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The Almighty Buck

NFT Marketplace Halts Most Transactions, Citing 'Rampant' Fakes and Plagiarism (reuters.com) 106

Posted by EditorDavid from the very-non-fungible dept.
Reuters reports that a popular NFT trading platform "has halted most transactions because people were selling tokens of content that did not belong to them, its founder said, calling this a 'fundamental problem' in the fast-growing digital assets market...." The U.S.-based Cent executed one of the first known million-dollar NFT sales when it sold the former Twitter CEO's [first] tweet as an NFT last March. But as of February 6, it has stopped allowing buying and selling, CEO and co-founder Cameron Hejazi told Reuters.... Hejazi highlighted three main problems: people selling unauthorised copies of other NFTs, people making NFTs of content which does not belong to them, and people selling sets of NFTs which resemble a security.

He said these issues were "rampant", with users "minting and minting and minting counterfeit digital assets".

"It kept happening. We would ban offending accounts but it was like we're playing a game of whack-a-mole... Every time we would ban one, another one would come up, or three more would come up...." Hejazi said his company was keen on protecting content-creators, and may introduce centralised controls as a short-term measure in order to re-open the marketplace, before exploring decentralised solutions.
Engadget reports that Cent "continues to operate its Valuables marketplace, the place where people can purchase non-fungible tokens of tweets, but that's about it."

See also: More Than 80% of NFTs Created For Free On OpenSea Are Fraud Or Spam, Company Says.
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NFT Marketplace Halts Most Transactions, Citing 'Rampant' Fakes and Plagiarism More

NFT Marketplace Halts Most Transactions, Citing 'Rampant' Fakes and Plagiarism

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  • Fakes? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Xenna ( 37238 ) on Sunday February 13, 2022 @04:39AM (#62263307)

    Well, bugger me with a fish fork!

    https://twitter.com/blackadder... [twitter.com]

  • Yeah, well... (Score:3)

    by h33t l4x0r ( 4107715 ) on Sunday February 13, 2022 @04:46AM (#62263315)
    Making ETH accounts isn't like making email accounts. I could make hundreds of ETH accounts per second... And sometimes I do.

  • Can I make an nft of an nft? Then an nft of that?

    • By clever abuse of QR codes...

      Yes?

      • How about an NFT of itself?

      • An NFT is just a chunk of data on a blockchain. In the case of NFT images, it's more often than not just a URL to where the image is hosted... which of course means the NFT is broken as soon as the image is moved, renamed or anything at all happens to the host...

        But since an NFT is just a lump of data, there is absolutely nothing preventing someone from making an NFT of an NFT of an NFT, ad infinitum.
        =Smidge=

      • QR codes? Too complicated. Just use the same NFT someone else has and change a single pixel. Yes, that's how silly this NFT-craze is. It's what happens when non-programmers pick up something shiny.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by quonset ( 4839537 )

      Can I make an nft of an nft? Then an nft of that?

      Interestingly enough, that is exactly what was going on in 2006-2007 under the Bush administration when it came to debt. Wall Street used debt to buy more debt then more debt again.

      And look how that turned out.

      • Interestingly enough, that is exactly what was going on in 2006-2007 under the Bush administration when it came to debt. Wall Street used debt to buy more debt then more debt again.

        An idea those Commie Bastards STOLE from the Federal Reserve Bank!

  • If not for the issue of gas cost, I'd script something up to churn out NFTs of things I don't own by the billions. Just to help this stupid idea die faster.

    • Since the image itself has no bearing whatsoever on its no-fungible component..

      Have people made NFTs of tubgirl, goatse, gasper, and co yet?

      • Re: We need more. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by alexgieg ( 948359 ) <alexgieg@gmail.com> on Sunday February 13, 2022 @06:53AM (#62263423) Homepage

        I read an article by a critic of NFTs a few months ago who did something along those lines.

        Since NFTs are just URLs to a server, and the server can do anything when people access that URL, he published NFTs on major markers that looked like one type of abstract art when viewed from market A's UI, as a different abstract art when viewed from market B's UI, and so on and so forth, all computer generated so his own actual copyright. And, when viewed directly from any other source (from a crypto wallet, for example), looked like a public domain cartoon turd.

