Sounds like the problem is how these transactions escape any sales tax, thus these gimmicks and other forms of money laundering simply have zero cost or oversight.

Truly it's the purest form of Keynesian beauty context imaginable, and everyone who's participating hopes they won't be the greater fool.

Honestly, NFTs will make it into economic textbooks, assuming they haven't already. They've become these wonderfully pure little natural experiments in economic theory, and it's fascinating (and horrifying) watching them play out.

Idk, I guess I must've been a poor 12-year old, if that's what 12-year olds spend on their hobbies nowadays.

[0] https://etherscan.io/token/0x96ed81c7f4406eff359e27bff6325dc...

[1] https://etherscan.io/tx/0x17654fa3a9b49fc1688df27d195ffb59a1...

> This time, he drew inspiration from a well known pixelated whale meme image and a popular digital-art style but used his own program to create the set of 3,350 emoji-type whales.

All while coding for "20 to 30 minutes per day".

Seems pretty clear that this is the dad (who works in software in finance) cashing in on the NFT trend and using his 12 year old son to generate the publicity.

Define "good." It's literally teaching the kid miracles can happen. There are millions better ways to give the kid the money, like setting up a start-up with him, without actually cheating on him (if the conjecture is true, that is).

> NFTs are mostly used as a ponzi game. There's not enough physical art or exotic cars or other collectibles for the moneyed folks to trade, so now they have NFTs.

IMHO, it's more likely that the heart of the NFT economy is based on capital flight, money laundering and black money transfers, and outright fraud based on wash trading: fraud that's dressed up to look like a Ponzi scheme so that the buyer thinks they are in on the grift.

Or what?

The collection is of 3,350 whales, according to this other source:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/25/12-year-old-coder-made-6-fig...

the collection was sold in 9 hours for 255,000 US$, that makes a whale sold for around 76 US$ apiece?

EDIT:

Another question being:

>He then earned an additional 30 ether, worth over $95,000, from the resale market, since Ahmed earns a 2.5% royalty on each secondary sale.

30 ether (so we remain in this realm) corresponds to 2.5%, it should mean that secondary sales were worth 1,200 ethers.

What?

To be clear, nobody is being paid in NFTs: gangsters are 'buying' NFTs from the people they owe money to.

For now. Heroin was legal too once.

The many malicious actors in cryptocurrency are not representative of the many organizations and individual contributors in blockchain technology.

I think the common applications of NFTs now are entirely primitive, and I find understanding the concept of blockchain oracle networks to be hugely influential in framing my perspective of the 5-10 year landscape of IP and digital media. Lex Fridman's interview with Sergey, Chainlink founder, is exceptional, if lengthy.

A blockchain represents a public and immutable* ledger of "things that happened," and smart contracts represent agreements of "things that will happen if [conditions]." If the storage, execution and outcome of those smart contracts occurs on the same blockchain, that's a seriously powerful mechanism. Its primary limitation is that it cannot GET data from outside the blockchain, because that would compromise system integrity.

Oracle networks are simply another layer of distributed consensus. Weather is a straightforward and common example. Let's say there are a dozen entities that all operate as oracles in a weather network, and they report certain meteorological data at 24hr intervals. Should entity A report inaccurate or fraudulent data, the network would reject that and entity A would be penalized in some way. The number of oracles, or nodes, in the network is relative to the significance of value reliant on their data, so a handful of nodes is fine for early stages, and at larger scale, more nodes are incentivized to participate in data collection and validation to strengthen the system integrity.

There's a rapidly expanding body of research surrounding all of these concepts, but I find oracle networks to be the infrastructure required to begin standardization of the bridges between traditional, legacy agreements, comprised of legally binding contracts and IP / patents / copyright licensing, and smart contracts executed autonomously based on conditions and outcomes that are universally knowable and agreed upon.

With those bridges in place, we unlock a lot of efficiency by dis-intermediating the fulfillment of contractually obligated outcomes that are contingent on enforcement from a legal structure, which may not exist in developing nations. A smart contract for crop insurance that pays a claim if there is no rain in a region for a year will GET weather data from a smart contract provided by an oracle network (which already has its standards for validation published and verifiable) and simply pay out claims if those conditions are met.

A traditional insurance company might simply be bankrupt.

NFTs, conceptually and somewhere in the future, will represent a vast majority of the management of digital assets and probably many real world assets as well, because they are represented on chain. Maybe an oracle network formed of real estate title search companies offer a homeowner verification function and provide it as a zero-knowledge proof to a larger protocol that assesses some future form of creditworthiness. Maybe not in the next few years, but certainly in the next few decades, all titles, deeds, and other legal documents that represent ownership of an asset will have a primary digital representation on some sort of blockchain.

They probably won't even be called NFTs, but who cares, I'm sick of hearing about them anyway.

* there's a lot of discussion around finality but most implementations of blockchains have a strong degree of immutability

p.s. I sent Editorial an email

I mean, in which way is it different from US kids selling lemonade?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemonade_stand