[mingus88]

Wasn’t it always just money laundering?

Need to turn a million dollars of shady money into legit profit? Mint an NFT or coin and set a ridiculous price on it. Make the transactions on an anonymous ledger. Sell it to yourself.

I mean, come on. Art and real estate have always been vehicles for wealthy people to dump money offshore. Crypto made it so much easier to invent assets out of thin air and set whatever price you want on it.

With NFTs you don’t even need to hype up some artist as the next big thing, or trade in antiquities. Just generate a picture of Trump as a beefcake fireman or something and sell it for 1.8 million. That actually happened.

And golly, nobody is talking about it anymore. The fad just dried up just like all the money. Huh, go figure.

Time to harvest those losses.

[bediger4000]

I'm not against the idea that NFTs are just for money laundering, but if so, you have to ask why they didn't remain popular? Is all the money laundered that needs to be laundered? Is cryptocurrency better for laundering somehow?

[herval]

They lost the appeal because

1) global logistics normalized, moving the bulk of the money laundering activities back to their usual places (eg physical art),

2) people started realizing that the blockchain actually created a papertrail that’s much harder to conceal than a bunch of literal paper documents scattered across a web of global freight forwarding companies and shell companies and

3) KYC rules turned most fringe crypto exchanges into tightly monitored trading platforms

Crypto as a whole became less utilized as a laundering & gambling medium for those reasons, but it didn’t fully disappear since ETFs keep liquidity happening and transferring money with crypto is still better than swift in a lot of cases. NFTs went away because they had no use whatsoever

[bediger4000]

That makes sense, at least from a money laundering standpoint. I don't track cryptocurrency happenings closely. I did not know your (1) and (3). Thank you.

[krapp]

NFTs crashed because someone realized you could use multiple slurp juices on a single ape.

[palmfacehn]

I always assumed they were deliberate losses to counter taxable gains.