        The URL didn't change, nor disappear, so the NFT was "legit" in that buyers really "owned" that URL. But he was still removed from those markets for "fraud" after some buyers complained. And then wrote his article poking fun at the entire nonsense.

    • You could easily/cheaply set up your own blockchain to do this.

      "NFTs of Everything."

      If you had a marketing team, you could get rich off it.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Black Parrot ( 19622 )

        If you had a marketing team, you could get rich off it.

        If you have a marketing team, you can get rich off anything.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by shmlco ( 594907 )

          Or not. Marketing alone doesn't guarantee success, or every company with a marketing department would be as successful as Apple.

    • I believe someone figured out a way of making the initial buyer pay the gas fees.

  • NFTs are not ownership (Score:3)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Sunday February 13, 2022 @06:06AM (#62263373) Journal

    You can buy an NFT, but that doesn't give you ownership.

    You can make two, or infinite NFTs of the exact same object, and people can buy all of them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by narcc ( 412956 )

      I don't know what that's so difficult for people to understand. Even legitimate news sources get that wrong half the time.

    • Re:NFTs are not ownership (Score:5, Informative)

      by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Sunday February 13, 2022 @07:58AM (#62263495) Journal
      NFTs sort of come with an "issued by" stamp. Anyone can make an NFT of a particular work of art, but it's the artist's (digital) signature that makes it valuable. That, and his promise to mint only a limited number of NFTs for that work. Same way that limited edition prints work in the real world. With scams becoming more prevalent, reputation is going to matter. Established companies will have no issue on that score, and the same goes for well-established (old) NFTs themselves. But in the future, a fledgling artist new to the NFT market might opt to have an established company (maybe Sotheby's or a well known art dealer) mint the NFT on their behalf. The issuer does a few checks to make sure the work is legit, and takes a fee for the service.

      Disclaimer: while I see that NFTs can have some utility in establishing ownership of digital assets (especially those that are cross platform or do not live on any platform), there are still some major problems with NFTs and scams are only one of those. Here [moxie.org] is a good rundown on some of those issues. And in addition, the current valuation of the digital assets on the NFT market today is utterly bonkers. I'm no fan of the hype.

      • Re:NFTs are not ownership (Score:5, Interesting)

        by nagora ( 177841 ) on Sunday February 13, 2022 @08:16AM (#62263509)

        NFTs sort of come with an "issued by" stamp. Anyone can make an NFT of a particular work of art, but it's the artist's (digital) signature that makes it valuable.

        No, it's the market in gullible fools that makes an NFT valuable. At the moment the market wants to trade in digital autographs for some reason, but while autographs do have a normal, real-world market the valuations for the digital ones are massively higher despite not being rarer or even more reliable.

        That, and his promise to mint only a limited number of NFTs for that work. Same way that limited edition prints work in the real world.

        Except that digital "prints" are all the same. A limited edition print normally comes with some assurance of quality. A limited edition of a digital work is no different from any other digital edition of that work.

        With scams becoming more prevalent, reputation is going to matter. Established companies will have no issue on that score, and the same goes for well-established (old) NFTs themselves. But in the future, a fledgling artist new to the NFT market might opt to have an established company (maybe Sotheby's or a well known art dealer) mint the NFT on their behalf. The issuer does a few checks to make sure the work is legit, and takes a fee for the service.

        NFTs are a combination of a scam and an attempt to turn back the clock so that digital work can be treated like old masters. A similar thing happens with photography when dealing with superstar "creators" in that field. The thing that makes these works different from the past is their infinite reproducability. Take that away and they are no longer digital works in any meaningful way.

        • No, it's the market in gullible fools that makes an NFT valuable. At the moment the market wants to trade in digital autographs for some reason, but while autographs do have a normal, real-world market the valuations for the digital ones are massively higher despite not being rarer or even more reliable.

          I don't think the autograph analogy works, as most people are aware they're buying an autograph and not the person who signed the autograph.

          NFTs remind me of when I was searching eBay for a hard-to-find

          • It had a photo of the GPU and rattled off all the specs and capabilities. Then at the very end of that wall of text it said, "You are bidding on a photo of [GPU], not [GPU] itself."

