Hackers steal NFTs worth millions. In other news, NFTs worth millions.
theblock.co
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.
No one is gonna buy any NFTs for millions lmao
As crazy as it sounds, some people do.
They did. For like a week last year. Then everyone realized it was a scam.
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.
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.
Beeple made a lot
He was the first big one I remember. When it still had an air of legitimacy.
And, sadly, that has led to his posting a lot less content. But I can't say I blame him.
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.
That's not really what happened. Some people who had invested in companies that would make money if NFTs went up in value chummed the waters by buying NFTs for huge amounts, convincing a lot of people that NFTs were going to be great investments. Then celebrities with an interest in the scheme pumped up the value too.
That convinced a lot of idiots to "invest" in NFTs, then eventually the bottom fell out of the market.
As for artists, some made some money, but most of the money went into shit like "bored apes" which were algorithmically generated.
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?
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.
That's why I feel like he just trolled all the buyers of his NFTs.
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.
Tickets, yes, door keys, no.
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?
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.
The chain would be used to establish who owns the home.
That sounds more like a land registry system, than a key.
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.
Just like the NFTs in the article! Great idea
Lol
How exactly would that work? Keep in mind that the blockchain is by necessity not secret.
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
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.
Fair enough. I will say that I am not well enough versed in the topic to discuss it in depth.
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.
Blockchain in general is a solution looking for a problem. Blockchain is just a terrible database that burns mountains of coal. In almost every case when someone suggests using blockchain for something, the simpler solution is to just use a standard database.
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.
Which means that sovereign states would have to agree to no longer be the authority of who owned property, instead they'd just have to hand over all that authority to some distributed database. What's in it for them? What's in it for the people?
If the authority on who owns a home is a blockchain, then what happens if someone shows up at the police station, bruised and bleeding, and claims that they were tortured until they agreed to sign over the deed to their house. In the real world, the police (or at least the courts) would have authority over that deal, and if their investigation proved that someone was in fact tortured, it would mean it's not a legitimate sale, and the ownership reverts to the original person. But, if "blockchain", the police and courts have no authority. What's on the blockchain is law.
Well, just because a company holds the ledger of who owns what doesn't make it impossible to police, governments order companies to do stuff all the time, that wouldn't stop, but it would make it more difficult to police.
Ok, so who's the government going to order to change the blockchain?
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
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?
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.
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".
Im sure you dont keep up, but NFT market cap still pretty big rn at 5.5bn
I think of it like timeshare values. They’re really high …. Until you try to find someone who will actually buy it
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.
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.
What is a supposed fact without a source?
I too can make up facts like that.
The vast majority of NFTs are worthless now
And this is a report from a crypto website with a vested interest in pretending crypto has uses.
It’s like people who think their Beanie babies are still priceless.
Those are the transactions that are actually happening.
I'm sure there are lots of transactions that aren't happening because people have given up, and decided that a 99.9% loss in value is basically a 100% loss in value, so they've just walked away.
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 😃
Nah, that is what the NFT owners want the greater fools to believe it is worth.
It's a great way to launder money.
Better than the current money laundering techniques? Using art appraisals to inflate assets and move dirty money, or straight up using banks like Deutsche or Credit Suisse (RIP) to move dirty money?
The smart criminal understands the value of diversity.
I mean yeah, it’s better to launder money using a difficult to trace digital ledger. But no, the things you mentioned won’t go away, because there’s also money in the laundering, and double dipping is the name of the game
Mmm, considering NFTs are all on transparent blockchains, I don't know that I would choose that particular method to accomplish that.
The transparency is the feature that makes it great. I can buy drugs or whatever, and exchange you buy an NFT from me of equal value. Now when the bank comes and says “where did this >$15k transaction come from?” I can point to the blockchain and say that I sold my fancy monkey pic.
This has been a thing in the physical art world for a while, https://complyadvantage.com/insights/art-money-laundering/, this just made it easier.
Yeah, I know it's happened for a while, but my big question would be why are you having to put your money back in the bank instead of leaving it on a blockchain such as Monero. The dollar is about the biggest scam around along with all other government fiat currencies.
