What is a NFT - Non fungible token?. And if that doesn't help try this for a less headache-inducing explanation.
'Bored Ape' NFT worth $284,495 accidentally sells for just $2,844:
A distracted trader accidentally sold a non-fungible token (NFT) for a hundredth of its market price.
NFTs are the latest cryptocurrency phenomenon to go mainstream. In the simplest terms, NFTs transform digital works of art and other collectibles into one-of-a-kind, verifiable assets that are easy to trade on the blockchain.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club is a collection of 10,000 pieces of digital NFT art living on the ethereum (eth) blockchain. On Saturday, the owner of such a piece of art accidentally sold his NFT for a fraction of what it was worth.
Max, who goes by the username maxnaut, said the mistake happened after "a lapse of concentration" when he accidentally listed the NFT for 0.75 eth ($2,844) instead of 75 eth ($284,495).
[...] Virtual art has been created, and talked about, for years. But now, thanks to endorsement from celebrities as diverse as Elon Musk, Lindsay Lohan and Steve Aoki, online buzz in art and cryptocurrency circles, and, perhaps most importantly, blockchain technology, it has not only entered the mainstream -- it is generating huge sums of money for digital artists and online collectors.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 15 2021, @01:39PM
n/t
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 15 2021, @01:43PM (4 children)
More likely maxnaut wanted some actual cash and this was the way to get it, instead of doing a sham trade with his buddies.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Wednesday December 15 2021, @03:44PM (3 children)
Now, is maxnaut that smart? After all, he bought it in the first place.
(Score: 5, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 15 2021, @04:16PM (2 children)
I feel that this is the entire basis of value behind the BAYC and many other NFT collections. They may have suckered in some actual money (like Snoop Dogg [fortune.com]), but the bulk of transactions seem to be between anonymous wallets with little or no other transactions recorded in them. Buyer beware [hackernoon.com].
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 16 2021, @12:02AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 16 2021, @01:15PM
Pump and dump happens on NASDAQ all the time too. It's illegal, but rarely enforced.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday December 15 2021, @01:58PM (14 children)
Right there in the story:
Yeah... Exactly the same reaction as if he had lost a bunch of money in Sim City or something. If it had been something of true value, he'd have been kicking himself and he would have had an earful from his floor manager, or possibly a call from his bank for losing $281K. But it ain't real so it's okay...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Wednesday December 15 2021, @02:16PM (12 children)
More likely he's rich enough that losing a few hundred thousand dollars in assets just isn't a big deal.
The article says it was his after all, so a floor manager would have nothing to say about it, and like stocks and other "paper assets" his bank probably wouldn't be involved to even know about it.
None of which to say the actual value of a make-believe asset is anything like the price - but at this point I'm painfully bored of arguing the difference between price and value (hint - water is the most valuable substance on Earth).
NFTs don't even have the legally backed value of a copyright - they're just one particular digital copy of something that may have countless other "unapproved" digital copies in circulation. The ultimate expression of grossly inflated artificial scarcity. They *might* have a license attached to them as well, which is theoretically worth something, but it sounds like for the most part such licenses don't actually grant any rights that you wouldn't get with a legally purchased physical copy without any licenses.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by helel on Wednesday December 15 2021, @02:44PM (10 children)
If my understanding is correct NFT's aren't even a single copy, they are a link to a single copy which may or may not be there when you follow it.
(Score: 5, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 15 2021, @05:18PM (9 children)
The essence of an NFT is a "smart contract" which assigns ownership of the NFT to a single wallet. An NFT is indivisible, and un-mergeable, thus: Non Fungible. And: Non Fungible Token is fun to say on talk shows, so score one in the marketing column.
So, if you have the (latest recorded) private key for an NFT, you are the "owner." Another provision of NFTs that usually gets lost in the breathless hype is: the "minter" or original creator of the NFT contract is due payment of a commission on all future sales of the NFT. Marketplaces typically write themselves into the contract as well. So, the structure/flow is something like:
Marketplace (MP) offers recording of NFT contracts. The marketplace defines a commission for themselves in the contract, 2.5% in the case of OpenSea.
