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.

    • IWantToFuckSpez@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      Love how the NFT hype was a big wealth transfer event. So many rich people, like wealthy oil Arabs, bought into the scam and moved so much money into artists pockets while they essentially got nothing in return.

      • triptrapper@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Is there any way to confirm this? Or are there examples of artists who made a significant amount of money from NFTs? I understand its potential benefit for artists, but I mostly remember already-rich corporations (e.g. UFC) using them as another way to extract money from consumers.

        • IWantToFuckSpez@kbin.social
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          11 months ago

          There are curated NFT auction sites where only selected artists are allowed to sell their work. And you can see for how much they sell their pieces. During the hype many sold items for thousands to tens of thousands or more. Also there is Beeple who rode the hype early from the start and he became a millionaire.

      • lunarul@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        My favorite is Murakami, who after selling NFTs he made paintings after all all of them. So which one is the “original”? The actual physical painting, or the digital NFT?

        • yeather@lemmy.ca
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          11 months ago

          Technically, the NFT. In reality, the physical. Is a lot harder to brag about your art assets if you have to log into your pc to show them off.

    • shortwavesurfer@monero.town
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      11 months ago

      I do see potential use for them, but not in the way they are currently being used. I could see uses like door keys, tickets, memberships, etc being of practical value, but not stupid little pictures.

        • shortwavesurfer@monero.town
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          11 months ago

          Besides the obvious of your door lock needing to be connected to the internet, and that could be a problem, what else do you see as being an issue with using it for door keys?

          • logan_berries@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Another question is: why would you need it for a key?

            Long-established public/private keys and signatures are used in this way all the time to control access to servers around the world. No blockchain needed. Blockchain is helpful when we all need to agree on a series of events.

            Homes are a nice example of where you can have an isolated system which knows what it needs to about you (e.g. a public key) without sharing or cross-checking anything with the world.

              • logan_berries@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                That isn’t required for a key. What if I want to let my family member access the house tomorrow while I’m out? Do I have to sell it to them?

                The key/lock relationship is not connected to ownership. Ownership could be connected to the ability to issue new keys, but even then the ownership doesn’t need to be logged in a blockchain for that - it can simply be signed by a key held by the land registry.

                If you want to make an argument for using blockchains for the land registry then… go ahead, but it’s another discussion with a whole different set of arguments.

          • bahbah23@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            How exactly would that work? Keep in mind that the blockchain is by necessity not secret.

            • shortwavesurfer@monero.town
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              11 months ago

              Right, but all the lock is doing is checking whether you own the NFT or not. If your house was in NFT, people could see that you bought a house, but not where it was as long as it was generic like house #40000

              • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
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                11 months ago

                all the lock is doing is checking whether you own the NFT or not.

                So, you’d need a method to verify who “you” are. And once again we’ve come up with a way to use NFTs that actually works better without NFTs.

                  • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
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                    11 months ago

                    No offense, but this is literally the problem with almost everyone who says they have a perfect usecase for NFTs. I also don’t know everything about everything either, but I know do know that we don’t tend to make existing systems complex just for fun.

                    Every time someone wants to fix something with NFTs, they’re either slapping an NFT on top of the existing system, making it more complicated, OR they want to start a new solution from the ground up, throwing out decades or centuries of experience and edge-case solutions to replace them with nothing, leading to major problems.

                    This post is about the second thing happening, your example is the first.

                    NFTs are a solution looking for a problem. But all the problems have already been solved without NFTs.

              • stoy@lemmy.zip
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                11 months ago

                How would that work in reality, how would the lock know that the NFT in question is the actual legal ownership of the house?

                The only way to guarantee that is to change the law that deeds of houses can only be an NFT.

                Otherwise someone could sell a house on paper, but retain the NFT to have access to the house.

                An NFT lock would also have the following problems, excluding the trust of ownership in the real world.

                Power to the lock is required, if your backup battery is dead then you might be locked out during a power cut.

                Internet access is required, during a powercut your router will probably die as well, so even if a battery backup is working, you’d still be locked out.

                Your ISP could have service interruptions, no internet, no access to the latest blockchain updates, meaning that the lock can’t trust that you actually have ownership/access, that would be an insanely easy way to hack the lock.

                • shortwavesurfer@monero.town
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                  11 months ago

                  I can’t really address the first part about selling the house on paper and not transferring the NFT.

                  I figure this thing would have cellular access as well as Wi-Fi. So if your Wi-Fi was to go down, then the cell network would be used instead. And those generally use different ISPs for fiber and often get restored first or dont go down at all since they are commercial contracts. In the event of a total internet cut, it is well known that a house does not change ownership very often, so the lock could be programmed to not accept any new keys for a period like a day. The lock would accept only the old key during that time like a cooldown period

                  • stoy@lemmy.zip
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                    11 months ago

                    Ok, lets disregard the regulatory issues, are you really asking people to sign up for a completely different ISP just to unlock their house with an NFT key?

                    As for a delay to update ownership, fine that would add some leniency and is not an unresonable feature.

                    But I just can’t see what problem an NFT key would solve, we don’t usually lock/unlock our front door with the deed of the home, what would the advantage be of doing that?

      • notthebees@reddthat.com
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        11 months ago

        I thought of it as a good way for artists to earn a living by more tokenized artworks, but then it gets hijacked by this shit.

      • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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        11 months ago

        Just like with everything else, all those things you suggested are already done much more reliably without NFTs.

        If you still want to see a more “pratical” use of it, look no further than Decentraland, where it’s used as “ownership” of digital “land” and other “goods”.

      • AA5B@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I think of it like timeshare values. They’re really high …. Until you try to find someone who will actually buy it

        • mhague@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          The person talking out of their ass is voted up.

          The person bringing up facts is voted down.

          The person posting dismissive nonsense is voted up.

          Gross.

          • AbidanYre@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            The only person providing any sources here would put that $5.5b market cap (if it’s accurate) at 1/4 of what it was two years ago.

            That’s one hell of a crash and burn.

          • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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            11 months ago

            What is a supposed fact without a source?

            I too can make up facts like that.

      • Womble@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        The vast majority of NFTs are worthless now

        “MacContract on Ethereum has a floor price of $13,234,204.2, but its all-time sales is only $18,” the report said, adding: “This stark discrepancy between listed floor prices and actual sales data exposes a significant issue in the NFT market – inflated valuations that don’t reflect genuine buyer interest or real-world transactions.

        “It becomes clear that a significant portion of the NFT market is characterized by speculative and hopeful pricing strategies that are far removed from the actual trading history of these assets,” it said.

        And this is a report from a crypto website with a vested interest in pretending crypto has uses.

        • CaptainSpaceman@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Its hard to be definitive, especially from one data point, but theres no doubt that lots of NFTs are just copycats trying to ride the coattails of other succesful projects, and end up flooding the market with garbage.

          But that doesnt mean all projects are garbage, nor that the tech is bad or unutilized.

          I had a feeling id get flamed by even mentioning NFTs, so im not surprised a the downvotes or derision. Anyways, have a good one 😃