Hello Bees,
August 2021, an NFT marketplace’s trade volume exceeded 3 billion dollars.
Visa buys a crypto punk NFT for 150,000 dollars.
Lionel Messi launches his NFT crypto art collection ‘The Messiverse’.
WWE released John Cena NFTs.
That’s in this episode of Bees of Bitcoin where we explore all things crypto. Well, NFTs.
Intro
A digital picture of a rock sold for 3 million dollars. But, why would anyone buy a picture of a rock?
First of all, it’s just a JPEG image.
Secondly, it only exists virtually.
Thirdly, it can be viewed by anyone for free.
Then who in their right mind would buy such a thing?
That too, for whopping millions of dollars.
The main argument behind this is:
Digital Scarcity and has everything to do with Human Psychology.
Collectibles
We as humans have an innate need to own things. Some people dream of owning cars, houses, and jewelry. If you’re a billionaire, you wanna own mansions, helicopters, and superyachts. If you’re steve cohen, you’d own a 14-foot preserved shark. From Leonardo da Vinci's manuscripts to the Mona Lisa portrait, I could never understand why people wanna own ancient pieces of art.
With the recent advancements in technology, NFTs are becoming the new collectibles. The three-letter magic, NFT, means Non-Fungible Tokens.
Sounds too technical, right? So, let me break it down for ya. Let’s first understand what fungible means.
Fungible is Replaceable.
The value of 1 dollar in your hand is the same as 1 dollar in my hand. 1 Bitcoin of yours holds the same value as 1 bitcoin of mine.
Non-fungible, however, is unique. Like you and I. Non-fungible tokens or NFTs are not interchangeable with other tokens. This concept is not new and it has been used in collectibles for centuries like baseball cards and Beanie Babies. Infuse the concept of collectibles into crypto, and you get NFTs.
You might remember the artist Beeple who made waves in the crypto community when he sold his 13 years of art collated in a single JPEG image as the NFT raked in 69 million dollars. The craze for NFTs peaked during early 2021 and waned soon after. Now the enthusiasm is revived, thanks to the bull market.
This time, the party was kickstarted by
Pudgy Penguins,
Bored Ape Yacht Club,
Art Blocks, and Surprise, Surprise,
Cryptopunks.
You might remember the two-decades-old dot com bubble where people invested a shit ton of money on budding internet companies. The NFT rally that’s happening now is not very different.
But before diving deep into that, let’s talk about collectibles. Shall we?
Have you collected Pokémon cards and traded them with your friends?
Then, you must know what I am talking about. Or at least, you must have heard about it. If not, you must be living under a rock, and have no clue that the rocks now sell for 3 million dollars. You may be wondering what’s special about a rock?
This is not some solid mass of rock along the beachside. It’s the digital pictures of a rock-based on some royalty-free clipart produced in the 90s. Apparently, there are only 100 of these things, and people are going crazy to own this shit.
So, I visited the amazon of NFTs, Opensea. Suddenly, I was introduced to
Cool Cats, Gutter Cats, Dope Shibas, CyberKongs, Party Penguins, Chromie Squiggles, Meebits, and a heck of a lot of so-called art.
It doesn’t stop there. Axie Infinity, an NFT-based online video game is raking in millions selling digital creatures, that, according to them, love to battle, build, and hunt for treasure.
But what does one do with the digital art that they buy for millions of dollars? One of the major benefits of owning a pudgy penguin or a crypto punk or a digital picture of rock is getting to display the art mainly on your Twitter profile pic. And, maybe show the world that you belong here.
Yeah! You heard that right!
But it’s not like all NFTs are unusable except for profile pictures.
WWE and Visa’s NFTs
WWE recently released John Cena NFTs.
These NFT holders will get a chance to witness WrestleMania, the biggest wrestling event hosted every year. The holders of the NFT get two front-row tickets along with Unprecedented VIP access and hotel accommodations. It’s not just the world’s biggest entertainment company that entered the space.
The world’s biggest payment processor Visa announced that they’ve bought one of the “CryptoPunk” digital avatars, one of the thousands based on NFTs for $150,000 worth of Eth.
"We felt that CryptoPunks would be a great addition to our collection of artifacts that can chart and celebrate the past, present, and future of commerce," Visa's head of crypto told in an interview.
Visa’s reason to enter crypto space? To learn more about the growing market.
They think NFTs will play an important role in the future of retail, social media, entertainment, and commerce. Visa is known for going to extreme lengths to protect its turf.
Visa is also partnering with cryptocurrency startups BlockFi and crypto.com to offer credit cards that reward purchases with Bitcoin. They have set up their internal crypto team in 2019 and have taken several initiatives in the space since then. For example, they became the first major payments network to support transaction settlement with stablecoin. They also wanna pioneer central bank digital currency or CBDC payments. Bye, Bye Privacy.
The Messiverse
Okay, Enough about NFTs, let’s talk sports for a bit.
Football star Lionel Messi ended his 20 plus year stint at Spanish football club Barcelona recently and he broke down in tears at his Barcelona FC exit press conference. He then threw away the napkin that he used to wipe off his tears.
Someone grabbed it from the trash without anyone noticing, and put it up for sale for 1 million dollars.
The seller described that the napkin contains Messi’s genetic DNA, and that can be used to create his clone. And not so surprisingly, a Brazilian model named Luana Sandien bid on it for 600,000 dollars.
Just when I thought that the story couldn’t get any crazier. Let me ask you… If you and your clone went on to a fight… who do you think would win?
