NBA Metaverse Partner Terminates Relationship, Threatens Reporters Covering Deal
defector.com
defector.com
The way the CEO misspells NY (New York) as “MY” in his own e-mail signature is a fitting touch.
Edit: also looks like Google maps places it at the park down by Dumbo. Very weird.
Some of the results also include the odd term "Bootstrap Template". Perhaps there is some web building tool that uses this address as the filler text on a template page?
What is mind boggling in that some idiots at 76ers and NBA got swindled by clearly a non-existent entity.
https://bootstrapmade.com/demo/Flattern/
Bootstrap is just a front-end web framework and there's nothing inherently wrong with using a nice-looking Bootstrap template to get a decent site up fast. Real companies doing that make sure to swap in their own contact info, though. Every search result with the Adam street non-address is for something shady.
It does. That's why, thanks to number portability, you can sell a 212 area code number for hundreds, or even thousands of dollars.
https://twitter.com/dhm/status/1480306092622024706
Expecting him to know the correct abbreviation for New York may be asking a lot lol.
I can't believe South Park is as solid as ever when it comes to capturing the absurdity of cultural phenomena.
Thing is, people have been shelling real money for virtual items for a long time. Remember MMOs, hell even Diablo? Team Fortress 2 and the whole hats money making machine? Well, now all that is going to end up mainstream.
I don't like it one bit but status symbols have been around since before there were humans. You can see this shit in animal societies, too
But the whole thing seems so craven, just like freemium games that south park also skewered, based on taking advantage of some addicts/clout chasers who crave the rush of some digital bits attached to their avatars.
The only thing NFTs seem to offer is an extra middleman who can make money off of these transactions.
Even that isn't new. Valve has been taking a 30% cut of everything sold on their community market for as long as I can remember.
I think the difference is that at least to someone, those virtual MMO goods had value. You could wear the stupid hat. You could buy in-game stuff with the virtual gold. You could live in your Ultima Online castle.
NFTs really don't have any intrinsic value to anyone, at all.
Just think of NFT's as a digital receipt (incl. tickets or club membership), certificates and then think of use-cases where proving that you have one of those would be useful. Of course you can argue that the entire blockchain aspect isn't necessary but that's a different conversation. Or if this is a good thing or not.
Another thing I thought would be useful in games, but unlikely to ever happen, is using NFTs to track ownership of in-game cosmetics. That way cosmetics you get from known e-sports pros could be worth more than cosmetics you purchased from whatever store, the same a pair of Michael Jordan's shoes he wore during a game is more of a collectible than buying the equivalent shoes from Footlocker.
This has gotten to the point where it transcends even the most bat-shit insane people; this has to be an elaborate troll or they are delusional.
Granted sports organizations and can be as dysfunctional as any organization, but you would hope they would do a little vetting of who they make deals with.
https://defector.com/what-the-hell-is-this-company-the-76ers...
HN discussion of the backstory:
It smells of fraud and I’m sure more is yet to come.
For months, the Times of Israel kept pounding on this story. It took quite a while. At peak, something like 40% of the Israeli finance industry was binary option scams. Some of the scammers were well connected politically.
Amazingly, it was legal in Israel to run financial scams against non-Israelis. That changed only when it became an international embarrassment big enough to hurt the country's image.
Some of the scammers pivoted to crypto. Others moved operations to Bulgaria. But none of them seem to have gone to jail in Israel. Some were caught in the US or the EU and did go to jail there.
[1] https://financefeeds.com/we-lobby-southampton-fc-on-why-they...
[2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-wolves-of-tel-aviv-israels...
I would think that any threat of legal action on Color Star's part is an empty one, since that would mean "Lucas Capetian" would have to appear (either in-person or via video) for the purposes of a legal deposition. That seems unlikely, given "his" reticence to appear in public or reveal anything at all about his true identity.
Those with legal expertise, feel free to weigh in here.
I'd definitely subpoena him. But it can take a lot of money to get to that point...
> Eagle-eyed viewers of Friday night’s Celtics-76ers tilt in Philadelphia will have noticed a sudden absence of the ubiquitous Color Star banners recently seen splashed on every available flat surface inside the home team’s arena