            That is extremely annoying when it happens.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        I don't think there is broad agreement about what owning an NFT means or even should mean yet. Is like you say - "A special edition", is it more like "a certificate of authenticity", is actually "a record of real ownership", etc - all similar in theme but subtly different but those differences are also very important in a lot of cases.

        Now the serious issue is implementation. Alright its not resonable to put the content directly on the blockchain for fucks sake - just the URL - wtf were they thinking, not

      • With scams becoming more prevalent, reputation is going to matter.

        Nah, with scams becoming more prevalent, NFTs are not going to matter.

      • "but it's the artist's (digital) signature that makes it valuable"

        I value shelter, food, and family. I don't value a random "artist's" (digital) signature. It's so obviously a scam like Ninja loans in 2006, but it happens over and over because enough people are stupid.

  • NFTs certify that you were the "owner" of an URL (not an image), and the URL is different each time. Hard to consider it "plagiarism".

  • No ownership is the problem (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Sunday February 13, 2022 @06:38AM (#62263399)

    people making NFTs of content which does not belong to them

    The problem is that, fundamentally, NFTs are trying to create scarcity that doesn't exist in the first place. I.e. the NFT'ed content didn't belong to anybody in the first place, and was nobody's to sell.

    No one own Jack Dorsey's first post - least of which Jack Dorsey: he forfeited the right to it when he posted it.

    Nobody owns any meme GIF that half of the planet has seen.

    Just like nobody owns the Mona Lisa or Guernica. Someone does own the original media and physical rendering of the pictures, but the images themselves belong to humanity. That's the beauty of the digital age that NFTs are trying to curtail and monetize.

    I know it's an old canard, but... information wants to be free. NFTs try to put a sticker tag back onto it and it's not sticking.

    • Re:No ownership is the problem (Score:4, Funny)

      by Kokuyo ( 549451 ) on Sunday February 13, 2022 @07:11AM (#62263435) Journal

      Well put for someone who can't even keep the Duke boys in check.

    • The problem is that, fundamentally, NFTs are trying to create scarcity that doesn't exist in the first place. I.e. the NFT'ed content didn't belong to anybody in the first place, and was nobody's to sell.

      So basically economic rent-seeking in almost it's textbook-purest form.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ZiggyZiggyZig ( 5490070 )

      Um, copyright is still a thing, even if yay NFTs. Authors retain moral rights over their stuff for their lifetime, even if they forfeited *some* rights by posting on a public forum. Jack Dorsey still owns his post. It's just that "owning" has a different meaning for ideas than for objects.

    • No one own Jack Dorsey's first post - least of which Jack Dorsey: he forfeited the right to it when he posted it.

      False. SOMEONE owns it, and anyone else using it is either using it under fair use, or license, or illegally. Our system doesn't really permit no one to own anything, except when copyright has expired. Everything else called a thing, whether imaginary (as in the case of "intellectual property") or real, is owned by someone or some organization. Sometimes it's "owned" "by" "The People", which is a fancy way of saying it's owned by the government which is supposed to be ours but usually is under de facto owne

  • Like, with plain old blockchains and their purported use of supposedly securing supply chains, what mechanism is there ACTUALLY to prevent anyone from counterfeits or mislabelling? What ACTUAL mechanism is there to maintain the link between the blockchain and the physical object, if it can't even do it for fucking digital objects?

    In the end, just like with this NFT shit, eventually something OUTSIDE the system has to come in and regulate things.

    It seems like nerds are incapable of playing things out b

    • Is this an NFT problem, or a blockchain problem?

      Yes.

    • > and their purported use of supposedly securing supply chains

      There is nothing purported about the use of deliberately vulnerable supply chains. Black markets, and hiding the traceability of money and of illegal products without law enforcement or taxation tracing, is what they were designed for. NFT is merely a similar form of the same pyramid scheme based economic models.

      Also note that this is not "nerds" who insist on these games. It's youngsters born into or who happen into the wealth of a new market

    • In the end, just like with this NFT shit, eventually something OUTSIDE the system has to come in and regulate things.

