[BuyMyBitcoins]

I tend to view the NFT craze as just that, a craze. It started as a massive and intriguing stunt that spread far and wide because of how absurd it all seems. It’s the perfect storm of “I don’t get this at all” combined with “you just don’t understand how revolutionary this is”. You also have the appeal of “why don’t I just make a few of these NFT things and make some money too?”

Additionally, I’ve read that the supposed $69 million dollars worth of ethereum used to purchase that famous NFT isn’t actually a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain. So there’s a good chance this whole thing was a farce to jumpstart interest in the NFT market itself.

Ultimately a few whales, famous people, and early adopters have already made out like bandits while the vast majority of people are barely going to make any money in the NFT market and it will sizzle out rapidly.

[m12k]

You're missing an important use case here: Money laundry. While regular cryptocurrency is quite useful for this, it comes with the drawback of having a well-defined market value at any given point in time, making it harder to cook the books since there is some "ground truth" to get audited against. NFTs don't have that limitation - the price at any moment can be as high or as low as you need it to be to shift any amount of money, instantly, from anywhere in the world to anywhere else in the world. Regular art has historically been used for this too, as has high-end real estate (basically anything where rich "eccentrics" can pay whatever they want for something), but these come with the hassle of needing to also move a physical good, sign deeds, set up companies - plus there is a limited supply of these, limiting the bandwidth with which you can shift money around. NFTs overcome all these limitations, it's an entirely digital, global, endless supply of goods with no fixed marked value and a plausible cover story of why it's worth millions. If you're in charge of bookkeeping at a cartel, NFTs are probably the most exciting thing that has happened this decade if not longer.

[Tarsul]

I have no problem believing this. Nonetheless, I'd like to see a good hypothetical example to really understand how it would work. Would the seller have to be in on the deal? Probably, or not?

[cmeacham98]

One hypothetical where the seller _is_ in on the deal:

Let's say I want to send you money for something illegal. You, however, don't want the government getting suspicious about how you're spending $large_amount on $small_salary.

I could gift you the money, but if we don't have an existing relationship or reason to do so that looks mighty suspicious, and additionally gift tax can end up being more than income tax.

The next option is for me to "buy" something from you. This needs to be something you can obtain for a low price but sell for a high price. You could sell me a loaf of bread for $1million, but that's going to look equally (if not more) suspicious than the gift.

Enter art: Art can be produced for extremely low cost, but sold at massive markups (and often is so). The value of art is almost entirely subjective (i.e. "what is someone willing to pay for this"), so unlike with a piece of bread it's not obvious that I'm paying for something I consider near worthless. Each piece of original artwork is unique, so there's no market to prove that nobody else would be willing to pay such a sum for your art.

Therefore, with art you can receive the money, pay taxes on it, and claim to the government it's totally legit. NFTs have similar properties to art: they're unique, can be minted at very low cost, people are willing to pay large sums for them, and nobody really has any way of determining their "true" value.

[BoiledCabbage]

Yup, that's NFTs in a nutshell.

And there is almost certainly a large real world contingent salivating at the thought that they can soon launder huge amounts of money, based on infinite products, that are impossible to value and trivial to create.

And as usual there will be a handful of technology people afterwards standing around shocked, saying they had no idea they enabled the 21st century's money laundering platform, and

Just like the cliche "I just wanted to make an anarchist digital currency, I didn't think it would impact society in negative ways we can't control!"

[wingworks]

Kinda reminds me of steem (steemit.com), when it first caught on in the media, there were (still are?) some huge whales on the platform, and some people made some serious money doing not much. But now a few years later, profits have leveled out allot.