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For the curious, it seems like the last time there was any meaningful activity for these NFTs was 3 years ago when someone sold one for ¢12: https://opensea.io/collection/cryptomondrian/activity?activi... The height of the NFT fever era was truly something.

mingus88 · 13h ago

Wasn’t it always just money laundering?

Need to turn a million dollars of shady money into legit profit? Mint an NFT or coin and set a ridiculous price on it. Make the transactions on an anonymous ledger. Sell it to yourself.

I mean, come on. Art and real estate have always been vehicles for wealthy people to dump money offshore. Crypto made it so much easier to invent assets out of thin air and set whatever price you want on it.

With NFTs you don’t even need to hype up some artist as the next big thing, or trade in antiquities. Just generate a picture of Trump as a beefcake fireman or something and sell it for 1.8 million. That actually happened.

And golly, nobody is talking about it anymore. The fad just dried up just like all the money. Huh, go figure.

Time to harvest those losses.

bediger4000 · 7h ago

I'm not against the idea that NFTs are just for money laundering, but if so, you have to ask why they didn't remain popular? Is all the money laundered that needs to be laundered? Is cryptocurrency better for laundering somehow?

herval · 1h ago

They lost the appeal because

1) global logistics normalized, moving the bulk of the money laundering activities back to their usual places (eg physical art),

2) people started realizing that the blockchain actually created a papertrail that’s much harder to conceal than a bunch of literal paper documents scattered across a web of global freight forwarding companies and shell companies and

3) KYC rules turned most fringe crypto exchanges into tightly monitored trading platforms

Crypto as a whole became less utilized as a laundering & gambling medium for those reasons, but it didn’t fully disappear since ETFs keep liquidity happening and transferring money with crypto is still better than swift in a lot of cases. NFTs went away because they had no use whatsoever

krapp · 7h ago

NFTs crashed because someone realized you could use multiple slurp juices on a single ape.

palmfacehn · 11h ago

I always assumed they were deliberate losses to counter taxable gains.

readthenotes1 · 13h ago

"NFTs are status, identity, community, self-expression, access and more."

Always wondered why someone would pay a lot money for a bunch of pixels. Status and attention-serking (aka identity) are pretty strong drivers

BoorishBears · 11h ago

NFTs got much bigger than they could if it was just people who believe in the mission, just like Bitcoin

Speculation was the main driver for most people once the prices started going exponential

kkfx · 13h ago

The NFTs that most people haven't yet understood are contracts, notarial deeds, and bureaucracy in general, which can be transferred from third-party guarantors to the "great public guarantor" of blockchain participants, all recorded with a certified date and verifiable history.

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