Messi, on the other hand, launched his own NFT collection called “The Messiverse” in collaboration with Bosslogic.
Kode Abdo, aka Bosslogic, is a graphic designer and digital concept artist based in Australia, who is not only a talented artist but also a great businessman who knows how to market himself. In this NFT collection, Messi is portrayed as a king, superhero, and Greek titan in works entitled "Man from the Future," "Worth the Weight," and "The King Piece" that celebrate his career highlights.
The football star also received his new club’s fan token as part of his welcome package to Paris-Saint Germain. The club had said that a “significant” amount of fan tokens were given to Messi, though the exact amount wasn’t disclosed.
Are these tokens really from the blockchain? Because I see there’s no transparency here. Sensing something shady.
Not talking about Messi’s involvement with money laundering using offshore tax havens, as revealed by Panama papers.
But with the NFTs.
How to Launder Money with NFTs
Recently, I came across a piece “How to Launder Money With NFTs” written by Isaiah McCall. (For educational purposes of course.)
If you have $1 million in illegal money, you would spend $1 million on your OWN NFT. You can do this yourself or use a trusted third-party account. Then you resell the trash for nothing and bank the profits.
And if the IRS asks where you got all that dough... “What are you talking about? I made that money selling precious digital art. It’s clean yo.”
Of course, there are unique and promising NFT projects out there. For example, buying stoner cats NFTs gives you access to the short-animated series, and there’s TechCrunch Founder who sold his $1.6 Million San-Francisco House on a Crypto Real Estate Platform.
There are a lot of speculations as well. Just a few weeks ago, we’ve covered how a 12-year old sold out his entire collection of weird whale NFTs. In my opinion, this was a mere encouragement from the crypto community to invite the next generation into the space. I say this because, soon after Ahmed’s project sold out, doubts began to emerge about his identity. Some users contended that he was an anonymous imposter, given that his young age was a unique selling point.
Crypto doesn’t discriminate.
OnlyFans’ Censorship Saga
Speaking of discrimination, OnlyFans announced they’re gonna prohibit users from posting any sexually explicit conduct, citing mounting pressure from banking partners and payment providers. Nobody’s paying for cooking videos on onlyfans. It’s no secret that a majority of creators post sexually explicit material. And fans of only fans were not happy with the news of them banning adult content.
Edward Snowden quoted the situation and tweeted “Bitcoin fixes this”.
Because there’s no central authority who controls the tech. I mean, sexually explicit content is the backbone of only fans. They then had post-nut clarity and reversed their decision. Good for them.
I recall when PayPal froze WikiLeaks donations bowing to U.S. pressure. Not just PayPal, but Visa, MasterCard, the Bank of America, and Western Union all have been engaged in an unlawful banking blockade against WikiLeaks. That’s when Wikileaks decided to accept donations in bitcoin.
One cannot start a debate about Bitcoin and not end it with the federal reserve.
is Crypto Unusable?
Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari says crypto is “95% fraud, hype, noise, and confusion.” He added, “I’ve not seen any use case other than funding illicit activities like drugs and prostitution.”
Speaking of which, I recall a piece from George Carlin.
“I don't understand why prostitution is illegal.
Selling is legal, f*cking is legal. So why isn't selling f*cking legal?”
I mean, why should it be illegal to sell something that’s perfectly legal to give away?
I can’t follow the logic on that at all… Of all the things that you can do to a person, giving an orgasm is hardly the worst thing in the world. In the army, they give you a medal for spraying napalm on people.”
God, I miss Carlin.
Sex for money is illegal until it's filmed, distributed, and relabelled as "porn". Imagine a scenario where the police bust indoors and shout
“You are arrested for prostitution!”.
“No officer, there’s a camera in the corner of the room.”
“Filming a porno are we? My mistakes, carry on.”
Because when it comes to screwing you and taking your money, the government doesn’t want any competition.
Back to the story, the fed chairman adds,
There are thousands of these garbage coins that have been created. Some of them are complete fraud, Ponzi schemes, where they pump it up, they dupe people to invest money, and then the founders rip them off.
It’s true that there are a lot of shitcoins that are just intended to rug pull you, meaning, lure you in by promising exorbitant returns in the minimum possible timeframe, and scam you.
Just after the Shiba Inu token took off, it spawned an entire range of meme coins such as
Akita Inu, Kishu Inu, Saitama Inu, Hachiko Inu, Keanu Inu, Floki Inu, Jindo Inu, CoShi Inu, Tsuki Inu, Chubby Inu,.. and I am not kidding, Ponzu Inu. At least Ponzu Inu is being honest about its intentions.
These are meme coins masquerading as something that has value. Of course, your local pet store is not accepting any of these shitcoins when you buy “Flower Rear Gear Pup Butt Cover”. Let the poor thing poo in peace.
Also, dog coins are to the crypto as to cat JPEGs are to the NFT space.
Highly speculative and mostly scammy.
The fed chairman Neel Kashkari continues,
“There is no barrier to you creating your own bitcoin or me creating my own — I’ll call it neelcoin.” Come on Neel, people will not be buying your shitcoin. Why? Cause neelcoin probably won’t have a dog in it. Or I may be wrong. People are literally buying digital pictures of rock. And at the time of recording this, 11,500+ coins are listed on Coinmarketcap.
And a vast majority of them are gonna scam you.
Always Remember!
A single bee is ignored.
A swarm of bees is feared.
Let’s stand together.
Don’t forget to bee awesome.
Thanks for reading.
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