Hackers steal NFTs worth millions. In other news, NFTs worth millions.
3 years ago by yesman to c/technology
The way I read the article, the "worth millions" is the sum of the ransom demand.
The funny part is that the exploit is in the "smart" contract, ya know the thing that the blockchain keeps secure by forbidding any updates or patches.
As crazy as it sounds, some people do.
Love how the NFT hype was a big wealth transfer event. So many rich people, like wealthy oil Arabs, bought into the scam and moved so much money into artists pockets while they essentially got nothing in return.
Is there any way to confirm this? Or are there examples of artists who made a significant amount of money from NFTs? I understand its potential benefit for artists, but I mostly remember already-rich corporations (e.g. UFC) using them as another way to extract money from consumers.
That's not really what happened. Some people who had invested in companies that would make money if NFTs went up in value chummed the waters by buying NFTs for huge amounts, convincing a lot of people that NFTs were going to be great investments. Then celebrities with an interest in the scheme pumped up the value too.
That convinced a lot of idiots to "invest" in NFTs, then eventually the bottom fell out of the market.
As for artists, some made some money, but most of the money went into shit like "bored apes" which were algorithmically generated.
I do see potential use for them, but not in the way they are currently being used. I could see uses like door keys, tickets, memberships, etc being of practical value, but not stupid little pictures.
I thought of it as a good way for artists to earn a living by more tokenized artworks, but then it gets hijacked by this shit.
Just like with everything else, all those things you suggested are already done much more reliably without NFTs.
If you still want to see a more "pratical" use of it, look no further than Decentraland, where it's used as "ownership" of digital "land" and other "goods".
Im sure you dont keep up, but NFT market cap still pretty big rn at 5.5bn
The vast majority of NFTs are worthless now
“MacContract on Ethereum has a floor price of $13,234,204.2, but its all-time sales is only $18,” the report said, adding: “This stark discrepancy between listed floor prices and actual sales data exposes a significant issue in the NFT market – inflated valuations that don’t reflect genuine buyer interest or real-world transactions.
“It becomes clear that a significant portion of the NFT market is characterized by speculative and hopeful pricing strategies that are far removed from the actual trading history of these assets,” it said.
And this is a report from a crypto website with a vested interest in pretending crypto has uses.
Nah, that is what the NFT owners want the greater fools to believe it is worth.
Better than the current money laundering techniques? Using art appraisals to inflate assets and move dirty money, or straight up using banks like Deutsche or Credit Suisse (RIP) to move dirty money?
I mean yeah, it’s better to launder money using a difficult to trace digital ledger. But no, the things you mentioned won’t go away, because there’s also money in the laundering, and double dipping is the name of the game
Mmm, considering NFTs are all on transparent blockchains, I don't know that I would choose that particular method to accomplish that.
The transparency is the feature that makes it great. I can buy drugs or whatever, and exchange you buy an NFT from me of equal value. Now when the bank comes and says “where did this >$15k transaction come from?” I can point to the blockchain and say that I sold my fancy monkey pic.
This has been a thing in the physical art world for a while, https://complyadvantage.com/..., this just made it easier.
wouldn't the above article still point out that people do?
Those who buy art and pack it in a safe until it's worth more?
Im glad that doesn't work as well in digital.
First, DO people buy them for millions, in the present tense? I know that people did in the past, but I thought the price on most of these took a huge hit.
Second: do people BUY them for millions, in the sense that they trade things of well-measured value (like fiat currency or gold) for coins to buy these? Or do they buy them for millions of dollars in equivalent coins that they already have, and don't want to actually sell for real goods or money because they'd realized huge losses if they actually cashed out, so they have to keep them circulating within the blockchain to maintain a hope that they'll return anywhere near their previous value? Because if you have 10 million dollars worth of etherium that you bought at 20 million and an NFT of questionable value, can't you just buy and sell it to a few wallets you own to make it look like it's recently been purchased for a few million to create the illusion of value without actually ever giving or receiving anything?
This seems like kind of a meaningless distinction when the comment was speaking about the relative value of these. How some pays is irrelevant.
This feels like you're trying to shit on them so just refuse to believe that the concept of value has any meaning. Things are worth whatever someone will pay for them.
That doesn't make the people willing to pay for it smart.
I'm sorry it feels that way, that's not my intention.
I think it's a meaningful distinction because my understanding is that many large matter holders are early adopters who acquired coins at at basement prices that them became highly valued when crypto took off. These people, as I understand it, have a different spending pattern than we associate with conventional wealth. They may shuffle their coins between digital assets with limited conversion into real world good and services, because inside the block chain they're billionaires, but if they tried to buy a house or a vacation they're forced to find buyers at prices that are reflective of the value among crypto holders, but not nearly as high to those outside the system who they'd need to complete cash transactions.
The distinction isn't meaningless, it's actually vitally important. The thing is, we've been here before, hundreds if not thousands of times, with the stock market and other speculative bubbles. Once a big enough entity decides to cut their losses and bail with whatever they can get, all that "value" disappears and there's no inherent value of the asset itself to fall back on. So it has been with other crypto crashes in the past few years.
Granted, this is generally true of fiat as well, we just have a lot more people and hopefully some safeguards and, vitally, an active economy holding up that value.
No
Sounds like a great way to make an insurance claim on a bunch of NFTs worth "millions" that you could not convince anyone to buy.
What insurance company is dumb enough to insure NFTs?
Ones that think they can't be stolen
If the insurance company thinks the nft can't be stolen, it's money for no risk. That's why they would easily accept insuring an nft.
