Buyers of Bored Ape NFTs sue after digital apes turn out to be bad investment
Buyers of Bored Ape NFTs sue after digital apes turn out to be bad investment
It's hard to feel sorry for anyone who fell for a very obvious art grift. Even harder to be sorry for those caught grifting.
Even a cursory understanding of value would have told these people that pretty looking receipts are a piss poor investment, but no, they were convinced that NFT's (a tech they obviously knew nothing about) held intrinsic value despite having nothing of value backing them.
Everyone caught up in the NFT art grift did so because they thought they could make a quick buck being ahead of the wave of the next big pump and dump like crypto and got fucked by their hubris. The grifter's meanwhile were out here selling them graffiti'd up CVS receipts and saying they were worth the Mona Lisa.
The result? A perfectly valid and valuable technology has been completely disregarded by the public because 90% of people were too stupid to think before they bought into a tech they didn't understand and they all lost money to grifters. Worlds most widespread art grift and everyone was played a fool, and a valuable tech has been discredited, misunderstood, and shunned.
A perfectly valid and valuable technology has been completely disregarded by the public
Damn, you were so close! Just expand what you said about NFTs to the whole crypto bullshit and you got it.
The one example I’ve heard that makes sense are NFTs to represent a purchase of digital games. This then allows the selling of digital keys second hand.
Other than that it all sounds like a scam.
There is value in a fully distributed append-only database system that can run on nodes that don't trust each other. We just haven't found any valid use of it outside crypto yet.
NFTs do have value in narrow use cases. For instance Domain names are NFTs and incredibly important to the way humans interact with the internet.
Edit: I may have misunderstood and the person I'm replying to agreed with my assertation that the tech has been disregarded and that it expands to crypto as well. I expected that assumption was obvious and didn't need to be stated directly and thought the poster was being disingenuous. Leaving my comment up for posterity.
Don't conflate your ignorance with other people's knowledge, go develop a better understanding of the tech rather than assuming it has no value because you're too ignorant to learn about it.
Even crypto has a place, doesn't mean it's being used correctly by the majority of people.
I equate the public engaging in crypto and NFT's to tribal folks who accidentally pick up a discarded radioactive canister, what they have is valuable in the right hands, dangerous to themselves.
The result? A perfectly valid and valuable technology has been completely disregarded by the public
No. Stop. If blockchain, nfts, etc. had actual merit over what we already have rn, they would be used everywhere. But ever since the inception of the og blockchain, they do not. Because there is not a single actual use case of them that isn't already done (and done better) by other tech.
So stop this "oh it was good, just misunderstood" nonsense. It was never good, and never will be.
Is your only argument "wah, wah, wah, no!" because it's not very convincing.
Neither side of this looks good for crypto bros.
One side says, "This was a ripoff; you knew it was a ripoff when you sold it to us."
The other side says, "This was a stunt; you knew it was a stunt when you bought in."
"Yes your Honour, I knew it was a pyramid scheme. But I never thought I would be the last buyer. I always thought there would be another dumbass to buy it from me at a higher price, otherwise I wouldn't have bought it in the first place. I'm not stupid, unlike those last buyers!
Moreover, your Honour, on a technical note, this is not a monkey. You see, a monkey is different from a monke, and both..."
The amended lawsuit alleges that "Yuga colluded with fine arts broker, Defendant Sotheby's, to run a deceptive auction." After the sale, a Sotheby's representative described the winning bidder during a Twitter Spaces event as a "traditional" collector, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit said it turned out the auction buyer was now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, whose founder Sam Bankman-Fried is in jail awaiting trial on criminal charges. Ethereum blockchain transaction data shows that after the auction, "Sotheby's transferred the lot of BAYC NFTs to wallet address 0xf8e0C93Fd48B4C34A4194d3AF436b13032E641F3,77 which, upon information and belief, is owned/controlled by FTX," the complaint said. Speculation that FTX was the buyer had been percolating since at least January 2023.
So basically, they're alleging Sotheby's, Yuga, and FTX staged the auction to pump the price. Bold claim, curious how this will play out.
Isn't pumping the price kinda the job of sotherbys/auctions?
I mean, they do have them on record lying about it, so not that bold.
The amended lawsuit alleges that "Yuga colluded with fine arts broker, Defendant Sotheby's, to run a deceptive auction." After the sale, a Sotheby's representative described the winning bidder during a Twitter Spaces event as a "traditional" collector, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit said it turned out the auction buyer was now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, whose founder Sam Bankman-Fried is in jail awaiting trial on criminal charges.
I don't think it's fair to pin this all on people who got duped. Calling FTX, a company now known for throwing around large sums of stolen money to pump up the brand, bribe government officials, and fix prices, a "traditional collector", is beyond misleading.
Yeah fuck these stupid NFT scams but fuck FTX more. They knew what they were doing. They also are alleged to have been behind the giant Bitcoin price pump of 2021
lmao even they can never be a true investor
[Bored Ape NFTs can now be purchased for just $50,000 each.]
You can also buy my special doodles for $12 million each.
Oh it's even stupider than that.
In most cases it's, A. Just a link which happens to be a jpg. Which means it the website wants to change the jpg they can or if the website goes down it points nowhere.
Or B. Just a hash, which might supposed to be a unique representation of a specific image, but really is just a string of characters, so different sites might disagree what that image is.
I'm looking for a rendition of the Sistine Chapel with God as Danny Devito and Christopher Lloyd as Adam, like it was in the Taxi days, ideally done in oils. All I've got is a buck, but my social account has followers. If I post it, you'll get exposure. What can you do for me?
NFT's were actually a very clever plot put together by us starving artists to combat the hordes of choosing beggars that infest the internet. We all knew it was a scam, just like limited edition glichee prints, but there hasn't been a time in history when artists made enough money not to have to scam folks to survive, so we figured we were more than justified taking the tech-bros for a ride.
