The major hack may be the worst attack to hit the NFT community in its history, with millions of dollars in potential losses.
The way I read the article, the "worth millions" is the sum of the ransom demand.
The funny part is that the exploit is in the "smart" contract, ya know the thing that the blockchain keeps secure by forbidding any updates or patches.
First, DO people buy them for millions, in the present tense? I know that people did in the past, but I thought the price on most of these took a huge hit.
Second: do people BUY them for millions, in the sense that they trade things of well-measured value (like fiat currency or gold) for coins to buy these? Or do they buy them for millions of dollars in equivalent coins that they already have, and don't want to actually sell for real goods or money because they'd realized huge losses if they actually cashed out, so they have to keep them circulating within the blockchain to maintain a hope that they'll return anywhere near their previous value? Because if you have 10 million dollars worth of etherium that you bought at 20 million and an NFT of questionable value, can't you just buy and sell it to a few wallets you own to make it look like it's recently been purchased for a few million to create the illusion of value without actually ever giving or receiving anything?
Then what would you do with it? Is it purely for clout? "Hey guys, look, I got an image of this monkey." Yes monkeys are amazing, but you don't even own the picture, so what's the point?
Another interpretation is that it's all an insurance scam were something worthless is "stolen by hackers" and then claimed to be worth millions for the insurance claim.
But surely nobody in the "well known as impeccably honest" NFT world would ever do something like that!
Think of it like this, when people make drug busts and they find huge amounts of cocaine or whatever and they say oh this is 300 something mod a million is worth of stuff. No it's not. It's maybe like not even half that not even a quarter of that, they just make it up just to make their bust even bigger
I remember it used to be calculated on the lowest value extrapolated out so a gram of smoke was 20/25 bucks so a kilo of smoke "had a street value of 20,000 - 25,000."
One of the great thing about the AI revolution is that since generating infinite number of unique random (and commonly, bad) pictures of literally anything you can think of takes only seconds, the entire concept of NFT has become completely worthless as it completely destroyed the value-from-scarcity argument. Not that it ever was a good argument to begin with.
People trying to discuss the topic have their posts pushed down while "lmao nfts" are voted up. How do you see someone saying, respectfully, "I think there's a benefit to this." and try to push down their contribution?
Anyone who wants a good discussion about news in this community, must leave this community. If you want to add context or opposing perspectives, better go elsewhere. You build a community like this and you get people who know Hans had a vibrator, because jokes and legit opinions are treated as interchangable.
NFTs are a joke, so it's totally fine for a topic like this.
Like what is there to discuss? The entire concept is stupid. With NFTs the object isn't even on the blockchain, the image isn't there. It's pretty much just some random information that says image x belongs to you (but you have to store image x somewhere else and can lose it).
When it comes to owning art either physical media or the rights to the image already do a much better job.
The only area where NFTs sound useful (but they aren't) is things like trading card games. Where you can have a card in a game and you own it, but because it's an NFT you could sell the card to another player outside the game. But the whole concept again breaks down, the game can simply block the card from being played later on or remove the card and you're left with nothing (besides "proof" that you own the NFT for a card that existed in the past). It adds nothing of value that a normal entry in a database couldn't provide.
One thing I'm still positive on: Crypto currency was a great idea, at least until Bitcoin was sabotaged with the 1 MB block size and transacting with it died along the way.
I seem to recall digital trading card games existing long before NFTs were ever thought up, so not even that works. In fact, every "use" for NFTs I've ever seen suggested has been something we already had that is actually easier without involving the things.
Maybe it's because majority of people think that NFTs are a joke and don't agree that there are any benefits to this? Maybe they don't want to engage in a discussion because they already heard all the arguments and still think it's BS? I don't know, I'm just guessing.
Because the incorrect reddit downvoting, where people trest them like s like/dislike system (not the original downvoting, where you would only downvote if something did not contribute to the conversation) was imported to lemmy
Insurance scam? Not too be cynical, but after the price dropped a year(?) ago there were a number of thefts for which there was speculation about them being insurance fraud.