NFT minter (MI) opens an NFT (smart contract) on the marketplace, defining the commission they want (generally 0-10%), and attaching some digital file to the NFT. Sometimes there is also "unlockable content" which the marketplace only shows to the current owner(s) of the NFT. Some NFTs are single copy, some allow a defined number of owners. NFT minter then offers the NFT(s) for sale on the marketplace at an asking price. There are various auction, reducing price, fixed price, limited time options but basically, the NFT is offered at some price.
NFT buyer (Bob) either buys an offered NFT at the asking price, or makes a lower offer which the seller may or may not accept. Once the transaction is complete and recorded, buyer Bob now owns the NFT according to the terms of the smart contract recorded by the marketplace (MP). MP takes their 2.5% commission, in most cases also takes the MI minter's 10% commission, then passes the remaining funds to the minter MI's wallet. Some time later they also pass the 10% commission to MI's wallet.
Bob, eager for profits, turns around and offers 'his' NFT for sale, presumably at some higher price. The next NFT buyer (Chuck) purchases the NFT from Bob, 12.5% is skimmed from Chuck's funds and split between MP and MI, and Bob gets the 87.5% left over of whatever Chuck just paid. Chuck is now the 'owner' of this particular NFT, Chuck can access whatever "hidden" info the marketplace has attached to the NFT. Bob, of course, also has a copy of this hidden information, but what Bob doesn't have is "ownership" of the NFT according to the smart contract, so if Bob attempts to sell the NFT again, the smart contract will indicate it as a double spend attempt and refuse to record the transaction.
Now, Bob could take the ape portrait, or whatever visible and hidden information he got while he was "owner" of the NFT, turn around and re-market these digital files as an NFT of his own, but it would then be Bob's NFT, not MI's. Somebody might be willing to pay Bob for his NFT, but the theory goes that MI, or Banksy, or BAYC, or whoever the minter was, their "marketing" of the NFT is what has the true value, and that people will prefer to pay for a genuine Banksy NFT, traceable to the wallet Banksy gets paid through for all of his NFTs on the marketplace, rather than paying Bob for the same digital files which are only traceable to Bob's wallet, not Banksy's.
"Bored Ape" is actually a pretty insightful summary analysis of the value of NFTs, saying "Wildly Optimistic Greedy Ape" out loud would be bad marketing.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 15 2021, @07:45PM
wow. thank you, this is the first time I hear a sensible explanation.
still technically a nonsensical waste of time, but thank you anyway :)
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Wednesday December 15 2021, @08:08PM (2 children)
The only thing I think you missed is that the NFT itself is a link to a hosted object separate from the blockchain. So if that host/content ever goes away for any reason, the blockchain would establish you uniquely own an official unique NFT minted by Banksy at [xyz], but there's nothing actually AT [xyz].
In another thread I compared the NFT to owning a certificate of authenticity for an signed numbered first edition book. It's entirely possible for the book itself to be lost or destroye leaving you with a certificate of authenticity for a thing you can't produce. Sure you could have made a copy of the book, and show people that.. but that's just a copy same as any other copy, it is not the actual unique special one the certificate of authenticity authenticates as unique and special.
Likewise, the only thing that makes a particular Bored Ape image valuable is that the blockchain points to that copy and says its the unique one, minted by the official minter, and you own it. But if all you have is the blockchain record proving you own what it points at, but the actual content that was pointed to is gone, what exactly do you have? And is it still worth something?