What kind of idiot do you think I am?
I won’t pay a penny more than $10 million.
i don't think you can sue for buying the losing ticket of crypto gambling
All of this NFT art is so ugly. If it was unique in a visually pleasing way—okay buy it. But to me, all of these images just look basically the same but with a new background or accessory.
Are there any actually good looking NFT series?
Every NFT I've seen looks like dogshit, and crypto enthusiasts get so angry when I point it out.
I have some that I didn't pay for and they also look fkn stoopid. Like the artists are people who just discovered how to use Photoshop last week, but never learned how to draw
I did the nft thing. I'm in the black. I tell people not to get into nfts... And if you do only do it for the art, not to make money. There are plenty of dead or free NFTs out there that cost you nothing.
There are some really cool small projects out there with really interesting art... However, the mainstream only sees these fugly PFPs and all of the genuinely interesting stuff is buried because crypto bros don't pump it.
A project I find interesting is "Loot" - it has its own ecosphere - it's a just a series of inventory lists, but it serves as a background for other projects to build on. It's not that the art is good - it's literally white text on a black background - but the concept is interesting. Banners, Loot Explorers, Abstract loot are 3 projects I can think ff off hand
And before anyone comes in and responds "well I could do that" - yeah you could, but you didn't, so yeah.
NFTs as they were presented are bullshit. I think there are more problems than solutions, however, I have seen some of the coolest digital art in this space.
If you want to chat more about the art side of things, hmu. I'm not interested in talking about eth or bitcoin or cryptocurrency - but I can help you find cool interesting projects that are working to try new things other than dumb looking monkeys.
Wish I could feel sorry, but so much of the NFT audience responded with such smugness and superiority to any warning and criticism, that it is hard to summon any other feeling than schadenfreude
What a bunch a dumb apes
Hahahahahaha
Bored Ape, in particular, was tried as an attempt to bring digital art into the fine art market to use as a tax dodge. If this case goes to court I hope it's going to shine a big bright light on the fact that a lot of the fine arts market has been a giant tax dodge scam for decades. 🤞
Not that it's been a secret, but exposure is good.
Yep. People shit on nfts all day long for good reason, but ultimately they're just an extension of the art world in general being a market for scams and dodgy practices.
Poor Ape Rot Club.
They were fungable after all!
Whaaaaaaaaaat? Who could have possibly have seen this coming??
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
"Sotheby's representations that the undisclosed buyer was a 'traditional' collector had misleadingly created the impression that the market for BAYC NFTs had crossed over to a mainstream audience," the lawsuit claimed.
Investors previously sued Bored Ape creator Yuga Labs, four company executives, and various celebrity promoters including Paris Hilton, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kevin Hart, Snoop Dogg, Serena Williams, Madonna, Jimmy Fallon, Steph Curry, and Justin Bieber.
The lawsuit said it turned out the auction buyer was now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, whose founder Sam Bankman-Fried is in jail awaiting trial on criminal charges.
Ethereum blockchain transaction data shows that after the auction, "Sotheby's transferred the lot of BAYC NFTs to wallet address 0xf8e0C93Fd48B4C34A4194d3AF436b13032E641F3,77 which, upon information and belief, is owned/controlled by FTX," the complaint said.
"While the Executive Defendants made hundreds of millions of dollars, investors were left with NFTs worth a fraction of their artificially inflated value," the original version of the complaint in December said.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Some schadenfreude is definitely warranted, but the lawsuit may have merit.
I think that's exactly right. It was a grift, after all.
I just don't understand how anyone could have fallen for it. Let alone people with this kind of money, who have all the information in the world at their fingertips. Is it just about them finding certain techbros charismatic? Ooh, they have money, I'd better give them my money so that I can have money too?
Flabbergasting, the whole lot of it.
Well both crypto enthusiasts and art collectors are very used to the notion that an asset is as valuable as what people are willing to pay for it, regardless of intrinsic value, so I don’t find it too surprising.
Wow who would've thought
Yeah. They really should've bought the lion!
Seriously though. This was so obvious right from the start. I can't believe how gullible and naive people are.
2020's the decade of the .jpg wars. Lmao.
“Do I look like I know what a jay-peg is? I just want a picture of a got dang hot dog!”
i love crypto.. I've always asked what the calculations are searching for from the myriad of cpu & gpu's... and no one has really ever given me a straight answer for why it has value. *edit: to the last guy that tried to sell me a photo of a monkey... thanks for the downvote, yet again
It's the final form of artificial scarcity, scarcity alone without even a thing to be made scarce.
This is so funny. The entire point of cryptocurrency was to be an irreversible, untraceable currency. Now these dipshits are sueing over losses? I don't know if they are severely mistaken or severely angry. You are not getting that back. Neither do you deserve to. You knew what you were doing.
The first step is "Fuck the government!" The second step is always "Help me, Obi Wan Government, you're my only hope!"
I deserve help from the government as I've done everything right and just been unfortunate. Its everyone else who have got into trouble entirely through their own doing that don't deserve help.
When was cryptocurrency meant to be untraceable? It literally had the complete ledger out in the public.
They just seem really upset that the scam/grift/MLM didn't work out in their favour and they're the ones taking the loss.
You forgot unregulated which usually even makes it to the front row in a lot of arguments completely denying the necessity to even have regulations at all...
I don't really agree with this sentiment.
Are they dipshits?
Yes
Should Sothebys lose all credibility and be fined for faking an auction?
Also yes.
Should Bored Ape owners get any of their money back?
Naaaaaaaaaaaw
This crosses certain lines that are beyond just: huuuur crypto dumb
They are just severely greedy. They have no other ideology.