The Crypto Thread

The word “scam” does a lot of work in some of these posts. Asset bubbles can blow up and collapse without anyone doing anything nefarious. Unloading bags that you think are going to zero is a bit more dubious, but I suppose you can kinda claim the buyers knew the risks going in.

Isn’t that basically how the squid game coin worked?

There is a lot of miscommunication in this thread because people are using “scam” in many different ways.

Some NFTs are scams in the traditional sense, like the devs promise to reveal the art a few days after mint but then never do, delete their socials and are never heard from again.

Many people in the discord use “scam” in a much broader sense, where essentially every single NFT ever created is a scam: “no one wants any of this shit” is one of the biggest discord memes. In this sense, there’s nothing nefarious about the “scam” because ~everyone playing knows it’s a game of musical chairs where the poker chips go up and down in value but everyone knows that at some point the chips are worth zero.

Then there are some true believers like (I think) beetlejuice, sven (see above), and perhaps yuv who think that certain NFTs will hold value longterm or be fun to own for some other reason. This view is actually incredibly rare AFAICT. So this group of people would not call every NFT a scam.

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I will concede that this view shared by cassette helped me understand my issue. I do think some nfts will have long term value and i have “”””moral”””” issues with the musical chair game.
At the very least i do not like it.

I am also losing in nfts i think as i got buried by the pak thing i think. I also lost a bunch on eth but i probably slightly up on crypto in total.

I don’t think any of us know which project will be a rug or a drill to 0 or be the next bayc ahead of time tbh. It’s a guessing game. The point I was trying to make yesterday is that most projects will end up being worth 0 regardless so engaging in any NFT buying is pretty likely to end up either holding something worthless or having sold something to someone else that is ultimately worthless.

I completely understand having a moral issue with that but I don’t think picking and choosing projects really alleviates that much. You mentioned pak and that’s the perfect example that even sure thing long term NFT holds like pak can rug us.

Not sure what’s confusing here. I believe nfts will still be a thing in the future, but currently there’s about 50 projects being released a day and I think 99.9% of them are going to zero because they won’t ever do anything innovative or create anything of value.

I think actual art nfts will be worth lots in the future. It’s very hard to predict who and what though. I’ve recently bought a Beeple and I’m trying to find a low edition Xcopy to add to my holdings. Those 2 would be my best guess of 2 artists being a potential good investment.

There will also be a company in the future with an absurd valuations based on metaverse or whatever you want to call it. I would just say gaming based. This might be Yuga, but probably is most likely just a company that still doesn’t exist.

I find it extremely unlikely that literally everything would literally go to zero. Stuff like BAYC and CryptoPunks have become historic and culturally relevant. They could certainly lose a lot of their value, but as long as Ethereum exists they’ll be worth something, even if it’s only a couple hundred bucks.

Yea some of the scammier ICOs from 2017 still have 10s of millions of dollars in market cap.

https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/1529164484044115971

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Yea this is where I fall as well. PFPs, for example: there is a clear, nonzero value in having a profile picture that is owned by only you and is able to be linked across multiple sites (or metaverses, if that’s what the future holds). The actual value of that in dollars is pretty hard to predict. Are there 10,000 people out there who value having a Bored Ape avatar at $100,000 or more, therefore maintaining its floor price in the $100,000 range? I don’t know, maybe? People spend money on stupid status items all the time, I don’t know why signaling that you’re an OG NFT or Crypto person would be any different than showing off your taste in cars or art or something.

Are people going to pay premiums for some random PFP NFT? Probably not, projects like that are a dime a dozen, and if you don’t care about signaling your coolness you can just get a $5 token and put that up as your cross-site avatar. Where things get fun is when intentionally uncool things become cool, the memeification of certain collections. Owning the stupid thing becomes cool, if only temporarily, and all of a sudden it’s worth more than $5 because people want one.

By far the most likely scenario in NFT-land is that 99.9% of projects end up worthless, just like 99.9% of art that’s ever been made is worthless. Everything along the way is just gambling.

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https://twitter.com/morebuttertv/status/1529151981792727040

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Someone explain this one to me: doesn’t he still own the copyrights to the monkey character?

No, the scammer sold it to someone else (basically they listed for below the floor price and someone snapped it up) and now that person owns the ape and therefore they own the rights to it. He’s trying to buy it back from this person but afaik he hasn’t gotten a response yet.

OK but what does US copyright law say?

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How does US law treat unknowing purchasers of stolen goods? Oh no, that sucks? Or is there some compensation. Like if I buy a car off Craigslist and it turns out to have been stolen, I’m SOL? (If cars have specific laws or title insurance or something just pretend it’s something else)

I ask because the scammer doesn’t even have it anymore

This just seems like the DAO that thought they bought the rights to Dune but I basically don’t get any of this crypto stuff.

Like if I buy a car off Craigslist and it turns out to have been stolen, I’m SOL?

Yeah. You can maybe sue the guy you bought it from, but if the police find out you will lose the car.

We wrote about this exact thing happening before. I don’t see how it’s anything other than property theft under law that already exists.

I don’t think so. My recollection from property class, is that since the seller never had proper title to the car, he cannot pass title even to a bona-fide good faith purchaser. Title reverts to the original owner (and the buyer would have a claim against the seller). I’m pretty sure this applies to all purchases, not just cars.

Another interesting legal rule is that clearly mispriced sales aren’t valid. So if you go to a store and something and they forget a comma - say listed at $1.00 instead of $1,000, that’s not a valid sale. So people that punt stuff with a misclick in theory could try to sue to regain ownership and void the sale.

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Would be interesting to see this in court. Seems like a decent opportunity.

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That’s different in Germany. A good faith buyer of stolen property becomes the rightful owner. This is so a buyer will not have to verify the provenance of every item they purchase which would make even basic commerce either impractical or very risky.
A red flag like an unusually low price would preempt good faith though.