17 votes

People are paying millions of dollars for digital pictures of rocks

26 comments

  1. [14]
    Seven
    Link
    I don't know how people can see this and not think that crypto is a Ponzi scheme.

    I don't know how people can see this and not think that crypto is a Ponzi scheme.

    14 votes
    1. [13]
      skybrian
      Link Parent
      It’s more like a pump-and-dump. But the people doing this know roughly what they’re getting into, so you could think of it more like a gambling game.

      It’s more like a pump-and-dump. But the people doing this know roughly what they’re getting into, so you could think of it more like a gambling game.

      9 votes
      1. [12]
        Seven
        Link Parent
        NFTs in particular seem to be more of a pump-and-dump than regular crypto though. Like a few rich people using it to make money and artists all getting screwed over afterwards.

        NFTs in particular seem to be more of a pump-and-dump than regular crypto though. Like a few rich people using it to make money and artists all getting screwed over afterwards.

        9 votes
        1. [11]
          Wolf
          Link Parent
          Artists have the most low-risk investment in the space,. They only have to risk their labor, which is being more highly valued in the NFT space than anywhere else. They also get 5% - 10% royalties...

          Artists have the most low-risk investment in the space,. They only have to risk their labor, which is being more highly valued in the NFT space than anywhere else. They also get 5% - 10% royalties from every sale. So whether it pumps or it dumps, artists make money on work that would have been sitting on their Instagram for free anyway.

          I am not advocating for NFTs or crypto, but artists in the space are doing really well. Even if they don't want to hold on to crypto, they can immediately transfer and sell it. The only people getting screwed are late buyers.

          I should disclose I have skin in the game, and I actively speculate with NFTs and other cryptocurrencies.

          7 votes
          1. [8]
            Seven
            Link Parent
            That is simply not true. Due to the fees involved, over 1 in 3 NFTs lose money for the artist. It's simply not good for artists compared to other alternatives. That is, unless you count every...

            Artists have the most low-risk investment in the space

            That is simply not true. Due to the fees involved, over 1 in 3 NFTs lose money for the artist. It's simply not good for artists compared to other alternatives.

            The only people getting screwed are late buyers.

            That is, unless you count every other person on this planet impacted by crypto's climate destruction. Frankly, it's morally unconscionable.

            I should disclose I have skin in the game, and I actively speculate with NFTs and other cryptocurrencies.

            While I appreciate your disclosure, this type of comment is so common that it's practically a meme at this point. Because people who are involved with crypto make more money the more people are involved, it works like a pyramid scheme in that you have an active incentive to sell the idea of crypto and NFTs as well as lie and exaggerate. I haven't seen anyone who defends crypto who doesn't have a financial stake in it.

            9 votes
            1. [3]
              Greg
              Link Parent
              That goes both ways - anyone with a legitimate belief in crypto, especially with enough motivation to dive into discussions about it, will likely be holding some because of that belief. I'd be a...

              Because people who are involved with crypto make more money the more people are involved, it works like a pyramid scheme in that you have an active incentive to sell the idea of crypto and NFTs as well as lie and exaggerate. I haven't seen anyone who defends crypto who doesn't have a financial stake in it.

              That goes both ways - anyone with a legitimate belief in crypto, especially with enough motivation to dive into discussions about it, will likely be holding some because of that belief. I'd be a little suspicious of someone claiming a favourable view who hadn't put their money where their mouth was.

              4 votes
              1. [2]
                Seven
                Link Parent
                That's certainly true, but you can see how I can't really trust you to be an impartial actor in these kinds of discussions then, right?

                That's certainly true, but you can see how I can't really trust you to be an impartial actor in these kinds of discussions then, right?

                2 votes
                1. Greg
                  Link Parent
                  For sure - it's quite reasonable to consider people's biases, I just don't think it's fair to say they're necessarily incentivised to lie or exaggerate. They may not be impartial, but they can...

                  For sure - it's quite reasonable to consider people's biases, I just don't think it's fair to say they're necessarily incentivised to lie or exaggerate. They may not be impartial, but they can quite easily still be truthful and sincere.

                  2 votes
            2. [3]
              skybrian
              Link Parent
              After following your link and skimming a bit, it appears that fees for the artist are about $300 or so and expected profits are… unclear. As with all art, I expect that how much money you make...

              After following your link and skimming a bit, it appears that fees for the artist are about $300 or so and expected profits are… unclear. As with all art, I expect that how much money you make depends on how popular you are and a bit of luck. Many artistic ventures are risky and potentially money-losing if your art doesn’t sell.

