How Legacy became a costly crypto bust for players and a business win for Peter Molyneux

After millions in NFT sales, the hyped “play to earn” game was effectively dead in weeks.

See full article...

 

[MilanKraft]

Look, I’m very anti scam, very anti fraud, and don’t think there is enough consumer protections.

But

At what point do we say anyone choosing to buy an NFT isn’t the victim of a con artist, they’re just trying to fool themselves?

Mostly I agree but there is an element of, some of these people getting taken likely don't understand the technical aspects (on a generational level). But yeah, for anyone under the age of 60 buying NFTs, tough to feel sorry for them. Do your homework, etc. I suspected from the first instant I read about them, that NFTs were a by-design scam vehicle piggybacking on the concept of rights ownership. There are surely other metastasizings by now, and someone may downvote me on an obscure corner-case of "but, but not ALL NFTs are like that - this one over here is legitimate!" angle, but yeah... hard pass on all things NFT.

For any given variant, when you peel away the layer of hand-wavy salesmanship bullshit, one will always find a buyer beware scenario lurking. On its face the concept borders on idiotic.... OK, so I'm going to pay a person thousand$ or million$ using real money and a blockchain transaction, for some purely digital asset found online, on the theory that I will then "own the rights" to it afterward. Yet the thing itself is almost always spread across the Internets already (the value usually stems from the thing's popularity), which means the buyer has zero actual control over the asset's use or distribution, and because the NFT itself is not something widely recognized by financial or legal institutions, you have no legal recourse if someone uses or distributes the "thing you own the rights to" (but really don't own the rights to) in a way you don't like or intend. In fact, AFAIK there's nothing stopping the originator from generating more NFT variations for the same works and selling them to other people.

An equally stupid but more visually satisfying way to mismanage your hard-earned money is to create a huge pile of it in your driveway, douse it with gasoline, then set it on fire. In doing so, you will have the same level of rights ownership and enforcability as an NFT.

My favorite example was the artist guy who, while he wasn't a scammer, had made a 1001 of these simplistic 3D scenes in Cinema 4D (called "C4D Once a Days" or similar), and it was just this thing that started out as, "you learn this software by tinkering, so once a day, make a simple project and eventually you will get good at it." Well, that was cool enough and harmless obviously, and it became this sort of iconic thing in the 3D arts space. Eventually, with the advent of NFTs, the artist guy parlayed these relatively simplistic works into some bat-shit-crazy deal he literally conjured out of thin air (because that's what NFTs are). He sold the "rights to his dailies" (or maybe his whole "catalog"?) for $60M+ (!!!) Yet, I could go online x weeks / months / years later, find some or all of those same artworks, download them, put one them on a commercial web site as my business logo, or put a dozen of them on t-shirts and sell them, whatever I wanted.... and the "new owner" wouldn't have a single thing to say about it.

NFTs: Just Say No.