Buyers of Bored Ape NFTs sue after digital apes turn out to be bad investment
arstechnica.com
Lawsuit: Sotheby’s $24M sale to FTX gave Bored Ape NFTs “an air of legitimacy.”…

The Sotheby’s auction house has been named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by investors who regret buying Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs that sold for highly inflated prices during the NFT craze in 2021.

  • FrankFrankson@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    1 year ago

    You are missing my point. It’s more like a pile of photos. If some artist took a picture and printed a shit ton of copies of it and sold those but signed one of them the one they signed might hold more value to collectors. That is what an NFT is like, the single copy of the photo that is signed. It’s not some amazing ground breaking thing that makes something so amazingly unique that nothing else compares to it… it’s just like a signature on a photograph.

    I also never said anything about ownership of the image. A signature doesn’t imply that either.

    • ActionHank@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      91·
      1 year ago

      Its not though, the signature and the digital art are stored separately. Their association only exists within a controlled a system. So that, you don’t actually have a signature attached to art, you have a signature associated with art, and only when viewed through a website such as OpenSea. You’re not investing in the infallibility of math. Your “investing” in some joker with an httpd server, who pointed two records at each-other in a database, the same way any other database works. Imagine someone giving you a number, and saying somewhere there’s some art that this number means you own. You can check to see what art you own, only by plugging your number into my software… that’s what you’ve purchased.

      • FrankFrankson@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        1 year ago

        Its not though, the signature and the digital art are stored separately.

        They don’t have to be. That is just how it was done to sell thousands of stupid pictures of Apes, Cats, more apes and whatever else stupid crap they made thousands of iterations of.

    • BreadstickNinja@lemmy.worldEnglish
      62·
      1 year ago

      I’m not missing your point, I just disagree with it. A signed print is physically distinct from a copy. If an artist personally spent extra time with a particular piece to sign it, adding another personal touch on their creation, I would think that legitimately adds value.

      An NFT does not do that. All an NFT does is cause somebody’s GPU to spin up and generate carbon emissions associated with the same literal string of zeros and ones that accompanies every other copy of the print. It doesn’t represent any additional attention on the part of the creator. It’s just a substandard copy that comes with excess waste.

      • FrankFrankson@lemmy.worldEnglish
        32·
        1 year ago

        All an NFT does is cause somebody’s GPU to spin up and generate carbon emissions associated with the same literal string of zeros and ones that accompanies every other copy of the print. It doesn’t represent any additional attention on the part of the creator. It’s just a substandard copy that comes with excess waste.

        None of that is true. You don’t need a GPU to spin up to do anything. You are conflating mining crypto currency with NFTs. A NFT is just a cryptographic signature kept on some sort of blockchain that is associated with an image or file or unique pointer. You can use a preexisting blockchain or even make your own. Blockchains don’t have to be mineable and blockchains themselves are actually a good idea… mineable crypto currency is just a really shitty use case for them. It has nothing to do with mining and is just another form of cryptographic signature.

        Edit: The fact that you think a physical signature has value while a unique digital signature (yes… the signature is unique) has none is personal preference and once again not the point I am making. I am saying it is a type of signature and some collectors might find value in it.