              Making money on 2 of 3 sales seems like pretty good odds if that’s what you actually get, since profitable sales can make up for the losses.

              3 votes
              1. [2]
                Seven
                Link Parent
                That's true, but most other artistic ventures don't involve burning a mile of the Amazon rainforest to engage with. I just don't see the advantage that NFTs give compared to any other type of art...

                Many artistic ventures are risky and potentially money-losing if your art doesn’t sell.

                That's true, but most other artistic ventures don't involve burning a mile of the Amazon rainforest to engage with. I just don't see the advantage that NFTs give compared to any other type of art sales.

                5 votes
                1. skybrian
                  (edited )
                  Link Parent
                  Umm, let's use real units here. Looks like carbon emissions are in metric tons and a coast-to-coast plane ticket in the US is about 1.4 tons. (1400 kilograms). And it looks like an ethereum...

                  Umm, let's use real units here. Looks like carbon emissions are in metric tons and a coast-to-coast plane ticket in the US is about 1.4 tons. (1400 kilograms).

                  And it looks like an ethereum transaction's emissions are about 70 kilograms. That's very high for a purely electronic transaction and they do add up. I've been very critical of cryptocurrencies for this, because they should be much cheaper.

                  But in perspective, it's still quite low compared to many real-world things commonly done by artists. I wonder what the emissions are of your average concert or art opening?

                  (My numbers may be off, and I don't know how many transactions a typical NFT has. Maybe someone can do a better comparison?)

                  5 votes
            3. Wolf
              (edited )
              Link Parent
              This is true only if you don't pick the right platform. Opensea is the largest NFT platform and it only has a one-time set up fee, which you can make a profit on if you sell for $100. I don't why...

              That is simply not true. Due to the fees involved, over 1 in 3 NFTs lose money for the artist. It's simply not good for artists compared to other alternatives.

              This is true only if you don't pick the right platform. Opensea is the largest NFT platform and it only has a one-time set up fee, which you can make a profit on if you sell for $100. I don't why a one-time setup fee of around $75 would be so unreasonable when you have a chance to actually sell your art. It's not like there's other places for artists to sell their art that are more likely to give them positive returns. You can check fee breakdown by the same author here. I definitely jumped the gun when I said it's entirely risk-free. I think a better description would be that it has a much better risk-reward ratio than any other avenue most artists have. There's some risk here, but it can be managed with basic research.

              That is, unless you count every other person on this planet impacted by crypto's climate destruction. Frankly, it's morally unconscionable.

              Won't disagree with you there. It is demonstrably bad for the environment.

              I haven't seen anyone who defends crypto who doesn't have a financial stake in it.

              Wouldn't anyone who believes in their own defense of crypto have a financial stake in crypto? Why would you believe something is a promising piece of technology without at least having a small stake in it? There's only a small chance of that happening.

          2. [2]
            teaearlgraycold
            Link Parent
            I’m working on an NFT of my own. It could be an easy $200,000.

            I’m working on an NFT of my own. It could be an easy $200,000.

            2 votes
            1. Wolf
              Link Parent
              Good luck! I hope it works out for you.

              Good luck! I hope it works out for you.

  2. [6]
    rogue_cricket
    Link
    The whole NFT phenomenon reminds me of the "adoptables" art communities... I first saw them almost two decades ago, people would pay (real or virtual) currency to get "ownership" of a virtual...

    The whole NFT phenomenon reminds me of the "adoptables" art communities... I first saw them almost two decades ago, people would pay (real or virtual) currency to get "ownership" of a virtual "pet" or character. I was never into them personally, but they were popular with tween girls at the time. Apparently now they're more of a furry thing.

    An artist would invent some kind of creature and give relative rarities of different patterns or features and then create a system wherein you adopt one. You could sometimes bid to commission a custom one, but just as often you'd get one as they were created and put on sale like buying it off a shelf. But it's not just the art, it's like... the right to roleplay with it, trade it, even to commission other art featuring it... basically to make it "yours". Of course without involving NFTs the only thing that really verifies whether the creature "belongs" to you for sharing/trading/role playing would be group consensus.

    Honestly all this just strikes me as grown men speculating (or money laundering) with million-dollar dollies. At least with adoptables the art had to be good!