What does "link rot" do with NFT markets?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 15 2021, @08:32PM (1 child)
I believe that is generally true of OpenSea and most of the go-go NFT marketplaces today. There's nothing theoretically preventing the big digital file from being recorded on the blockchain, besides the prohibitively high costs of recording on the Ethereum and other proof of work blockchains. The Polygon proof of stake blockchain based NFTs have essentially zero recording fees, I doubt they are recording the file on the chain because nobody's valuing that right now, but such a lower cost blockchain certainly _could_ record larger NFT records at a practical cost. I think the original low-res NFTs were created with the thought they would be practical to record on high-cost blockchains, but the recent marketing reality seems to be that buyers don't care (if those are real buyers and not just a bunch of shills.)
The difference with digital "assets" is that the Certificate of Authenticity could (maybe doesn't always today) contain a hash of the original digital asset, and copies of the digital asset are literally indistinguishable, so if you have a digital file with a matching hash to the CoA's hash of the original, you "have it." So, there are two elements at play: one, the secret key corresponding to the most recent owner of an NFT on the blockchain, and two: hopefully that NFT somewhere contains at least a hash of your NFT (no guarantees, I haven't analyzed any of the NFT code, but certainly it is technically feasible), so if you have a digital file that has that hash, that is proof that the file is the actual NFT's image, or song, or whatever. Now, if everyone manages to lose the original, then they'll likely never reconstruct a file with the hash, so in that case it is indeed lost.
One of the "values" of blockchain is that the whole chain is replicated by all of the miners, or signers, or whatever you are using to do distributed certification of new records on the blockchain. You are right that the NFT file itself is unlikely to get that 30,000x replication across a system like Ethereum's miner network, but a hash of the NFT file should be practical to include in the original smart contract record. Anyone who pays $300K for an NFT and doesn't keep a copy of the corresponding file for themselves... should just go hotbox in their Lambo until they forget what they lost.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Saturday December 18 2021, @08:05AM
I've read that hashes are being stored, but that the hash includes the location; so a copy of the image won't match the hash unless its also where its supposed to be.
This makes sense, given digital assets can be copied trivially perfectly, the location of the officially minted copy helps differentiate copies and makes the official one unique, since we can all have files that match a file hash, but only one will be in the official place.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Wednesday December 15 2021, @11:27PM (4 children)
Surprised the Kardashians aren't doing this: create a NFT of naked-selfies, then selling it for big bucks.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 16 2021, @03:35AM (3 children)
Check again, I think I saw Paris Hilton on Jimmy Kimmel promoting her NFTs - or something similar.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday December 16 2021, @11:41AM (2 children)
I was trying to be funny: you made me poop myself. And vomit. Dang.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 16 2021, @01:12PM
Sorry about that, it was actually Jimmy Fallon:
https://youtu.be/oiN1_6pb_eE [youtu.be]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 17 2021, @08:46AM
All Holes... NFT.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 15 2021, @04:28PM
More likely, that's the appearance he is portraying.
10,000 BAYC NFTs, how many owners do you think there are? I mean: real owners - not imaginary people connected by anonymous crypto wallets. If the bulk of the BAYC is held by a few people, particularly a "club" of HODLers, they are the digital OPEC: setting price floors for their assets and just refusing to sell below that floor. Except this guy. Sure, it was a typo. Sure, he could have taken a quick cry in his Green Lambo in Maui thinking about the Purple one he could have bought for LA with the proceeds he just lost through carelessness. Truth is: he netted 0.75 ETH from the open market from his "mistake" - do you think there's actually 75, or even 5 ETH on the open market offering to buy his NFT? If there was, surely he would have accepted the offer rather than listing an ASK below it.
This collusion of NFT owners may be "worth" $3B when you look at their ASK prices, but if they tried to cash out with ETH from outside their club I bet they'd have a hard time getting even $3M from the world at large.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 16 2021, @07:09PM
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 15 2021, @03:06PM (2 children)
I've got a bridge to sell you
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/22/22344556/john-cleese-monty-python-nft-brooklyn-bridge [theverge.com]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday December 15 2021, @04:00PM
That was an interesting, informative, and down-right funny rabbit hole.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday December 15 2021, @08:41PM
Well that's just silly!