I think you misunderstood my comment.
In a highly simplified way: total risk of insuring from theft is roughly other-risks * theft-risk, so if theft risk is 0, it means that other risks, such as insanelly high risks in asset valuation are irrelevant to the total risk which will always end up as 0.
So it makes sense that being paid to insure that which cannot be stollen against theft is risk-free money quite independently of all else. (Of curse, if something has a non-zero probability - even if tiny - of being stolen none of that holds)
I think that's the whole humourous point the previous poster was making: that which NFT promoters kept on telling us guarantees unique ownership which cannot be taken by others (and hence cannot be stollen) turns out that it can.
Can I carry that loss over for the next... 100 years or so?
Accurate headline:
Millions of dollars lost as NFTs worth a total of $0 stolen
Let me get this straight, you can steal an nft but you can't own an nft?
Then what would you do with it? Is it purely for clout? "Hey guys, look, I got an image of this monkey." Yes monkeys are amazing, but you don't even own the picture, so what's the point?
I mean low key it's supposed to be a receipt that can't be copied. The receipt being slapped onto an image is what most associated with NFTs but it's more just like a code that provides proof of purchase/ownership because you can trace the history on the block chain
Except more like a star registry because there's nothing to say you actually own the image. Other people on other blockchains might also claim that they own the image. Other people on the same blockchain might also claim the exact same image, just at a different URL.
It's a receipt with a link to an image. The image is entirely unrelated to the NFT outside of the link that's embedded into the NFT. It's kinda like how you can embed an image from one website onto another separate unrelated website
The rub here being that you really only own the receipt, it doesn't confer any legal rights or ensure exclusivity of the content it's attached to. I get why people uninterested in being part of a PNG are excited about them, but I haven't personally seen a use case for them that isn't exploitable or already solved by current technology.
You very much do own an NFT you purchase, what you don't own is the asset the NFT represents (the shitty RNG generated monkey for example).
No no, they stole the link to a jpeg, careful you will make them angry
Here, take my link to get a feeling
https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/db03eae9-a3a9-42df-8cf2-f2aa8bfa2d95.webp
Another interpretation is that it's all an insurance scam were something worthless is "stolen by hackers" and then claimed to be worth millions for the insurance claim.
But surely nobody in the "well known as impeccably honest" NFT world would ever do something like that!
"If some idiot wants to pay for it..."
Think of it like this, when people make drug busts and they find huge amounts of cocaine or whatever and they say oh this is 300 something mod a million is worth of stuff. No it's not. It's maybe like not even half that not even a quarter of that, they just make it up just to make their bust even bigger
I also like the "10 Kilos of product was taken off of the street" which means like 12 grams of weed was turned into brownies
One of the great thing about the AI revolution is that since generating infinite number of unique random (and commonly, bad) pictures of literally anything you can think of takes only seconds, the entire concept of NFT has become completely worthless as it completely destroyed the value-from-scarcity argument. Not that it ever was a good argument to begin with.
How do you steal a hyperlink to a jpeg
"Do I look like i know what an NFT is?
I just want a picture of some gaht dang shitposts."
People trying to discuss the topic have their posts pushed down while "lmao nfts" are voted up. How do you see someone saying, respectfully, "I think there's a benefit to this." and try to push down their contribution?
Anyone who wants a good discussion about news in this community, must leave this community. If you want to add context or opposing perspectives, better go elsewhere. You build a community like this and you get people who know Hans had a vibrator, because jokes and legit opinions are treated as interchangable.
NFTs are a joke, so it's totally fine for a topic like this.
Like what is there to discuss? The entire concept is stupid. With NFTs the object isn't even on the blockchain, the image isn't there. It's pretty much just some random information that says image x belongs to you (but you have to store image x somewhere else and can lose it).
When it comes to owning art either physical media or the rights to the image already do a much better job.
The only area where NFTs sound useful (but they aren't) is things like trading card games. Where you can have a card in a game and you own it, but because it's an NFT you could sell the card to another player outside the game. But the whole concept again breaks down, the game can simply block the card from being played later on or remove the card and you're left with nothing (besides "proof" that you own the NFT for a card that existed in the past). It adds nothing of value that a normal entry in a database couldn't provide.
One thing I'm still positive on: Crypto currency was a great idea, at least until Bitcoin was sabotaged with the 1 MB block size and transacting with it died along the way.
I seem to recall digital trading card games existing long before NFTs were ever thought up, so not even that works. In fact, every "use" for NFTs I've ever seen suggested has been something we already had that is actually easier without involving the things.
Well, digital trading card games do exist of course, but often you can't even trade cards. And much less sell them for real money. With an NFT in theory you could do what you want with the card, like give it to your buddy for 10 bucks and you don't even have to use the game client for it.
The problem here is that the card itself is in the game code, so you can freely move ownership, but the game could just remove the card and make your NFT worthless.
Introducing Monero. You're welcome.
Maybe it's because majority of people think that NFTs are a joke and don't agree that there are any benefits to this? Maybe they don't want to engage in a discussion because they already heard all the arguments and still think it's BS? I don't know, I'm just guessing.
Because the incorrect reddit downvoting, where people trest them like s like/dislike system (not the original downvoting, where you would only downvote if something did not contribute to the conversation) was imported to lemmy
Insurance scam? Not too be cynical, but after the price dropped a year(?) ago there were a number of thefts for which there was speculation about them being insurance fraud.
The platform behind the smart contract has to issue a new smart contract and migrate people to it.
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No one is gonna buy any NFTs for millions lmao
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