Digital ownership tokens could work if there legal framework imbuing digital property with the same attributes as physical property, i.e. legal ownership and the right to sell, trade, donate, loan or destroy it just as with a real thing. And tokens would have to be maintained by a single platform with legal weight behind it. If there were such a thing and platforms were compelled to support it, then it could work.
But NFTs were not that. They were a scam from the get go. I truly wonder how anybody could be stupid enough to believe a URL pointing at a machine generated picture would ever be worth something let alone appreciate in value. Or buying content in dogshit NFT based games like Legacy or Earth 2. Or that scam game Logan Paul endorsed. Or buying real plots of land such as on “Satoshi” (Lataroa) Island - a malaria riddled jungle that was sold as libertarian asshole utopia before it flopped. But people did. Because people are stupid.
I need to come up with my own scam to rinse rich idiots.
Ok - hear me out.
We get idk 1000 of us poors to buy some cheap land in the Midwest. Up in Appalachia.
We sell “Rapture Survival Communities”
They’re $999/month and you’ll get a hidden bungalow community complete with bunker. We’ll fill it with doctors and pastors and birthing women.
BUT YOU CANT KNOW THE LOCATION UNTIL THE RAPTURE HAPPENS. You don’t want any pesky liberals finding it and gaying up the place with their liberal demonic child sacrifice transness.
We will deliver coordinates via analog radio and Morse code once the rapture has started.
By business plan makes Sam Altman hard in his butt:
- Collect money
- Don’t build anything.
- repeat
When they come screaming for proof and receipts and refunds… Just gaslight them and buy a politician.
The best scams are either holistic/psychic stuff or Hi-fi Audio.
High Fi audio is actually legit to a point. Over $300 (well, $400 now with tariffs) is when the scam begins
Not necessarily. For headphones it can go higher. I’m currently looking at hifiman unveiled.
This sequence of comments has me cracking up.
“I need a thing to make suckers out of morons”
…
“You should sell them audiophile shit”
…
“Well… some audiophile shit is ok… up to point… after that, you’re def a sucker!”
…
“Actually… you’re not a sucker at all if you spend a bunch of money on this shit. Here, take my money!”
Wanna start a headphone company with me?
I get what you’re saying, but there are basically only 3 companies whose headphones are worth 300-600€. Said companies took decades, mountain of innovations and patents to get where they are now.
If you can actually get that kind of immersion and quality cheaper - I’m all ears. Literally
If you’re talking about the Susvara unveiled or whatever they’re currently 15k aud. That is fucking wild.
Lol no, that is entirely different category, those are essentially limited edition engineering pieces. The consumer one is Ananda unveiled, which in my local shop goes for €460.
Oh thank goodness. Cool, I’ll check those out. I’m interested in getting some audio-cans for my head!
Also worth noting. The Bored Ape Yaht Club NFTs (in the thumbnail) were released by 4chan trolls with Nazi symbolism hidden in some of them. This was the most successful NFT project of them all.
Isn’t it pretty obvious this was 99% a money laundering scheme?
That’s easy to say with the benefit of hindsight in 2026. However, back in 2021, it was easy to say without the benefit of hindsight.
Had me in the first half, not gonna lie.
I think it was even easier to say in 2021, because more people knew about it and the scam was even more obvious. Now, in 2026, most people’s hindsight doesn’t go back that far, it was quickly forgotten as it should be, and people are like “huh? NFT?”
Everyone comment how much did they lose on NFTs.
I will start: $0.
Also I made: 0$
I found value in shitting on people buying them. $0 monetary gain, but at least $10 in schadenfreude.
Under a grand. Is there anyone really stupid enough to think this is still worth anything at all?
I would actually pay like $100 to say I own the EFT some moron paid millions of dollars for. I’ve bought dumber things. I paid real money for a 100 trillion dollar zimbabwe bill that is completely worthless. Great for cocaine! I’ve also paid hundreds of dollars for 1 night of cocaine, dozens of times, and have nothing to show for any of them.
Pro tip: don’t do cocaine while you still can choose.
What? You mean digital art that infinitely reproducible, can’t actually be owned, WASN’T the next big thing? Oh jeez. I hope the metaverse succeeds and if not then AI surely will RIGHT?!?!
Hey but this cryptographic key says that I own it because I paid made up currency units for it or something
Hey but that made up currency I worked for by burning electricity, I mean MINING it.
Hey, but the recent changes means I earned that made up currency by proving I own more than you!
OH! It’s an epeen thing! Got you! All the rich win. Congrats to them.
All the rich win.
Basically…
If you weren’t using them to launder money for a criminal enterprise, then you were doing them wrong.
but for a brief period of time, some people made some money, while most participants lost
edit: do AI next
The whole NFT thing was one giant pump and dump.
A grand is still 1000 dollars too high a price for these things.
I’ll see your grand and say 950 is still too high.
As with everything crypto this was a huge scam. Besides the obvious profiting from gullable idiots, the other use case is to illegally funnel money.
Not absolutely everything in crypto is a scam, though 99% of it is, and I will definitely agree with you there. But there is 1% that is actually trying to do something useful, and you’ve got to be able to find that 1% and not throw it out with the bath water.
I’d wager even the 1% is the stereotypical “solution in search of a problem”. Seems to be a reoccurring theme as of late in the tech industry.
Having a currency not backed by a government or different currency is actually something the world could benefit from. Iranian currency was backed by USD, the US caused a shortage of USD there, and their currency value dropped to under 3% of it’s former value. 90 Million people.
That said, I think most of us have only ever used crypto to buy drugs off the internet.