He should have gotten Terry Gilliam to do the actual drawing.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday December 15 2021, @04:10PM (3 children)
I wonder: Is it hard to create NFTs? Could anyone do it with just installing the right software? (Obviously if anyone would be willing to buy those is a whole other question.)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by rob_on_earth on Wednesday December 15 2021, @04:30PM (1 child)
This is where the fun begins. The online NFT markets charge you $100 per NFT you try and sell and then loop themselves in for a percentage of any future sales.
The big money is not in owning/selling NFTs, but being the middle man. And if you are thinking you could set one up, you are already too late.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 15 2021, @04:36PM
There are a wide variety of markets. This [opensea.io] NFT collection was "minted" for literally nothing. Just like selling prints or paintings in the real world, the value is not so much in the thing itself as it is in the marketing. BAYC is marketed directly at the "get rich quick" vice, like beanie babies, and tulip bulbs, and so many other bubble markets before it, and the news media broadcasts the story louder and wider than state lottery winner stories - free press: fuel for the fire.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 15 2021, @04:31PM
Not hard at all: https://hackernoon.com/mint-your-nfts-for-nothin-get-your-crypto-for-free [hackernoon.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 15 2021, @05:09PM
For the low price of 1.61803 Dogecoins, you can now acquire an NFT commemorating our British editors!
https://filmdaily.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/lizard-1.jpg [filmdaily.co]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Wednesday December 15 2021, @05:58PM (4 children)
The guy really did make a typo in his price (he meant 75.00 ether, but forgot to add the zeroes, so the price was 0.75 ether). The thing that is striking is the number of bots monitoring the blockchain. Some bot knew about these NFTs, knew what their prices ought to be, and pounced. To ensure that the pounce went through with the very next block, the bot offered more than $30k in gas fees. If the bot hadn't done this, the seller would have had the time to cancel the offered sale.
If cryptocurrencies are supposed to be the future, then Ethereum, Bitcoin, et all are just clumsy prototypes. Aside from the slow transactions, and (especially Ethereum) the crazy transaction fees, consider: Do you really want to put your virtual money into a system where other people can screw you by bribing the bank? That is, in part, what happened here.
Cryptocurrencies are a really cool idea, and they could - possibly, in better implementations - compete with fiat currencies. However, everyone is stuck on the first generation prototypes. Later generations fix a lot of problems, but there seems to be no way to get people to abandon Bitcoin/Ethereum/etc. and move on to more modern options.
I suppose the other striking thing is the amount of money floating around out there. I mean, someone had to write and launch that bot, and give it instant access to $30k. Presumably they have other bots, monitoring other things, also with access to serious amounts of cash. And the guy with his NFT - a couple hundred thousand here or there - he doesn't care. Crazy...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 15 2021, @08:58PM (2 children)
I'm going to overshare, overly early, and drop a link here. The linked story is about a 30 minute read (depends on how much you drill into the tooltip notes) describing a potential blockchain implementation where anyone / everyone, their businesses, children, dogs, whatever, has their own blockchains with provisions for secure exchange of value among those chains.
http://assignonward.com/IslandLife.html [assignonward.com]
At the bottom of the page is a link to a rat's nest of half formed ideas around the concept. What it needs is somebody, preferably several somebodies, who care to push it forward, keeping clearly in mind the vision of "People's Blockchains" - not multi billion dollar one-chain to rule them all blockchains, but simple, low overhead, directly assessable chains of value with value established on personal scales. Conceived of for use primarily in flexible, open communities of 200 or fewer people. Not to say they're not globally interoperable, just to say that people outside the immediate circle of those owning / maintaining a chain probably don't value their assets as highly as those with direct face-to-face exposure to the owners.
You have been warned, if you don't have at least 30 minutes to invest in reading the story, don't bother. It's not your VC's blockchain, and it doesn't have the same use cases, but it does have potential to be a grass-roots layer in a system of blockchains wherein the individuals control: the gas fees, the float of available "coin", the backing value they choose to provide in exchange for their "coin", etc.