Because sometimes even criminals need to buy things that aren’t illegal, I guess. And the legitimate people who have those things don’t want to play games dealing with fake internet money.
If I want to buy a jetski, the place I buy it from isn’t going to take crypto because the people that sell the parts for it don’t take crypto and the people who build it can’t pay for food in crypto.
Crypto is only useful for rug pull scams, money laundering, and black-market transactions. It’s real innovation is undoing centuries of banking regulations so that people can learn the hard way why all those regulations exist.
Money has value basically because people need to pay taxes. The shop owner sells things for Euros or USD partially because eventually at the end of the year they need to turn over Euros or USD to the government as taxes. If they sold things for bitcoins, they'd eventually have to convert those bitcoins to USD to pay taxes.
Other than speculation, the only reason bitcoin has any value is that sometimes people need to pay ransomware ransoms. That means they need to buy bitcoin somehow. And, even the criminals who receive that bitcoin will launder it and change it back into real assets because it's not useful to them as bitcoin. Eliminate ransomware and suddenly the only value for bitcoin is people who hold it hoping there's a greater fool out there who will buy it from them for more than they paid.
For now, sure. However, i will say that i have been buying food woth crypto for over a year now and havent starved yet. And if i wanted a jetski and wanted to pay in crypto i could do so. Fundamentally, crypto and banking are two totally different things because with a bank somebody holds your money. With crypto, you hold your money.
You own a cryptographic key that a bunch of strangers have decided points to a spot on a ledger. These strangers have no legal connection to you, but things have been working out pretty well so far because your incentives align.
As a bunch of Ledger owners are finding out, there are reasons for FDIC insurance of banks and that reason is so that people don’t have to be exposed to the dangers of storing all their money under their mattresses. Everyone recommends getting your crypto into a hardwallet, but what happens when a Ledger update bricks it? Or the company decides to backdoor it to escrow your “private” keys? And what can you do with those hardwallet funds besides HODL? Can you imagine if every time you wanted to spend part of your dirty fiat savings, you had to expose all of it to danger to do so?
The FDIC is a scam. If JPMorgan or Wells Fargo failed they would not have enough to cover the loss. In fact they only hold ~2% of what they insure which would leave 98% of people with nothing. The only reason the FDIC is not bankrupt is because a cascade of banks have not failed all at once
The recent incident was a software supply chain attack. I am not aware of a bricked update but thats not saying much since i dont follow them closely
You lose all trust in them as you should and no longer use their products.
That is the point of a hardware wallet to hold your funds securely until you want to use them.
Your hardware wallet acts as savings and use a hot wallet as a spend account with less money in it.
I’m just saying what I saw over at https://old.reddit.com/r/ledgerwallet/search?q=Lost+my+btc+upgrade&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all
Obviously I haven’t checked up on all of those, but it does seem to happen a bit. I’m not sure how frequently would be considered okay here, but that’s the sort of thing that shouldn’t happen.
Yeah, it should not occur. I have never used one, so do not know exactly how it works. But I have not lost any crypto in the 10 years I have been using crypto.
The exchanges are basically cryptos banks. They hold your money, not you.
And they are much more prone to scamming you than any bank ever could.
They don't hold my money. I use them as they are supposed to be used. I get in, exchange my crypto, and then immediately withdraw it. They are not meant to hold your money. And true crypto people don't let them hold their money.
Because my mortgage company, supermarket and power company only take real money.
The mortgage I could see being a problem. As for groceries and power, I can pay for those with crypto.
If you really believe crypto is the future, you would have converted all your money to the blockchain.
Since you say you can buy everything with it.
Oh, but i have. Or >95% anyway. I keep a few dollars around in case i need them.
Good and services are still primarily purchased with fiat in most of the world. You need to be able to actually use it for it to be useful, so whether or not blockchain is theoretically better doesn't matter there if there isn't wide enough adoption.
True, thanks to the internet if the good is not immediately available in my local area for crypto i can order it online and have it delivered. Depending on exactly what the service is makes that an option too.
Must be nice to be rich.
Plenty of us can't afford to order groceries to be delivered and Aldi sure doesn't accept Bitcoin.