Yeah, but a currency practically needs a military and an economy to back it.
Who is going to stop me from fucking with the bitcoin supply if I own the US economy?
That’s the point of crypto - unless you can alter 51% of the blockchain, you can’t.
You misunderstand, if I own the GDP of a world power, what’s preventing me from buying a ton of Bitcoin and fucking with the supply that way?
Crypto nowadays looks like a pump and dump free for all.
How is buying the asset fucking with the supply?
If you mean hoarding it, that’s pretty much all Bitcoin is good for.
I think most people don’t understand cryptocurrencies. On one side it’s all hyperbolic about being your own bank and financial freedom and new tech, on the other side it’s hyperbolic about how there is no underlying value, it’s all going to 0, scams, drugs, terrorism, money laundering,…
But the fact is that crypto does have an underlying value. It’s gambling. Gambling is a huge industry.
Congrats, now you understand fiat currency. It only has value because we agree on it.
NFTs as a mechanism for exchanging and authenticating contracts is pretty revolutionary. But the only thing that reached public awareness were the dumb NFTs of a single image. The closest breakout was probably the effort for ticket sales and club memberships – your “ticket” is the NFT itself, and you can move it around (sell, exchange) as you want before the event. There are still human-errors/logistical problems but in the end whomever has the NFT gets the seat. For club memberships, you were a member as long as you held the NFT. If you wanted out, you could sell it to someone else that wanted to join the club.
I could imagine all kinds of interesting use cases. But everything is just dumb about it now. Oh well.
I still don’t see how the NFT is a benefit over existing digital ticket platforms.
“Digital ticket platform” is literally the poster boy of middle-man grift. Are you not familiar with Ticketmaster? Even smaller platforms are taking 15-30% fees for very little value-add. They “exist” to reduce the operating expenses of venues, but if there was wider infrastructure of NFTs these venues wouldn’t need to contract it out.
Explain how.
It’s not that different from how it currently works, but the difference is the platform is distributed and not centralized. NFTs are nonfungible, and the contract process guarantees the NFT can’t be owned by multiple wallets. There can be only “one”.
A venue generates 5000 NFTs (could be individual seats, could be general ticket) and puts them on an NFT marketplace (e.g. OpenSea) for the ticket price (e.g. $100) + 1% (OpenSea will also charge a fee). I buy one of those tickets for $101. I go to the venue. The ticket scanner sends a challenge to my phone, and my phone generates a signature that proves I have the ticket, and I go in.
If I can’t go for whatever reason I can’t go, I can post the NFT to the same or a different marketplace. Note that NFTs don’t necessarily prevent ticket scalping, however because it’s part of a digital contract you can also code an upper limit for the resale of the NFT which would definitely hurt scalpers. But just eliminating the vendor lock-in of the ticket exchange would cut fees between 95 and 99%.
Logistically, what if I lose my phone, and can’t verify the challenge proving I have the NFT at the gate (or whatever similar scenario). The same system intended to prevent fraud also means the system is not flexible for human error. But maybe that’s worth it for everyone to not have to pay 15-30% fees by centralized ticket management systems.
I’m still not seeing the difference between this and an entry in a standard SQL database.
I don’t see how this is cheaper, either. A venue management company using a separate marketplace adds complexity, instead of managing the ticket in-house. It adds interoperability, sure, but also management and development work. And I certainly wouldn’t trust each venue to securely implement it themselves.
You aren’t seeing a difference between what I described and a SQL database? I work in IT and I’m not sure of your background. First, nobody opens a SQL database to the public. There’s a ton of code surrounding every database. How do you think a SQL database ensures only “one owner” of a ticket? It requires identity tracking and management as the tip of the iceberg. And how do you think a SQL database allows people to exchange ownership of the ticket? It requires creating uniquely identified tokens, and code to bridge across systems and exchange the UIDs around. On and on. Almost no venues are doing this in-house, I am not sure what you mean by that.
You’re not thinking of any complicated scenarios if you think ticket sales can be “just a SQL database”. Ticketmaster offers a ton of management around tickets specifically because they are not using any generalized exchange platform (e.g. an NFT standard). With NFTs the bar is lowered for venues to manage it themselves. Posting NFTs to a NFT exchange is dead simple. You don’t need an IT department, hosting costs, staff, call center, etc. to support it. You need a couple of point of sale devices for verification at the door (something they generally already need).
And I certainly wouldn’t trust each venue to securely implement it themselves.
I feel like you’re putting out mixed messages or I’m not understanding your point. You wouldn’t trust venues to use NFTs successfully because they need to do something specific? Or you are referring to in-house development not being done securely? My overall point is, NFT exchange becomes a standard around which venues can operate independently with significantly less overhead, is simpler for the consumer, and cuts out predatory centralized ticket services.
Anyways, cheers. I think there’s a lot of other interesting cases for NFTs but people tend to focus just on jpeg thumbnails.
Not the person you’re talking to, but it seems like a stretch that some little nightclub will want to build and maintain their own smart contract infrastructure. It’s not just issuing the tickets, it’s also building and distributing the tools to quickly validate the hundreds/thousands of attendees every night.
For example, it’s not enough just to validate that everyone at the gate has an NFT. I could enter the venue with a valid token, and then transfer it to my friend still outside once I’m through the door. So now the bouncer needs to track what tickets have already been scanned, and you probably want it to update off-chain (faster and no gas fees).
Not that I can pretend to know what already goes in to a venue supporting TicketMaster, but I figure there’s got to be a reason why these middlemen were wanted in the first place. That reason is probably about venues wanting to do music and not tech support.