If you and your, at least somewhat trustworthy, neighbor (whether next door, or around the globe) want to exchange value, there's no reason to be paying some central clearinghouse to process the record of the exchange. If your neighbor screws you, you have the immutable record of the promise(s) made, and the one doing the defaulting has exposed themselves to ALL their trading partners as untrustworthy.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Wednesday December 15 2021, @10:17PM (1 child)
For small communities, I fail to see the value in transacting via the blockchain.
The whole point of a Blockchain is to operate in an environment with little to no inherent trust. Small communities usually trust each other far more - I am happy to lend tools to my neighbor because I know he'll get them back to me (and 'I know where he lives'). I don't need to temporarily transfer ownership of my spade to him via a Blockchain to ensure that the transaction is recorded. If he doesn't return my spade, I don't need to send a copy of the blockchain record to the rest of my neighbors - I just tell them that Bob didn't return my spade and I'm annoyed.
Also - the smaller the blockchain, the greater chance that a malicious actor could set up enough dummy/sockpuppet accounts to influence the blockchain's record of truth (given it's consensus-based).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 15 2021, @11:19PM
The point, to me, is for the community to establish trust among itself, and interlocking communities - forming a larger pool of implied trust. If you read the linked story, it starts with higher trust transactions among friends, but spreads to include lower trust required transactions with transient tourists.
When you have established a blockchain (auditable record) of transactions within your "local community" of a few dozens of people, many of those people will be in an overlapping community of a few dozens of people, and now you "know" these friends of friends not only by spoken reputation, but also by automatically auditable transaction records.
In the world of publicly traded companies, there are a large number of "closely held" companies where a principal individual or group retains 51% control - the same can be true in proof of stake blockchains, particularly with delegated proof of stake. When you do business with a closely held company, they aren't controlled by the shareholders or a board of directors, they make their own decisions. Same for a closely held blockchain. A malicious actor buying up shares in a closely held blockchain can't do much besides tie up the float and generate transaction fees. If a closely held chain has problems with malicious actors tying up the float, they can still transfer their identity to a new chain that establishes a new float for their legitimate trading partners - offer to wind down the old chain by buying out shareholders at a fair price, if the malicious actor doesn't want to sell - they risk losing their investment to-date when the chain controller stops redeeming shares for value.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 15 2021, @09:38PM
Automated traders have been advertising $250K and up salaries for programmers for 25 or so years now. These days I think they're up to the $500K+ range for people with exotic skills that are in fashion. Blockchains are their latest playgrounds - not surprising at all that they're willing to give $30K to snipe a low bid on an asset they believe they can turn for more money.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday December 15 2021, @07:46PM (3 children)
I would argue that these things are *worth* very little. If I burn a pile of money and film it, is the video worth the amount of money I burned?
That somebody is willing to pay $10,000 for a tissue that George Clooney sneezed in or whatever hardly makes said tissue "worth" $10k.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 15 2021, @08:48PM (1 child)
I keep wondering what would happen if someone who owns one (or more) of those dark wallets (or whatever they're called; wallets with a lot of crypto in them but haven't had transactions in years), decided to, for instance, sell 100 bitcoins for a total of one US dollar. Wouldn't that crash the bitcoin market? Sure it would be stupid to do from a wealth perspective, but not everyone operates from that perspective. Some might do it for lolz.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 15 2021, @09:07PM
No need to sell them for $1. The whole crypto-market's value is based on limited supply. If the old whale wallets suddenly opened and sold for market value, market value would drop fast and hard, and that would shake confidence in the market causing it to drop further, and harder.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 15 2021, @09:33PM
A thing is only worth what a person is willing to pay for it - whether directly or via proxy/markets.
If there are buyers willing to pay $20K for Mr. Clooney's nasal excretions, and the $10K buyer has the means to sell to those people, then his $10K investment was very shrewd.
🌻🌻 [google.com]