Was anybody actually paying $500 though? It’s impossible to know but I think a majority of the sales were back to the seller to pump up the price, launder money, dodge taxes etc. There probably weren’t that many people actually paying 20k for these links.
A lot of very dark money got moved around though, which is really the only use case for crypto in general.
Don’t count out gambling. NFTs are a gambling game, where you win if you aren’t the last one holding the bag. There’s no hard guarantee that the traffic for a given NFT is real or not, but if its origin is something scarce and noteworthy (like being minted by the subject of a popular meme) then that can be a Schelling point for gamblers to converge on and reasonably conclude that other gamblers will be trying for the same NFT.
At some point the game ends when sources of new players are exhausted and everyone stops playing, but at one point I believe people were playing. Of course at the time people tried to describe why someone might buy a NFT as being some vague other buzzword laden reason, probably because the game ends sooner if everyone knows everyone else is also just hoping to flip it for a profit.
Was anybody actually paying $500 though? It’s impossible to know but I think a majority of the sales were back to the seller to pump up the price, launder money, dodge taxes etc. There probably weren’t that many people actually paying 20k for these links.
A lot of very dark money got moved around though, which is really the only use case for crypto in general.
500k
Don’t count out gambling. NFTs are a gambling game, where you win if you aren’t the last one holding the bag. There’s no hard guarantee that the traffic for a given NFT is real or not, but if its origin is something scarce and noteworthy (like being minted by the subject of a popular meme) then that can be a Schelling point for gamblers to converge on and reasonably conclude that other gamblers will be trying for the same NFT.
At some point the game ends when sources of new players are exhausted and everyone stops playing, but at one point I believe people were playing. Of course at the time people tried to describe why someone might buy a NFT as being some vague other buzzword laden reason, probably because the game ends sooner if everyone knows everyone else is also just hoping to flip it for a profit.