      Well a great start would be to force NFT issuers to digitally sign the NFT with a DSC validated from a authentic Certificate Authority. That would separate the wheat from the chaff pretty quick.

      • Re:Is this an NFT problem, or a blockchain problem (Score:5, Insightful)

        by larwe ( 858929 ) on Sunday February 13, 2022 @03:06PM (#62264169)

        Well a great start would be to force NFT issuers to digitally sign the NFT with a DSC validated from a authentic Certificate Authority

        I can never quite tell, when reading posts about crypto, who is trolling, who is grifting, and who has swallowed the hype and is hence being scammed. This sentence is a perfect example, because isn't the entire point of the 3l33t singularity-heralding central blockchain, that there can be nobody to "force" anyone to do anything? Now sure, you can start a campaign to educate people that only signed NFTs have value to discourage people from buying unsigned tokens, and individual markets could also make it a requirement, but there is by design no point in the underlying technology that anyone could be "forced" to do anything.

        • Well technically the contract is signed when it's deployed and the token is signed when it's minted. All transactions are signed. And if you have ENS (Think DNS) your name will show up when they scan it.
      • So, like I said, something outside the system has to come in and regulate.

  • Douglas Adams... (Score:5, Funny)

    by rantrantrant ( 4753443 ) on Sunday February 13, 2022 @07:13AM (#62263439)
    ...joked about this stuff. Remember the story where the middle class of a planet were tricked into leaving their home planet to colonise a new one? They immediately adopted the leaf as their currency. Then they realised the bountiful supply of leaves from billions of trees meant hyperinflation, so their solution? A massive campaign of defoliation to stabilise their new currency. NFTs are life imitating comedy.
  • OK everyone is dogpiling the platform. Fair enough. Can we take time from the Two Minutes Hate to explain something? Who are the actual legitimate users of services like these? From the report, 20% is real business. Who are these people? What do they see in this? What's behind "owning" an NFT? There has got to be something I'm not seeing.

    AFAIK, an NFT is just a URL in a blockchain. The moment the website gets redesigned, as they all do someday, all the links will break. Try following links from [pointsincase.com]

    • Re:Walk me through this (Score:5, Informative)

      by shmlco ( 594907 ) on Sunday February 13, 2022 @08:43AM (#62263533) Homepage

      NFT's are simply a component of the "greater fool" theory. "I'll spend X on this in the hope that in the future I can find someone who'll give me X+1 for it. Repeat ad infinitum."

      As long as there's a greater fool the pyramid scheme works. When the last sucker gets on board, however, it then becomes a race to cash out.

    • money laundering

    • But obviously these people see something worthwhile that they'll spend real money on. What's the deal?

      It's rather simple. There are people out there who part with their money rather easily.

      And those who get a sort of thrill out of grifting them. The more outlandish the grift, the greater the thrill.

      If I were to create a currency called "Olsoc Shitcoin", Where in addition to the digital aspect, I send them actual turds in the mail, there will indeed be people lining up for the chance to buy them.

      They'll brag about how they have the best of both worlds, a digital coin, and a turd they can hold in their

    • Re:Walk me through this (Score:5, Informative)

      by NoMoreACs ( 6161580 ) on Sunday February 13, 2022 @02:32PM (#62264077)

      OK everyone is dogpiling the platform. Fair enough. Can we take time from the Two Minutes Hate to explain something?

      No.

      Who are the actual legitimate users of services like these?

      Allmost no one.

      From the report, 20% is real business.

      Which leaves 80% as illegitimate non-business (scam, fraud, theft, money laundering, etc)

      So, what's to discuss?

  • Plagiarism for NFTs can't exist. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by splutty ( 43475 ) on Sunday February 13, 2022 @08:14AM (#62263507)

    Plagiarism is a legal construct based on the definition of ownership of content.

    NFTs are NOT content, and do not infer ownership of anything except the "NFT" which is, as the name says Non Fungible. It's NOT the thing it tangentially pretends to be, nor does it give you ownership over that thing.

    So plagiarism is by the very definition of NFTs and the legal definition of plagiarism impossible.

    It does not matter what our good friends cryptobros *think* the NFT is, because legally, it's not.

