Twitter's Dorsey auctions first ever tweet as digital memorabilia

Basically, a sketchy businessman buys a bunch of art from some random unknown artist for pennies. He then gets his art world friends to start praising that artist and thus appraise the art at a stupidly high value. Come tax season, sketchy business man turns philanthropist and donates said art to some random museum. That donation is written off as a tax credit at that stupidly high value and now some museum is left holding crappy art. Alternatives strategies involve using the over-valued art as collateral for a loan or something in case cash is needed instead.

It's sorta like a pump-and-dump, except the intent is to fool some bureaucracy rather than the public.

https://www.riskscreen.com/kyc360/news/art-in-the-frame-for-...

https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2019/09/the-art-o...

> But in late 2017, US prosecutors say, Green fell in with the owners of a Mauritius-based investment company, Beaufort Securities, that engaged in fraud, stock manipulation, and money laundering. For Beaufort’s owners, duping investors into buying worthless securities was the easy part. The hard part was making the ill-gotten profit appear legitimate to regulators. Beaufort had done so in the past by depositing money under false names in offshore banks, then slipping it into the global banking system little by little. The company had also used the time-tested trick of buying real estate and quickly selling it off, often at a loss, to convert illegal proceeds into assets that could be accounted for as the fruit of a property deal.

> Now, money launderers like Beaufort were searching for less obvious ways to scrub their cash, and Matthew Green knew how to trade in multimillion-dollar works of art. Approached in late 2017 by the Beaufort conspirators—one of whom was in fact an undercover US federal agent who had infiltrated Beaufort—Green allegedly said he would accept £6.7 million (about $9 million at the time) in what he knew to be the yield of securities fraud in exchange for a 1965 Picasso, Personnages. Green would draw up phony ownership papers saying the work had been sold, all the while keeping the Picasso stored away. Down the road he would pretend to buy it back from his coconspirators at a lower price, keeping 5 to 10 percent of the laundered cash for himself.

> “Art is a very attractive vehicle to launder money,” says Peter D. Hardy, a former US prosecutor who now advises corporations and industries on compliance with anti-money-laundering requirements. “It can be hidden or smuggled, transactions often are private, and prices can be subjective and manipulated—and extremely high.”

With art, buy and sell prices have no comparison points and margins are very high.

Buyer: "I want 120k bucks worth of cocaine. How should I send you the money?"

Dealer: "I'm going to duct tape a banana to a wall and call it art. You buy the art. I drop off the coke."

Buyer: "Who the fuck would buy something like that?"

Dealer: "You, because you're actually buying the coke, not the banana or duct tape. But to the government, you look like a fucking idiot and I'm just a capitalist opportunist. They then dont question my questionable purchasing decisions because I'm an arteest."

I left out some details, but that's the broad brush strokes.

Edit: just thought about it. This is also a nice extra layer of plausible deniability for the buyer.

"I'm not sending money to acquire drugs/illegal weapons, I'm sending money for a... painting."

Cops: "It looks like a toddler drank paint and had projectile diarrhea."

"High class taste in sophisticated art cant be explained to simpletons like you."

- get a business that operates mostly on anonymous/untraceable cash (laundromat)

- put drug money through it and pay taxes

- business use "clean" money to buy a piece of art for $1 million from a corporation owned by the criminal boss (that was bought for $1k).

Voila, clean money in the hands of the head honcho.

Pure speculation on my part, though.

Then the crypto is untraceable at both ends: one side leads to the victim, the other to someone with plausible deniability: "I was just selling art at market value. I didn't have anything to do with that crime, and I don't know the person who bought the art." In between, nothing but an anonymous wallet and an untraceable transfer of NFT.

If, as you suggested you can obtain crypto without a paper trail then your plan might work. Since there's no paper trail you could even setup multiple sock puppets.

Then it would be more sensible for your CleanWallet to be owned by an NFT Art producing company. The become popular "over time" using your sock puppets and may even garner real attention (commissions per sale isn't uncommon and is a free bonus for the fees you've spent).

Alternatively you could run the NFT platform and take X% commission. With your sock puppets you mint and buy NFTs left and right. Maybe you'll even get some real business.

Both of these ideas shouldn't be difficult to off It's not uncommon for a crypto company to invest in other crypto companies which could add another layer of in direction.

This is all quite speculative and the ideas require a decent amount of effort. For the most part I agree that the use of crypto and NFTs to launder money is a bit overblown.

Isn't this the hard part? Not only this, but having to worry about physical transactions involving money...or the risk of traditional digital trails of bank transfers, etc?

My understanding is that NFT could clean up this aspect by 1) removing money transfer risk (probably use some sort of smart contract to guarantee transfer of NFT immediately to buyer upon successful bank transfer to seller) and 2) transferring underlying valuation to a subjective-valuation industry. Washing $ through a restaurant would open the restaurant up to possible scrutiny to prove they had higher food costs, etc...but NFTs appear to remove that risk since no one can really question increases to value of "art".

Also, technically the owners of the "high value" NFT could even be kept in the dark on the shady details if they are offered a quick buck by some offshore lawyer. They could probably even set it up to guarantee eventual transfer back to the original owner (netting them ~10% or so).

You "own" it in the sense there's an immutable paper trail that proves you and you alone are the owner. However, the castle being protected as a national monument, you cannot bulldoze it or even change it in any way by law AND you are obliged by law to open it to the public.

Basically you are buying bragging rights.

In a basic sense, you own a signed ‘snapshot’ of the tweet.

Basically it is kind of ‘only signed copy of the tweet’

If you don't then you have no credible ability to sell it, if you do... then maybe I'm interested.

In general items sold by their original authors will be more valuable (and you can already see evidence of this being wrong or right on the network), so this seems like a fine way of going about it.

The UK has to increasingly rely on Chinese nuclear expertise because over the last ten to twenty years a lot of engineers have retired and you don't just stagnate but decline because there's just not enough people and also state capacity to keep that process knowledge alive.

Musk says a lot of crap but on this he was right when he talked about the real loss of knowledge in spaceflight. It takes a very long time to get an engineering culture back once you lose it.

I find his analogy more apt - nothing prevented an artists from making another painting and claiming it to be genuine #1 of #1 either.

It's just with NFTs the benefit for a buyer is being able to see this happen on a public blockchain.

What advantage do they have for doing so?

Whether this agreement is stored as an NFT on the blockchain, or in Spotify's database doesn't matter, as long as they - or someone else! - can unilaterally yank that data out. And they can.

As far as files go, I'm reminded of the Robert Heinlein quote - probably mangled, maybe apocryphal - that you don't truly own anything you can't carry in your arms at a dead run.