    11 votes
    1. [3]
      GreaterPorpoise
      (edited )
      Link Parent
      Hi, just to chime here with some belated context (or more like a really deep dive tangent) as a former tween who did dabble in adoptables in the 2010s: The price paid for ownership of an adoptable...
      • Exemplary

      Hi, just to chime here with some belated context (or more like a really deep dive tangent) as a former tween who did dabble in adoptables in the 2010s:

      The price paid for ownership of an adoptable is a form of commission! People paid for an existing or custom character design and the original artist is appropriately compensated and credited for their design work. The roleplaying and whatnot may seem like weird "rights" to sell when it's all virtual but the commission establishes the credit and value from the start while allowing the buyer to continue the chain of creativity freely with whomever they want.

      And yea, it's an honour system. Nothing will actually stop people from reuploading or copying the design closely. And people did exactly that, a LOT and still do because the impact on the original artist is invisible and if the artist even finds out, their options are limited, reliant on the poster or site admin's empathy. (The artist will almost never take any legal copyright action either, unlike Disney or other media companies through Youtube.) It's an unfortunate side effect of technology, a prevailing belief that a downloadable jpg is probably public domain made by Anonymous.

      And it's impactful because in these communities, uncredited art and art labour being massively undervalued (especially by the artists themselves) were and still are huge problems. Firstly, proper attribution means that audiences can find the artist. Audience matters to gaining fans and gaining paying fans matters to paying bills and landing steady gigs with benefits.

      Secondly, when I was in the scene, a lot of amateur (edit: actually, amateur art becomes professional when people pay for it but anyway) art was priced in essentially cents, if it wasn't free. Dollars if you were confident and popular enough. People did it for fun and for the exposure. Maybe that's fine when you're a kid with free time and MS Paint and you're just drawing for your internet friends for shits and giggles. But then you the kid artist, grow up believing that art is supposed to be cheap, even after 10-20 years of drawing experience. I saw an advice post just the other day, from older creatives to younger ones with a pricing formula:

      cost of materials/tools + [hours of labour x minimum wage, at least].

      Minimum wage, because so many are charging less and they're afraid to challenge it. Compare that to what Photoshop costs now, a standard professional artist's tool (albeit now with many free or cheap alternatives). Because Adobe has the opposite problem in pricing themselves.

      I don't know about adoptables specifically anymore but character art and design commissions are an ongoing practice and livelihood, for many freelance and part-time digital artists. Even full-time professional animators, designers and digital artists in established media or gaming companies will struggle with the crunch of deadlines and projects, not only or directly because of this but I think at least in a small part because the time/labour that goes into their work is culturally undervalued. Not to mention carpal tunnel in a field where your hands are your career.

      Now, I understand OP's comparison wasn't implying this at all and I'm super digressing a lot around the topic but I just want this clear in good faith for a publicly viewable discussion: outside of the context of NFTs, paying artists for their digital work, even a purple sparkledog drawn up by a 13-year-old on MS Paint without anybody asking them to, is not in itself a scam if the buyer or market values the art and the labour and experience that went into it.

      For the NFTs, I suspect it's not so much the subjective "art" part as it is the rampant speculation part. Do they actually value what they are receiving or are they paying for hope? And what happens if they run out of hope? I don't know enough to comment beyond that.

      I'll disclose that I have no crypto investments at all but I did once have a deviantArt account and still have a drawing tablet. Thanks for bearing through my impassioned rant.

      10 votes
      1. [2]
        rogue_cricket
        (edited )
        Link Parent
        Thanks for the further information! I was always tangential to this thing... I just knew they existed, and I hope it didn't come through that I was necessarily denigrating the work involved in the...

        Thanks for the further information! I was always tangential to this thing... I just knew they existed, and I hope it didn't come through that I was necessarily denigrating the work involved in the initial creation of these pieces! Just a small musing on how (A) furries did it first and (B) the abstractness of the value.

        Getting a commission and paying for custom art is one thing - that's paying for concrete time and expertise - directly, paying for generative and creative labour. But as far as I understand it there are sometimes even secondary markets for adoptables as there are with these NFTs, so the values of these "used" adoptables and "off-the-shelf" adoptables are more interesting to me in terms of comparisons with NFT art. It's this secondary market that raises some interesting questions about the idea of the consensus of "ownership" being part of the value, when the thing being "owned" is an infinitely reproducible digital picture that anyone can look at.

        6 votes
        1. GreaterPorpoise
          Link Parent
          Not denigrating at all, my initial reaction was only that I wanted to supplement your perspective because I wasn't sure anybody else would've been able to. I was actually very surprised to see...

