A few weeks ago I wrote that NFTs would be great for artists – not so much for buyers.
Fail.
In the meantime, crypto-scammers have come up with the great idea of scouring the Internet for content that can be linked to NFTs and sold. This has gone so far that not only videos on YouTube have been stolen and sold as NFTs, but entire channels. And the actual channel owners had to prove to YouTube that they were really them.
By the time this is all sorted out and the buyers are looking down the tube again, the artists are under a lot of stress – and the scammers are grinning to themselves.
OpenSeas, one of the platforms for NFTs, has now admitted that at least 80% of all NFTs are fraudulent.
That platforms for cryptocurrency trading are run by scammers, that wallets worth millions are stolen almost every day – sure. And of course the police or insurance company will laugh at you if you go there and ask for compensation for your damage or want to get your money back. The perpetrators are sitting in the neighboring village or in the back of Mongolia. Nobody knows.
There is only one way to protect yourself: Don’t touch it. And for content creators: Regularly check whether images have been stolen from somewhere.
Web 3.0, as the whole thing is called, which has set out to democratize everything even more, money, virtual universes and stuff like that – it’s actually just a new method of ripping people off. Does anyone remember the gold rush in Second Life? Where rows and rows of properties were bought in SecondLife and you could even ride roller coasters virtually? For real money, of course? There’s even an own store – of course not in real dollars, but in Linden Dollars. At the moment one Linden Dollar is 0.278 Eurocent. Used to be higher…..
Zuckerberg has never really come up with anything new, so now he’s building a second-life deluxe, the Metaverse. Properties are already being sold there, too.
One can only keep away from the Scam…..
Update: Meanwhile, “properties” (“real estate”) in the “Metaverse” have already been sold for over $500 million, CNBC reports. This is not about Zuckerberg’s metaverse, but mainly about the four “metaverses” Sandbox, Decentraland, Cryptovoxels and Somnium. The “properties” are pure speculative objects – they are bought and immediately offered again at a multiple of the price.