LOL, I tried to buy an NFT and............

[chaumi]

Son comes home from school (and this is an illustration of where this is all heading I suspect)...

Dad, Dad. You know all this rubbish you've been on about for months...P2E, NFTs....I didn't believe you but it's real, right? People are actually buying digital items that are not real and common sense says has no value, and some of them you even need to buy just to play the game!

That's right, son. It's madness on the face of it, but yes it's real and there's every chance it's really really real. Why do you ask.

I've had a tip. There's a new set being minted tonight. They cost £80 each. The tip's come from some people that apparently know what they're doing. Can I buy one?

Lots of scams, son. Or there might be, at least. You have no clue whether any particular one is real, or they're going to disappear with all the cash.

Ah, but I really like the idea of this. And I heard these people whispering it are old-timer Bitcoiners. It's for a sci-fi space worlds game, looks good.

OK, what's it called? Let's look it up.


10 mins and a series of snapchats, messengers, whatever later.......

OK so my mate put his name down on a reservation list 3 weeks ago to buy one of the first 10,000 for £80. It's called xxxxxxxx.




Now, I'm curious. The online stuff looks good (but then, many of them do).I can afford £80 to go to £0 in a few days, although it would be mildly painful. Class it as a lesson.


So I go to the website. It says the coin needed to buy the NFT is SOL, and it gives me 4 wallet options to do it. Of course, I don't have any of the wallets, so I pick the first one and start the process...Phantom (no, of course I have no idea if that is a secure one or not, but hey ho, needs must and all that....)

A few mins later I have a Phantom wallet. But it's disappeared. I restart it, it asks for the security string, I enter, it's up again. I try to buy SOL...and it takes me to MoonPay to do it (never heard of it before but assumed it's something like Paypal for Crypto, a wild guess but possibly accurate)

45 mins later, photos of IDs etc, and I have an email saying account authorised from Moonpay. I click the link, takes me to a page saying 'sorry, we're not working right now'....half expected it to finish off with '...and you thought this would be easy?'

So 2.5 hours after it all started now, and no NFT at this point (and no chance, by the look of it). Looks like 1 SOL is currently around $95, so the cost now is no longer £80 but more like £180. The page on Magic Eden is showing 0 sold out of 10,000 and a price of 2.5 SOL each, I assume that 30 seconds after it all kicks off, that's going to show 10,000 sold.

I'm guessing that the only way to get one would have been to have registered 3 weeks ago, so probably this was all a waste of time anyway.


The point in all this?

No, it's not how pathetically ignorant I am...was actually mildly pleased with even getting this far...and I 'knew' right from the start that the chances of getting one were slim to zero without pre-registering...but figured it would be a good learning exercise in general.

The point is......this now appears to be with normal everyday schoolkids. In the playgrounds and at the dinner tables. I'd been asking hardened gamers for months 'you heard about play to earn games and NFTs right?'...and they were all looking at me blankly as if I was a blob from Neptune.

I'd say this might be an indicator this all about to go properly mainstream....until it's either proven to be a house of cards, or really is a core part of the future of gaming.

[universal4]

There are torrents available that contain many MANY thousand of the NFT's in a single monolithic file.

The nft's themselves are mostly nothing more then the link to a google drive somewhere that could disappear tomorrow.

Sometimes the images themselves will have watermarks, unless purchased directly from the artist's, or offered to their patreon subscibers, and even if one purchases the clean images that way, they are almost always re-published somewhere else making the value sketchy at best.

If the images are wanted because they like the character, and you can download the images themselves, and he wants them as a collection he can admire, and the cost of that is justified, by all means it sounds like a nice gift and may provide him the enjoyment of showing them off to his friends.

The nft's themselves, will most likely end up in torrents in a matter of days, even from new releases.

Rick
Universal4

[chaumi]

I think (pretty sure) this particular one is a different case, Rick. The NFTs are actually game characters - you need one to be able to play...or at a minimum you need one to have any chance of being competitive (because the character gives you powers/abilities that give you an edge in the game).

With these, it's all about whether the game takes off. Pick the right one and you're laughing. Pick a dud, and your NFT is worth zero (in financial terms and in gaming terms because no one will want to play).

From what I can see, all 10k minted this evening got snapped up. The lad that told mine (and had pre-registered) didn't get the one he reserved. Which indicates to me this is all still about the people at the top of the tree who know the game and how to play it, and not the normal guy on the street. Maybe I'm misinterpreting.

Will be interesting to watch this one. This was kids stuff today. Next step is the NFTs will be plots of land on planets, bunkers on the plots, then the planets themselves, galaxies, universes, etc. All assuming the game takes off (no pun intended). If that happens, there may be an interesting number of zeros added to the prices!!

Where tf are we heading.

