Originally published at: Second largest NFT marketplace apparently 87% wash trading | Boing Boing
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You can’t make this shit up, gentlefolk.
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Never saw that coming, really. /s
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This story should make it painfully clear that NFTs are 100% scam. But in case you’re wondering what to do next:
If you have money in NFTs: sell if you can, but don’t hold your breath.
If you are thinking of buying an NFT: don’t.
If you are thinking of joining the grift as an “NFT creator” and scamming the fools: getting in now would put you at the very bottom of the pyramid scam.
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So “wash trading” + blockchain (“more than $9.5 billion in total Ethereum trading volume since its launch.”) means that the significant number (~87%?) of blockchain entries are paired purchase/sale events which leaves everything unchanged besides two more blockchain entries? (“Not even ‘service charges’?”). All to give the illusion of value where there really is essentially none? (“Well ‘value’ is fungible. Might as well buy lottery tickets. Or at least keep a weather eye out for a winning lottery ticket blowing along the sidewalk”)
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“Let the market decide!”
(market crashes)
“See? The system works!”
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Worth checking out on this topic: “Line Goes Up” is a seriously good, two-hour-plus, nuanced and informative takedown of crypto and NFTs. (One that, hilariously, Google’s advertising algorithms have paired with advertisements for crypto trading platforms–illustrating one of the main points of the video, which is that it’s insane to trust code to get things right all the time.)
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ive got to wonder - besides the planet, and therefore all of us - who exactly is paying for all that electricity?
isn’t it just burning cash? somewhere someone must be paying out buckets of real currency
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Your regular reminder that any financial innovation created by Libertarians is most likely a scam to separate suckers from their money.
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Also, I was reading that 80% of OpenSea’s listings are theft/scams/spam. And they’re treated as one of the more “responsible/reliable” sellers of NFTs, which makes me wonder how dire the situation is everywhere else.
I keep seeing NFT-boosters talking about what they “could” be, but it’s clear what they are, right now, is so completely and utterly broken, in every respect, that there’s no path forward for them to be anything better even if that was theoretically possible (which I have yet to hear a convincing argument for).
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I think they still pay transaction fees, but I’m not sure.
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Pick It Up And Put It In Your Pocket (Stan Ridgway)
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I’m surprised.
Not by a libertarian techbro LARP of what they imagine a free market to be being riddled with fraud; that’s a baseline expectation; but that the absurd inefficiency of blockchain transactions(and associated high transaction costs) make that much wash trading economically viable.
When it comes to gas prices; Ethereum makes the high cost bits of Western Europe look like some sort of heavily subsidized petrostate by comparison.
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With blockchain grifts the line between the scammers and the marks is always fuzzy and a matter of perspective. I’m sure many of the people doing this fail to drum up enough fake momentum and just end up losing a lot on transaction fees because they don’t have enough stake to do it effectively or they don’t have the backing of the right influencers to get the attention.
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Joe Kennedy famously knew it was time to get out of stocks when he got share tips from a shoe shine boy, so we must be approaching the endgame of the NFT scam now that it is being promoted by professional footballers.
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I think people want to say I told you so re: NFTs, but the actual issue is $LOOKS. A user earns them by trading on the LR platform, so likely these users are exploiting the wash trading as a means of stacking free $LOOKS and dumping those.
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