marxists feel about profit in a capitalist system. One of their chief criticisms of capitalism is that things are valued by their market selling price, allowing capitalists to claim what they see as fictional excess "value" as profit. They are criticizing the notion that if an NFT can be sold for a million dollars, that it must be *worth* a million dollars.
Now to be fair, this critique of capitalism is a straw man. Adam Smith was fully aware of the difference between "value in use" vs. "v
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Stupid has no upper limit (Score:2)
I guess there IS a metric for general stupidity (Score:2)
I guess that's an achievement for statistics in 2021.
Finally we have an actual quantitative metric for stupidity, although this is likely heavily biased overrepresenting the 1%ers.
Offer Watson Medical as an NFT? (Score:4, Funny)
Could work. Should top the current $1B asking price in a few hours.
Title correction: (Score:3)
Scam Market Surpassed $40 Billion in 2021, New Estimate Shows
There, FTFY.
Fed tightens, QE becomes QT (Score:2)
I don't get it. (Score:2)
I understand what NFTs are.
I don't understand why anyone would want one, or would pay even a small amount of money for it, much less the absurd amounts that sound like they are in play here.
Can someone enlighten me?
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People who invest in really dumb startups have noticed a severe lack of really dumb startups since the pandemic began. They need to find something even more idiotic to throw their money at. There is a lot of money at the top that needs to be thrown around lately.
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Some people think they'll make a profit by selling them to a greater fool. Some people want them as bling on their Twitter profile, for them the excessive prices are the whole point. And some of it is probably money laundering: I can't imagine that criminals would ignore an opportunity like this.
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As someone who has been doing applied crypto since the 1990s, I don't see anything that a NFT offers, that a GPG signature doesn't, other than being part of a group of signatures, and bundled in a public ledger. The only difference between some random person off the street signing a .JPG file and a NFT is because the NFT signature is part of a made-up chain.
I don't see NFTs helping the artists at all, unless they are doing the NFTs themselves. Instead, I read reports of artwork ripped off and NFTs made fr
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Poor stranger is now down $14K. You turned $12k and a piece of art worth $0 into $26K.
No, you turned $12k in $14k. You don't count your initial investment twice. You had to put in your $12k savings into duping the mark to spending $14k on your NFT.
How much of that is wash trading? (Score:3)
Not every transaction is a sale. Several people have "sold" NFTs to their own accounts, probably in an attempt to drive up the price. We know about the ones where the owners weren't savvy enough to use wallets that couldn't be traced back to them, but we don't know how many of the other transactions are real sales.
Drill baby drill! (Score:2)
I Gift This Idea to the World (Score:2)
Attend award show afterparties, follow celebrities into the washroom, and wait to see if any fail to flush. Then take a picture... and sell an NFT for the raw file.
Pun not intended... then intended.
How about NFTs of individual Bitcoins, wrapped on (Score:2)
Sometimes it feels downright torture for all of us anti-bitcoin slashdotter gang here.
How about NFTs of individual Bitcoins, wrapped on some layer 2 Zero Knowledge rollup on a side chain of Ethereum ?
No? An ETF of those ? DeFi staking of those ?
TBH, the concept of Futures & Options felt equally tortuous to my parents. Going short itself was laughed out of the room by them. Listing your equity on a stock market where it's valuation goes up n down every minute was itself somewhat of a casino biz for them
How do you short NFTs? (Score:2)