          Not denigrating at all, my initial reaction was only that I wanted to supplement your perspective because I wasn't sure anybody else would've been able to. I was actually very surprised to see adoptables mentioned as I associate them with a very specific internet demographic I didn't expect to find on Tildes but seeing as we're both here, it's a pleasant surprise.

          This is where I admit the limits of my informed opinion because I didn't actually know adoptables could be resold. So I went to read up what I could about it.

          From what I can tell, common terms for reselling seems to be proper attribution and not selling for a profit (if the adoptable hasn't been changed in a way to add value), which makes me think it's a clause meant to allow people the freedom to "lose interest" in their purchase and recuperate the cost, while allowing some one else to take the creative reins and rights. All again with the assumption that rights are respected.

          Pardon the tangent but it reminds me a little bit of the open source code model, which aims to promote transparency and modification/redistribution, so people can collaborate and improve on the code. The main difference being that artists and resellers seem to prefer being compensated (though if I understand rightly, open source code doesn't automatically mean the end product is free either). And the common thread being that open source developers and artists choose to do this, over keeping their work to themselves or bound to a single fixed private buyer's specifications, because they see the benefits of "passing on the torch" to others in their community. Your code may be suited to you but some one else might use it to meet their own needs. You may not use the adoptable but some one else might do something brilliant with it. So not just assuming the community acknowledges the original rights but giving that good faith back to others.

          And I think that is partially how you maintain the value of the creative rights. If you were stuck with creative rights that you no longer want to exercise, they are then worthless to you and the art itself just sits to "rot" because of the consensus that nobody else will try to claim and modify it when it's still yours. So in that sense, perhaps there is some inherent value speculation there because it's about the added value that a buyer/re-buyer intends to or believes they can achieve when they have the creative rights to the character design. It's a material, an ingredient for non-financial gain (entertainment, roleplay, storytelling, etc), as much as it is a good/commodity to be owned or resold. Once you get or make something from the adoptable, be it a storytelling experience, additional drawings of the same design, a roleplay or social interaction based on your ownership, then you have already gotten additional value from the adoptable, at least in your own eyes.

          Could that be the key difference separating adoptables from NFT art? Or a key similarity? Are bragging rights equivalent to the creative rights of an adoptable?

          I'm not a financial analyst by any means (though I did study it some as part of accounting) but this has been an absolutely fascinating discussion over a comparison I never imagined making before in my life until now. Art and capitalism, always fun to watch when they mix.

          5 votes
    2. Seven
      Link Parent
      At least with adoptables, they usually come with reference sheets that make it really easy to commission more art of them, and most importantly, you don't have to destroy the planet to buy them.

      At least with adoptables, they usually come with reference sheets that make it really easy to commission more art of them, and most importantly, you don't have to destroy the planet to buy them.

      8 votes
    3. Wolf
      Link Parent
      To be fair, it's the ridiculous stories like EtherRocks that get the most traction from media, but that's not the whole picture. Yeah, most of the money is focused on speculating on this kind of...

      To be fair, it's the ridiculous stories like EtherRocks that get the most traction from media, but that's not the whole picture. Yeah, most of the money is focused on speculating on this kind of low-effort, only meme-value type of projects, but there's a lot of money being thrown at genuine artists. I just wanted to clarify that EtherRocks aren't the whole picture, even if it is a large part of it (for now).

      I should disclose I have skin in the game, and I actively speculate with NFTs and other cryptocurrencies.

      1 vote
  3. [2]
    balooga
    Link
    It's flabbergastingly stupid. I can't imagine people legitimately valuing these NFTs so high... so if we rule that out, it must be money laundering, right?

    It's flabbergastingly stupid. I can't imagine people legitimately valuing these NFTs so high... so if we rule that out, it must be money laundering, right?

    7 votes
    1. imperialismus
      Link Parent
      Or just plain old speculation. Doesn't matter if the price crashes next week if you sell at a profit on Friday...

      Or just plain old speculation. Doesn't matter if the price crashes next week if you sell at a profit on Friday...

      11 votes
  4. HotPants
    Link

    Clipart of a rock just sold for 400 ether, or about $1.3 million, late Monday afternoon.

    1 vote
  5. [3]
    HotPants
    Link
    This 12-year-old coder is set to earn over $400,000 after about 2 months selling NFTs
    1 vote
    1. [2]
      teaearlgraycold
      Link Parent
      Dude’s figured out where the easy money is.

      Dude’s figured out where the easy money is.

      1. HotPants
        Link Parent
        I wonder if maybe the dude's father figured out where the money is.

        I wonder if maybe the dude's father figured out where the money is.

        2 votes