[universal4]

If it is an nft and not unique to a single purchaser, it will be bootlegged and in torrents soon enough. If such are tied to a specific player id etc, then the secondary market will be filled with greed of players selling such for a profit, and in some countries the various governments will want to tax the capital gain, and if in the US will most certainly have a line on that if paypal or a handful of other regulated wallets are involved.

And any game that is designed that require certain wallets be used to buy characters in order to be successful in the game show how corrupt that game's developers are and should be avoided. Surely a game could be more successful providing a more level playing field and then using micro transactions to buy additional stuff in the game to help players advance.

The unfairness in such games, will still always be those who spend more and more to stroke their own egos to feel more superior over others.

And if people are foolish enough to pay for pieces of land on other planets, and buildings that will not be built or visited during their lifetimes, it will be sold. Stars were sold to people many years ago.

Rick
Universal4

[xecutable]

It's good that it was on the Solana blockchain, so you virtually paid no gas fees. It would have been much worse if it was on the Etherium network and you had to spend tens if not hundreds of dollars.

With that being said, Boomers II, Generation X, and even Millennials have a hard time grasping on the concept of NFTs, myself including, but this hasnt stopped me from flipping them from mint price (usually around 0.2 ETH) to couple of ETH and getting my 10x.

As for the process of buying, if you already had Binance, Coinbase or any major exchange account, and a Phantom (for Solana) or MetaMask (for Etherium or Avax or w/e) it takes a few clicks to buy SOL and send it over to your wallet. It doesnt help that Solana had TPS problems for the past 3 days with 1.8.14 coming out yesterday for validators to fix the issue.

Bottom line is, your experience was one of those 1 in a million rare cases where things go wrong. In reality it takes no more than a few minutes, given that you already had an exchange account.

The market is overcrowded with new projects at the moment, and the avatar pics everyone puts on is not really the point or purpose. The point is, if you went to the first Beatles concerts X years ago, and you still have your ticket, you have to somehow prove it, it was from that first concert. With NFTs if that ticket was sold to you as an NFT, problem solved. You can always go back and show that it was from that time from that concert.

Ofc there's the option to blow 330k $ on an APE too. Don't know what that's like, but many celebrities now do.

[baldidiot]

There are torrents available that contain many MANY thousand of the NFT's in a single monolithic file.

The nft's themselves are mostly nothing more then the link to a google drive somewhere that could disappear tomorrow.

Sometimes the images themselves will have watermarks, unless purchased directly from the artist's, or offered to their patreon subscibers, and even if one purchases the clean images that way, they are almost always re-published somewhere else making the value sketchy at best.

The image craze is probably one of the worst things that could have happened to NFTs as it has made people think that NFT = image.

There's actually a lot of real world applications of the NFT idea that have nothing to do with images, eg: ticketing.

For example, a football club could issue it's season tickets as NFTs with individual match ticket NFTs issued to the holder of the season ticket NFT. Can't go to a match (or just want to give the ticket to someone else?) just send them the NFT for that match. Could even limit the number of times a season ticket holder can give away tickets.

Same with concert tickets. Want to eliminate scalping? Issue tickets as NFTs and don't allow the transfer to any address other than the sending one (meaning if someone wanted to return their ticket it would have to go back to the people selling it in the first place).

[nwalker]

I know someone that spent $400,000 on an Ape a few weeks ago. Now the celebs have got in, prices are rising!

[potentialeight]

I think the primary issue here is that people think images themselves are NFTs since that's all that's been talked about in mainstream media. That's a real "well poisoning" event that the whole thing will have to get past to get larger acceptance at this point I think.

[universal4]

I agree that nft's do have some real world use scenarios, and ticketing is a great example. One day I think people will understand that example much better.

Rick
Universal4

And since the Beatle's were mentioned, although I don't have any original ticket stubs, I am trying to see if I can prove the vinyl is inside the 8 or 10 unopened albums of theirs I have...LOL Sorry though, none are on the Apple Label (back when they owned the label and Apple was really an apple)

[Jacob-itai-s]

LOL, I can't even start figuring the NFT, it is too complicated for me, I am too old LOL

[Dsquared]

I always enjoy reading your posts chaumi...tho this one made me realise how much I don't know about this topic lol. I dont mind admitting im a bit clueless on it ..still thanks for sharing the story

[baldidiot]

And since the Beatle's were mentioned, although I don't have any original ticket stubs, I am trying to see if I can prove the vinyl is inside the 8 or 10 unopened albums of theirs I have...LOL Sorry though, none are on the Apple Label (back when they owned the label and Apple was really an apple)

Schrodinger's vinyl?

[chaumi]

I always enjoy reading your posts chaumi...tho this one made me realise how much I don't know about this topic lol. I dont mind admitting im a bit clueless on it ..still thanks for sharing the story

thx DS I suspect a few of us have (and will have) joint middle names of Clueless about a fair bit of this new stuff, but it’s kinda fun trying to get it. We already learned more from this thread for sure.