Ever heard of instacart? They dont accept crypto, but you can buy their giftcards with crypto, order your aldi groceries, and go pick them up. Thats what i do anyway
And they charge a fee for it. Which is nice if you can afford it.
Not for pickup, they don't.
Hahahahahahaha!
I'm being serious when I say this: you don't understand what you're talking about. I know that's dismissive, and I'm sorry.
*did
wouldn't the above article still point out that people do?
Nope!
Those who buy art and pack it in a safe until it's worth more?
Im glad that doesn't work as well in digital.
Seth Green has entered the chat
They're priced like police drug busts.
People buy them for millions or their value would not be in the millions
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?
I'll get my friend to buy it from me for millions, then he can give the money back to me and when it sells again, we can split the profit. It's win-win!
This seems like kind of a meaningless distinction when the comment was speaking about the relative value of these. How some pays is irrelevant.
This feels like you're trying to shit on them so just refuse to believe that the concept of value has any meaning. Things are worth whatever someone will pay for them.
That doesn't make the people willing to pay for it smart.
I'm sorry it feels that way, that's not my intention.
I think it's a meaningful distinction because my understanding is that many large matter holders are early adopters who acquired coins at at basement prices that them became highly valued when crypto took off. These people, as I understand it, have a different spending pattern than we associate with conventional wealth. They may shuffle their coins between digital assets with limited conversion into real world good and services, because inside the block chain they're billionaires, but if they tried to buy a house or a vacation they're forced to find buyers at prices that are reflective of the value among crypto holders, but not nearly as high to those outside the system who they'd need to complete cash transactions.
The distinction isn't meaningless, it's actually vitally important. The thing is, we've been here before, hundreds if not thousands of times, with the stock market and other speculative bubbles. Once a big enough entity decides to cut their losses and bail with whatever they can get, all that "value" disappears and there's no inherent value of the asset itself to fall back on. So it has been with other crypto crashes in the past few years.
Granted, this is generally true of fiat as well, we just have a lot more people and hopefully some safeguards and, vitally, an active economy holding up that value.
All art is inherently without value, and it's value is entirely speculative.
I think NFTs are dumb as fuck, but they're worth what people will pay for them. Same shit with tulips in Denmark famously spiking - bubble or not, things are literally worth what someone will pay
No
That is literally what the concept of value is.
No, and that is exactly the problem.
They artificially inflate the price to make it seem more worth than it actually is.
It is a type of fraud
Things are worth what people will pay. People pay out the nose for diamonds and they are just shiny rocks and not particularly rare.
Sounds like a great way to make an insurance claim on a bunch of NFTs worth "millions" that you could not convince anyone to buy.
What insurance company is dumb enough to insure NFTs?
Ones that think they can't be stolen
You can in fact insure things that it is possible to steal. Cars, bikes, household posessions, you name it. It's quite common.
If the insurance company thinks the nft can't be stolen, it's money for no risk. That's why they would easily accept insuring an nft.
I think you misunderstood my comment.
In a highly simplified way: total risk of insuring from theft is roughly other-risks * theft-risk, so if theft risk is 0, it means that other risks, such as insanelly high risks in asset valuation are irrelevant to the total risk which will always end up as 0.
So it makes sense that being paid to insure that which cannot be stollen against theft is risk-free money quite independently of all else. (Of curse, if something has a non-zero probability - even if tiny - of being stolen none of that holds)
I think that's the whole humourous point the previous poster was making: that which NFT promoters kept on telling us guarantees unique ownership which cannot be taken by others (and hence cannot be stollen) turns out that it can.
Ones that understand the Internet and/or technology. And believe the "secure" hype.
I'd say more likely to be able to declare a capital loss on taxes.
Can I carry that loss over for the next... 100 years or so?
Accurate headline:
Millions of dollars lost as NFTs worth a total of $0 stolen
Let me get this straight, you can steal an nft but you can't own an nft?
You wouldn't download an NFT...
right clicks
No! I forbid it!
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?
