Purchasers of worthless digital monkeys sue worthless digital monkey auction house after realizing that worthless digital monkeys are worthless
Purchasers of worthless digital monkeys sue worthless digital monkey auction house after realizing that worthless digital monkeys are worthless
Lawsuit: Sotheby’s $24M sale to FTX gave Bored Ape NFTs “an air of legitimacy.”…
The Sotheby's auction house has been named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by investors who regret buying Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs that sold for highly inflated prices during the NFT craze in 2021.
Should've invested in beanie babies like the rest of the smart people.
Nah man, pogs are where it's at. Pogs!
Back in the mid-90s I had a friend who inherited $40,000 from her grandmother and spent all of it on $75 Fossil watches, the kind that were based on old cartoons like Popeye etc. And it took her a while to do it since she would drive to malls within a few hours of her and clean out the department stores that carried them. That's over 500 watches, a few at a time.
She was adamant that this was an excellent investment, but these are on eBay now for $50 to $60. At parties she would pull out the collection and start showing them to people (no touchy, of course) as if there was something intrinsically interesting about a cartoon Fossil watch. The sad thing is, with $40,000 in hand she probably could have bought two or three times as many from a wholesaler and maybe eventually actually have made some money.
At least with beanie babies there was a physical object.
The fact that they still sell for 50k is insane. It's a shitty picture with a convoluted proof of ownership. The fuck.
I all but guarantee you that those are getting shuffled around between owners to keep the price inflated.
Well, it's not that convoluted, it's basically just a hashmap.
I hope the defendant loses, but the damages shouldn’t be awarded to the fools who bought the NFTs. That money should go to literally anyone else, because they’ve already proved they can’t be trusted with money. Fuck both sides of this dispute.
I wish I had the temerity to sue people when an ‘investment’ doesn’t go my way.
I’m sure they’d have sued Sotheby’s if they made lots of profit right?
There was the bit about Sotheby's misrepresenting FTX as a buyer, but that doesn't make me any more sympathetic to their situation. Which, now that I've typed that, is extremely cynical when I like to think of myself as empathetic. I'm gonna try to change my take here. I like @db2's take that the money should be invested in public education.
I don’t think it would have mattered had they known. FTX was still in their good graces at the time, and FTX didn’t actually scam anyone (in this particular transaction lmao).
That's an average price of over $241,000, but Bored Ape NFTs now sell for a floor price of about $50,000 worth of ether cryptocrurrency, according to CoinGecko data accessed today.
Wait till they realize the actual value is $0.
The 50k value is itself propped up by fake transactions anyways. Since these sales are public, they can just push some around between two paid off clients to give the impression this is their worth.
Wait until you realize money is worthless.
Wait...the article says they're still worth $50k each.
Really?
You're vastly overestimating the reasoning ability of prospective NFT buyers.
They couldn't accurately identify a picture. Instead of concluding "I can just copy and paste this", they overrode their common sense to convince themselves that a digital picture of a monkey was unique. Unerringly, truly, exceptionally unique. A digital monkey picture.
It's pretty great. NFT dimbulbs are the flat earthers of crypto.
The bet a lot of people made was basically, since we can have a market of these random things, and they are actually non-replicable at the actual ERC721 assignment level (I know you can copy and paste the actual pictures), that those ownership assignments just become part of the greater pool of "currency", with some having greater value than other.
They will probably retain some value indefinitely, in the same way Beanie Babies have managed to hold on to some value even today. It's of course just not even close to the peak bubble value, because a lot of people were behaving irrationally purchasing them with the whole fear-of-missing-out attitude, driving the price up further, vicious cycle.
I wasn't into NFTs, but I did crypto for a bit when it was spiking just because I could. Don't underestimate greater fool theory. Plenty of people who bought either of these "assets" realize that they're only worth what you can sell them for and just flipped them during the initial bubble. The problem with that being that every asset that gets flipped results in some poor butthole holding the bag when the bubble pops. THAT is usually the true believer, the guy who honestly thought that he was just gonna keep this picture of a monkey in a hat and watch the value go up and up and up until he retired.
Collective delusion of people who still think they're holding onto something worth anything
Yup!
My vinyl collection is "worth" $50k. I just have to find someone deluded enough to believe me and buy it.
In reality it's worth ~$1k because they're old and play music instead of being ugly pictures of monkeys.
Presumably they're still useful for money laundering. Makes sense to keep some kind of price floor.
Lol. Ok so I’m NOT the dumb one for questioning why these fucking monkey pictures were so expensive. I had about a day of fomo when I was looking into nfts and then I paused, thought about it logically and said to myself “these are worthless and a scam.” I dinked around with crypto (couple hundred bucks total) and came to the conclusion it’s all bullshit. Very few are making actual $ after the initial btc craziness. Just the ones at the top of these pyramid schemes are winning. Everyone else is stupid idiots. Including myself for wasting a couple hundred bucks.
NFTs are not a terrible idea it's just another way of adding a signature to something. If a famous artist made a beautiful work of art and made an NFT of it and said "this is the only one I am selling" then I can understand how it might hold some value to collectors because it's just like how their signature adds to the value of their artwork.
My dog just took a shit outside and if I put my signature on it the value would still be that of a pile of dog shit. Dumb pictures of apes generated for the sole purpose of making more pictures of apes to sell that hold no value to begin with don't magically become more valuable after they have a signature on them.
An NFT is a way of pretending something is unique when it's not at all unique.
If you want unique art, buy a physical piece and put it on your wall.
