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Comment by hackinthebochs | Hacker News Reader

The only explanation for NFTs that made sense to me is that people with an interest in the network (e.g. early investors) are bidding up some choice NFTs to make news and drive interest in their network. There is no actual market for NFTs at these prices, but that doesn't stop groups with deep pockets from pretending like there is by purchasing well known memes for eye popping amounts. If internet "celebrities" are able to cash in on this nonsense, I see no harm in it. It's sort of like living off of VC subsidized products.

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Could be money laundering related too. Buy NFTs for small sums with clean crypto, sell it to your dirty wallet for inflated sums. In order for something like that to work there needs to be plausible deniability so they also buy NFTs with clean wallets which would explain the volume. Plus the legitimate crypto speculators see these crazy numbers and jump aboard too.

I think most of these NFT contracts will give 5% of every resale back to the original creator of the contract, too. Pretty ludicrous IMO

> If internet "celebrities" are able to cash in on this nonsense, I see no harm in it. It's sort of like living off of VC subsidized products.

If you only look at it from the perspective of the influencer, it doesn't seem like there's any harm. They managed to extract some wealth from crypto whales. -- where's the harm in that? But at the end of the day, they're selling a lie. The NFT-proponents want people to believe that NFTs are inherently valuable so that they can extract all of their money back, and then some. It's propaganda, and I can't get behind it, even if it means some artists are cashing out.

Yes, this and Bitcoin both feel like pyramid schemes.

There is a lot of initial investment from top-tier people who convince others to invest (by showing eye-popping returns) and drive more investment. Soon the people on the top-tier gradually cash out and eventually it's the common people who lost their hard-earned money.

The whole concept of wealth feels like a pyramid scheme.

Your second paragraph could be applied to any non-crypto asset class. The only difference I can see is that crypto just made this scheme more obvious, unobfuscated then let's say the stock market with its different investor classes.

The real market would be owning early works by an unknown, who later becomes known.

That will evolve into the patron system again, where the owner of early works becomes a hype machine to drum up their artists clout, and then offloads their early work.

The introduction of NFTs certainly spiked the price of ETH for a while but it seems the shine has worn off and the dump is in full force.

The beeple NFT that sold for 60m, was obviously an attempt to make NFTs look valuable.

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