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.
You must log in or # to comment.
Nope. Too bad, they knew what they were buying. That they convinced themselves the value they attributed to it would remain or increase is entirely on them. The fact that so many others saw it through a realistic lens means they had the same ability and chose not to.
But that said, the proceeds for them should also get clawed back and 100% put toward scam identification education. Neither side in this one should walk away enriched.
Honestly I’m ok with them keeping their money, afaik everyone knew where they were buying they were just dumb enough to think it would ever be worth something. If we want to claw back money from people we should start with the ones ruining the environment to make the line go up
I mean yeah, if you make it illegal for dumb people to overpay for stupid shit, half the global economy would collapse overnight
Just like Beanie Babies!
I’m all for that. And the stock market bros too.
That’s the whole point of legitimate auction houses like Sothby’s. They pay experts to provide some legitimacy and sanity. It’s one thing for me to say that a kids finger painting is worth 50k, it’s a different thing for a trained art appraiser at an auction house to set that price.
Sotheby sets the initial prices and provides estimates of value. They were supposed to be the responsible adult in the room. Now if they values them at say $1000 and they sold for 100,000k that’s on the buyer. If the value was set for 80k and it sold for 90k that’s a different story.
This is the part about wealthy people that I just love. If muh investment pays off, f-off society, I was smart and made a wise investment. I deserve to keep 100% of the proceeds. But when things go south, “Save meeeeeeeeee, you [society/regulators] shouldn’t have let me go through with it”. Then we’re back to the socialism they say they hate so much and that they lobby their own money to deny to the common folk.
Oy vay
Should’ve invested in beanie babies like the rest of the smart people.
Nah man, pogs are where it’s at. Pogs!
Joking aside, I miss my Pogs. Those need to come back.
I actually looked this up recently. You can buy pog makers!
Baby come back
You can blame it all on me
Everything’s coming up Milhouse!
I don’t think pogs were ever expected to make anyone a millionaire. The most expensive slammer I ever saw back in the day was $20 and pog $5. My mom wouldn’t buy me that fancy $20 slammer. :(
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.
A lot of those transactions is just to up the price so dumb asses think they are worth it. The other half is just dumb asses ofc.
It has to be some form of money laundering.
It is, but tsss.
Shhhhhhh don’t tell them
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.
NFTs remind me a lot of the international star registry.
You’re paying someone a lot for them to record some unofficial bragging rights in some unofficial database that literally no normal person cares about.
Wait…but the star is named after ME. It’s mine, right?
It sure is champ
Omigod how do you know my name? Do you work for the star people?
Very much like that, including how there can be multiple registries, like International Star Registry, Universal Star Database, The International Registry of Stars, Universal International Star Registry Database, etc., all ‘officially’ naming the same stars.
I dunno. That’s kinda neat. Maybe in like 20,000 years humans will be exploring the Mongostein system.
You missed the part where literally nobody else will look to those registries to see what random people named them.
Doesn’t NASA do it? I dunno. I always thought it was kind of neat, but ultimately pointless.
Nope. The names are entirely unofficial. No one uses them.
Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.
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.
I appreciate those buttholes.
Solid quote.
It would be cool if each buyer has a unique hash and elements of the art are AI generated (like the background or texture) using some chaotic process with the hash as the seed, so that everyone gets a unique version. I would pay maybe a couple of bucks for something like that.
That is a good idea, having a dynamically generated portion of the art dependent on a hash. That would actually be an NFT then, haha.
I still don’t think I would pay a couple bucks for one, but I like your idea.
Shoot. Maybe I’d sell them for a couple bucks? Let’s get on this.
That’s the spirit 🤣 The challenge is building a team with both technical and artistic know-how to build something like this.
From what I’ve learned about online digital currency, we only need one exceptional department, and that is marketing.
You might enjoy CryptoKitties
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.
It just means some moron is willing to pay that much
Presumably they’re still useful for money laundering. Makes sense to keep some kind of price floor.
deleted by creator
These silly things, according to the article, are still selling for $50k each. There are still greater fools to sell to, they just aren’t as rich. The current owners can still walk away with about 20% of their initial “investment”. They themselves will be the greater fool if they don’t unload them onto someone else.
deleted by creator
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.
You are missing my point. It’s more like a pile of photos. If some artist took a picture and printed a shit ton of copies of it and sold those but signed one of them the one they signed might hold more value to collectors. That is what an NFT is like, the single copy of the photo that is signed. It’s not some amazing ground breaking thing that makes something so amazingly unique that nothing else compares to it… it’s just like a signature on a photograph.
I also never said anything about ownership of the image. A signature doesn’t imply that either.
Its not though, the signature and the digital art are stored separately. Their association only exists within a controlled a system. So that, you don’t actually have a signature attached to art, you have a signature associated with art, and only when viewed through a website such as OpenSea. You’re not investing in the infallibility of math. Your “investing” in some joker with an httpd server, who pointed two records at each-other in a database, the same way any other database works. Imagine someone giving you a number, and saying somewhere there’s some art that this number means you own. You can check to see what art you own, only by plugging your number into my software… that’s what you’ve purchased.
Its not though, the signature and the digital art are stored separately.
They don’t have to be. That is just how it was done to sell thousands of stupid pictures of Apes, Cats, more apes and whatever else stupid crap they made thousands of iterations of.
I’m not missing your point, I just disagree with it. A signed print is physically distinct from a copy. If an artist personally spent extra time with a particular piece to sign it, adding another personal touch on their creation, I would think that legitimately adds value.
An NFT does not do that. All an NFT does is cause somebody’s GPU to spin up and generate carbon emissions associated with the same literal string of zeros and ones that accompanies every other copy of the print. It doesn’t represent any additional attention on the part of the creator. It’s just a substandard copy that comes with excess waste.
All an NFT does is cause somebody’s GPU to spin up and generate carbon emissions associated with the same literal string of zeros and ones that accompanies every other copy of the print. It doesn’t represent any additional attention on the part of the creator. It’s just a substandard copy that comes with excess waste.
None of that is true. You don’t need a GPU to spin up to do anything. You are conflating mining crypto currency with NFTs. A NFT is just a cryptographic signature kept on some sort of blockchain that is associated with an image or file or unique pointer. You can use a preexisting blockchain or even make your own. Blockchains don’t have to be mineable and blockchains themselves are actually a good idea… mineable crypto currency is just a really shitty use case for them. It has nothing to do with mining and is just another form of cryptographic signature.
Edit: The fact that you think a physical signature has value while a unique digital signature (yes… the signature is unique) has none is personal preference and once again not the point I am making. I am saying it is a type of signature and some collectors might find value in it.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
There’s nothing new under the sun.
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.
It’s pretty funny to think about if they didn’t bother to buy the actual domain that’s in the Blockchain. I hope they didn’t, and they get squatted later. That would make it even funnier.
I don’t know about that specific example, but people have had whats at the other end of the link changed after the sale. Like, instead of the monkey, now its goatse or something.
That’s why people sometimes prefer the URL to be an IPFS hash, that way the content is immutable. No guarantee that the content will always be available, but at least it can’t be changed.
