I Got People to Pay Me $50K in 3 Days with NFTs (2021)
Original: I got people to pay me $50K in 3 days with NFTs (2021)
Key topics
The NFT frenzy may be over, but the debate rages on about what drove its meteoric rise and fall. Some commenters, like mingus88, claim NFTs were always just a vehicle for money laundering, while others, such as readthenotes1, suggest they represented status, identity, and self-expression. As the discussion unfolds, a consensus emerges that speculation played a huge role in the NFT bubble, with BoorishBears noting that it attracted a broader audience beyond true believers. The conversation takes a turn for the insightful when herval and bediger4000 point out that the NFT market normalized as global logistics improved and the novelty wore off.
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1-2h
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- 01Story posted
Aug 30, 2025 at 3:16 AM EDT
4 months ago
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Aug 30, 2025 at 3:51 AM EDT
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Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Aug 30, 2025 at 5:56 PM EDT
4 months ago
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Need to turn a million dollars of shady money into legit profit? Mint an NFT or coin and set a ridiculous price on it. Make the transactions on an anonymous ledger. Sell it to yourself.
I mean, come on. Art and real estate have always been vehicles for wealthy people to dump money offshore. Crypto made it so much easier to invent assets out of thin air and set whatever price you want on it.
With NFTs you don’t even need to hype up some artist as the next big thing, or trade in antiquities. Just generate a picture of Trump as a beefcake fireman or something and sell it for 1.8 million. That actually happened.
And golly, nobody is talking about it anymore. The fad just dried up just like all the money. Huh, go figure.
Time to harvest those losses.
1) global logistics normalized, moving the bulk of the money laundering activities back to their usual places (eg physical art),
2) people started realizing that the blockchain actually created a papertrail that’s much harder to conceal than a bunch of literal paper documents scattered across a web of global freight forwarding companies and shell companies and
3) KYC rules turned most fringe crypto exchanges into tightly monitored trading platforms
Crypto as a whole became less utilized as a laundering & gambling medium for those reasons, but it didn’t fully disappear since ETFs keep liquidity happening and transferring money with crypto is still better than swift in a lot of cases. NFTs went away because they had no use whatsoever
Always wondered why someone would pay a lot money for a bunch of pixels. Status and attention-serking (aka identity) are pretty strong drivers
Speculation was the main driver for most people once the prices started going exponential