Pretending you own a JPEG image just because there's a token somewhere in the blockchain is idiotic, and a complete waste of the electricity used to maintain it. Anyone can save that same JPEG to their hard drive the second it's displayed anywhere. Masturbatory technobabble nonsense with no real-world significance.
No, NFTs are absolutely a stupid idea. Putting a few bytes of data on the block chain does not add any value whatsoever to whatever art is involved, nor does it prove any sort of ownership or legitimacy.
Whether the artist only sells one copy of their art or not, making an NFT is about the worst possible way to facilitate single ownership. This is because there's no practical way to store the entire artwork on the block chain. The images associated with NFTs "live on the block chain" in the same way that the a website "lives in" the URL that points to it - not at all.
That's a small price to pay for such a valuable insight. I know too many people who have lost tens of thousands of dollars chasing returns that will never happen.
Right? I’m glad I took a breath before dumping actual money into it. Lucky for me my girlfriend is smarter than I am and also gave me her opinion which was “crypto is fucking dumb.” That kind of sealed the deal. She’s usually right.
A foolish monkey and his bananas are soon parted.
When the price of all that worthless shit was going up these bozos smugly told anyone who told them it was worthless to ‘have fun staying poor’. They made their bed. They need to eat their loses.
There's nothing new under the sun.
Duh! NFTs are a scam.
How much are NFTs worth? Not a Fucking Thing!
Nonono you didn't read the article, the company behind says these are unique, and they were promoted by famous people, and auctioned at Sotheby's.
Trust me, clearly they are very valuable, honest! Somehow they are claimed to still be worth $50,000!! I bet in another couple of years they'll still be worth way over erh let me think, they may still be worth something, maybe a couple hundred? It's the future, it's a sure thing!!
I spent a lot of time coding some NFTs for a unique use case / idea I had. It doesn’t involve trading / speculative cryptocurrency or drawings of apes. If I ever finish it I definitely will not advertise it as using NFTs. The interesting thing to me is using them as contracts and/ or programmable money. Currently the banking system and credit card companies have a chokehold on payments/purchases/etc. But, NFTs and smart contracts in general provide an alternative to that. That to me has value inherently. Now, I’m aware that bad actors have been using crypto to circumvent laws/regulations, and I’m not in favor of that. But I also do not like the credit card system, and think there’s value in exploring alternative paradigms.
I just checked in on how NBA Topshot (basically sports highlight NFTs) are doing and apparently they are still finding greater fools.
they are only greater fools if they come from the greater fool plains of the US, otherwise it's just sparkling bagholders.
To be fair what people value something at, is what makes it valuable or not. It's not really a delusion and just what some people think, so that makes it true
Just don't buy the "worthless digital monkeys" and they'll be so worthless that their value will be in the negatives; they'll give you money.
In fairness, they didn't buy the monkeys, they bought a spot on the blockchain that says they own the hyperlink to the picture of the monkey.
I don't even understand how someone could fall for NFTs. It was so obviously a stupid, broken concept from the very beginning, it hurts to know that anyone actually was so dumb spent money on this.
Conmen typically target people of low intelligence in scams because it increases the chances of said scam being successful, like the classic Nigerian Prince scam littered with spelling inaccuracies aimed at duping the idiots.
Seth Green was literally going to make a TV show about his worthless scam. Like, bruh, you made Robot Chicken and have been on Family Guy for 24 years. Are you actually out of ideas?
He wanted to use it as a mascot and written off the purchase as a business expense that would also gather value because now his bored ape has a show. Tons of advertising for the ape, in the form of the show, that he flips his 300k purchase for millions would normally be a smart investment except NFTs spoil all good things.
Remember when Seth Green said he had a whole TV show ready to go based on his his Bored Ape and then someone stole it? He paid $300,000 to get it back and ever since... no TV show. I'm wondering if he's just embarrassed at this point.
buy stupid NFT
pitch TV show about said NFT
get investors to pay for it
take out insurance on NFT and TV show
never bother to make TV show
just collect salary as passive income
“leak” private key a few days before “release”
collect insurance to repay investors
profit
No one is going to insure an NFT
I lost a ton of respect for Seth Green on that one. I hope he's embarrassed!
GEE, WHO THE FUCK COULD'VE FORESEEN SUCH TURN OF EVENTS, HUH??? If only there were people that realized very early on that NFTs were absolutely pointless, right?
Sarcasm aside, even being the USA, I doubt there's any law that criminalizes shit investments. Despite everything, NFTs and cryptocoins themselves still aren't legally considered scams, so investing in them and losing money due to their price fluctuations aren't crimes.
Yuga colluded with fine arts broker, Defendant Sotheby's, to run a deceptive auction.
Isn't that the modus operandi of art auctions in general? There's always at least one or two fellas doing everything in their power to pump up prices of certain pieces or specific artists, since they have big collections.
Sotheby's Metaverse, an NFT trading platform opened after the auction, "operated (or attempted to operate) as an unregistered broker of securities."
Ooohh, now that could be interesting, though I highly doubt they'll get more than a slap on the wrist, if it gets that far.
Oh I didn’t realise FTX was involved in this grift 😂
Makes sense that a bunch of grifters would be involved in a grift that, in turn, makes their grift look more legitimate as well.
Of all the stupid NFTs, I'm glad to see the bored ape collapse.
I mean they all did! Didn't they?
Lolololol
Oh yeah, I forgot about these.
2021: "NFTs aren't like tulips at all!!!"
2023: crickets