    • NFTs aren't anything except what they are, but they also aren't not anything but what they aren't. You can MAKE an NFT denote actual ownership of an actual thing if you say it does, and you control both the NFT and the thing.

      Blockchain and NFTs could be used to create a functionally indelible document describing chain of ownership, which is something they could actually be useful for. Unfortunately, they mostly aren't used that way. But perhaps they ultimately will be used for that, and essentially only tha

      • Re:Plagiarism for NFTs can't exist. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by splutty ( 43475 ) on Sunday February 13, 2022 @12:48PM (#62263875)

        You're mostly correct. However making an NFT denote actual ownership of an actual thing you own is not something that's currently legally possible.

        So unless the laws change (and I doubt it, because why would they), you'd still need to transfer ownership of the actual thing. The NFT alone is not sufficient for that.

        Which makes the whole thing rather irrelevant :D

        And you don't need NFTs to create a blockchain ledger at all, so that's a use case that's completely contrived purely for "I want to use NFTs".

        So who knows, sometime in the future your idea might actually be implemented, but currently there is no legal framework for it, nor any necessity.

        • Which makes the whole thing rather irrelevant :D

          Yep. Total digital tulip bulbs. The only relevance is the ability to part suckers from money, or to hide economic activity from the authorities in plain sight.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Plagiarism is taking someone else's work and claiming it's your own. It is not a legal concept, and it's not based on ownership, no matter how you define that.

      It's actually a surprisingly appropriate term to use in this situation. I agreed to the Slashdot terms of service twenty five years ago, but I suspect I don't own this post. If you try to sell this text to someone you'd be committing some kind of copyright infringement and maybe fraud, depending. If you re-posted it somewhere and claimed you wrote it,

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by splutty ( 43475 )

        I was talking about plagiarizing NFTs, not about NFTs plagiarizing something :) For something to plagiarize an NFT, an NFT has to be something. And it isn't. So..

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          The article is about NFTs that purport to be from the creator of a work of art. So yes, the can be plagiaristic.

  • I really didn't understand about NFT's until how it was used to raise funds for Julian Assange's defense. That blockchain crypto was used also made sense in consideration of the gofundme Grand Fail of stealing funds. And if in the conversion to dollars in this, there is a steal then those responsible will be widely known, ostracized, and probably cyber attached into oblivion.

  • Huh, I guess you can't own digital assets like you can physical ones.
    Who'd have thunk?

  • I believe as Franklin Roosevelt noted:

    "No fucking shit".

    All this is is creating more and more outlandish worthless ways to get people to part with their money.

    And as it turns out, there is nothing that is too outlandish.

    • I believe as Franklin Roosevelt noted:

      "No fucking shit".

      All this is is creating more and more outlandish worthless ways to get people to part with their money.

      And as it turns out, there is nothing that is too outlandish.

      Nor people too stupid. . .

  • We should make a blockchain to record who is the owner of NFTs before they can sell NFTs on the blockchain.

    I'm going to start selling NFTs for NFTs shortly.

  • "Engadget reports that Cent "continues to operate its Valuables marketplace, the place where people can purchase non-fungible tokens of tweets, but that's about it.""

    Be still, my beating heart.

  • Anyone dumb enough to buy an NFT deserves exactly what they get - a hash with zero value. When society collapses and there's no more Internet it will be funny to see all the people who relied on blockchains to prove their wealth realize they have nothing. Land, guns, and learning to farm are the only sound investment.

  • Nobody knows exactly what they are. We can only describe what they are like when we consider them in a certain way.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Nobody knows exactly what they are. We can only describe what they are like when we consider them in a certain way.

      More like fundamental particles of imagination. An "Imagitron" so to say with an imagined real-world value. Vanishes if you look to closely at it...

  • Also: "All my Apes! Gone!"

    There is a sucker born every second....

  • I thought they were saying an NFT was proof you had the real deal.
  • I find it funny when you consider the primary purpose of NFT on art is to "prove" authenticity.
  • Sold an NFT of my balls for 6 bux. Fellt pretty good until my girl reminded me that she owns my real balls. Oh well we got 6 bux worth of reall world taco bell. Should of made an nft of my taco supreme actually...

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