I mean low key it's supposed to be a receipt that can't be copied. The receipt being slapped onto an image is what most associated with NFTs but it's more just like a code that provides proof of purchase/ownership because you can trace the history on the block chain
Except more like a star registry because there's nothing to say you actually own the image. Other people on other blockchains might also claim that they own the image. Other people on the same blockchain might also claim the exact same image, just at a different URL.
It's a receipt with a link to an image. The image is entirely unrelated to the NFT outside of the link that's embedded into the NFT. It's kinda like how you can embed an image from one website onto another separate unrelated website
The rub here being that you really only own the receipt, it doesn't confer any legal rights or ensure exclusivity of the content it's attached to. I get why people uninterested in being part of a PNG are excited about them, but I haven't personally seen a use case for them that isn't exploitable or already solved by current technology.
Back with GameStop the hope was the ability to sell/trade digital content like games. Because you actually own the digital content and the proof of purchase, closest to digital ownership I've seen.
PlayStation out here taking games after people bought them and shit is a strong reason for NFTs imo
How would NFTs make any difference for Sony losing rights to a game and removing it from their servers? They still know who purchased it from their own records but still removed access entirely.
That's not what's being said here. Not Sony losing rights to a game, just entirely being unable to provide proof of ownership on digital content.
I've had Microsoft do this to me for Minecraft during their transition to owning it where they claimed I didn't own the game. I had to legitimately email them a picture of a receipt I owned to get my account back. Had I not had that receipt I'd not have the game.
I've never had Sony do this but I hear they've done this exact thing to people in other ways usually DLCs.
With NFTs there's a third party undeniable proof of purchase and ownership. It takes that whole side away from the distributor giving power to the consumer.
In a better world I could then sell that NFT and proof of purchase and the company would honor it for the person I sold it to allowing for the resale of digital content.
It seems like this would solve the wrong problem with digital ownership. Even now the problem is not how to prove it, the problem is that you have to prove, and also that it's not ownership
You very much do own an NFT you purchase, what you don't own is the asset the NFT represents (the shitty RNG generated monkey for example).
I never had a jpeg stolen from me.
What a time to be alive.
No no, they stole the link to a jpeg, careful you will make them angry
Here, take my link to get a feeling
https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/db03eae9-a3a9-42df-8cf2-f2aa8bfa2d95.webp
That's not just a feeling, that's something more.
You better quit yapping before I steal more of your bytes pal, it'll be the biggest regret of your life
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!
I guess the millions are in the transaction fees
"Potential losses". I get the feeling that NFT owners got bit by the same bug that bit RIAA executives.
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."
I also like the "10 Kilos of product was taken off of the street" which means like 12 grams of weed was turned into brownies
4,000 pounds of weed removed from a single basement greenhouse
How do you steal a hyperlink to a jpeg
"Do I look like i know what an NFT is?
I just want a picture of some gaht dang shitposts."
And why should any sane person care if you did?
It's a digital file. Copies are exactly the same as the original.
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.
ITT: a handful of people starting to sweat about their NFT retirement strategy
I'm having difficulty with the word "worth". It appears to be doing an awful lot of heavy lifting
Just because the suckers that bought them paid millions doesn't mean that the NFTs are worth millions.
I'm worth millions, but I'm paid jack shit :(
…Been a minute since I’ve seen this fark headline meme.
Must be a real old-head if you know what fark is. ^me^ ^too^
Haha I came here just to mention this sounded straight out of Fark. Also, your dog wants steak.
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.
Well, digital trading card games do exist of course, but often you can't even trade cards. And much less sell them for real money. With an NFT in theory you could do what you want with the card, like give it to your buddy for 10 bucks and you don't even have to use the game client for it.
The problem here is that the card itself is in the game code, so you can freely move ownership, but the game could just remove the card and make your NFT worthless.
Introducing Monero. You're welcome.
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
Yeah the contract is how a few exchanges got stolen from in recent years
There were sufficiently stupid people to pay money for NFTs. They will sufficiently stupid people around to pay the ransom.
I'm just here for the Fark style headline. Well played!
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.
Can't even read the website, as the third modal, the newsletter modal, refuses to close. Yeesh.
Does this post give anyone farker vibes?
The platform behind the smart contract has to issue a new smart contract and migrate people to it.