Remember when NFTs sold for millions of dollars? 95% of the digital collectibles are now probably worthless.::NFTs had a huge bull run two years ago, with billions of dollars per month in trading volume, but now most have crashed to zero, a study found.

  • Syrc@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Why does everyone need to point out how “they were always worthless”? It’s a collector’s “item”, it only has value if someone wants to buy it, nothing new.

    The only difference is that this one’s value if the market completely crashes is absolute zero, but does that change much if regular collectible items are physical and can be sold for 1 cent instead?

    I never bought NFTs and never will, but as a collector this pisses me off because it’s the same as those people who mock card collections because “it’s just cardboard”. You’re completely missing the point.

    • LexiMax@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      If I buy a lot of baseball cards for 1 cent, at least they don’t suffer from the oracle paradox.

      NFT’s were nakedly a solution in search of a problem that weren’t even a very good solution to the problem they were purporting to solve. That’s what pisses people off.

      • Syrc@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Sorry, I tried to understand this Oracle Paradox you’re talking about but every explanation I found had so much jargon that it fried my brain at the third line. Do you know where can I find an ELI5?

        And yes, I get why people dislike the concept of NFTs, but mocking their value (or lack thereof) seems dumb when it’s “obtained” the same way as pretty much every other collectible.

        • LexiMax@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          1 year ago

          Essentially, the NFT is “proof of ownership” only insofar as what is put into the blockchain is correct and accurately reflects reality.

          If you don’t vet what goes on the blockchain for accuracy, the blockchain is useless, and if you do validate, you don’t need a blockchain because the validator can just use a traditional database.

          It is a solution in search of a problem.

          • Syrc@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            So it’s a matter of being relatively easy to scam people with it? Is it an issue only when the NFT is “made” for the first time or for every transaction too?

            I personally thought the appeal was that you can sell them as regular items, whereas if they were in a traditional database you still would’ve needed the transaction to be approved by the database itself.

            At least that’s what I figured, I know nothing of how selling an NFT works so I could be just talking out of my ass.

            • LexiMax@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              1 year ago

              So it’s a matter of being relatively easy to scam people with it?

              That is merely a side-effect of one of the original sins of programmable blockchains - the fact that there is a delegation of responsibility of data management from a database administrator to whoever happens to have control of that data, and the controller can only manage that data according to the underlying code of the NFT.

              This only sounds appealing if you’ve never actually touched a database in your life. There are too many points of failure, and said mistakes are much harder to correct.

        • Honytawk
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          1 year ago

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing

          This saying is connected with the answer to a question Socrates is said to have posed to the Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi, in which the oracle stated something to the effect of “Socrates is the wisest person in Athens.”[3]

          Socrates, believing the oracle but also completely convinced that he knew nothing, was said to have concluded that nobody knew anything, and that he was only wiser than others because he was the only person who recognised his own ignorance.

          • Syrc@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Now I’m even more confused. How does that have anything to do with NFTs?