The Grift Continues ... How can you run out of something that is digital? Act fast before the Trump Superhero Cards will sell out.

[Botany]

Link to tweet

How can you run out of something that is digital? I thought digital data was stored on the ....

.... computer's hard drive. And not unless that hard drive is wiped clean that data will always be there.

"Data is copied from the computer's main memory (random-access memory or RAM), and then written to the hard disk."

Grifters gotta grift.

[Siwsan]

1. Ah, but if you don't spend the $$ there's NO chance of winning a dinner with the former guy

[tanyev]

14. LOL, haven't there already been numerous contests to have dinner with him

and absolutely zero winners?

[Siwsan]

15. I do believe that is true!

[Jim__]

2. It's actually a $2.5 billion industry.

From The New Yorker - probably behind a paywall.

...

Witherspoon was writing to ask for recommendations of female artists making non-fungible tokens, or N.F.T.s. Sales of N.F.T.s in the first half of 2021 had reached $2.5 billion, and the field had a distinct boys’-club sensibility. The actress was one of a number of Hollywood women who felt excluded from the crypto boom. They wanted to learn more, and—in the grand tradition of minting Susan B. Anthony coins and casting female Ghostbusters—to stake a claim for women in a sphere dominated by men. “I’m definitely on a mission to make more women more money,” Witherspoon told Gayle King in an interview, which aired on the day she messaged Karkai, touting the sale of her media company, Hello Sunshine, for nearly a billion dollars.

Karkai had caught Witherspoon’s attention with a project that she and Malavieille had launched two months earlier, called World of Women: an N.F.T. collection madeup of Karkai’s drawings of glamorous cartoon sylphs. The WoWs, as she came to call them, had full lips and strong brows, and were variously outfitted with fluffy party dresses, spiked collars, purple lipstick, Princess Leia buns, and 3-D glasses. Karkai used a splashy, saturated palette that suggested Lisa Frank for grownups, and the kind of flat, graphic style seen on beach-read covers. World of Women’s female artist and subjects distinguished it from most other N.F.T. enterprises. (A collection called Fame Lady Squad had previously claimed to be a woman-led project selling the first line of female avatars, but Karkai, unlike the founders of Fame Lady Squad, was not eventually revealed to be three Russian-speaking men.)

N.F.T.s have been likened to works of art, to trading cards, to investment vehicles, and to virtual streetwear. In general terms, an N.F.T. is a permanent digital record of ownership—that is, an entry in a decentralized public ledger, called a blockchain, saying that someone owns something. Very often, the thing in question is a JPEG image, purchased with cryptocurrency. In the breathless days of early 2021, twenty months before the spectacular implosion of the crypto exchange FTX threw the entire sector into crisis, N.F.T.s were trading at a rate that inspired comparisons to tulip mania. Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, made an N.F.T. of his first tweet and sold it for the equivalent of more than $2.9 million. N.F.T.s were the stuff—along with cryptocurrencies, other blockchain applications, and the metaverse—of a hypothetical future Internet that tech evangelists had newly branded “web3.”

...

[dpibel]

12. "It was," I think, is more accurate than "it is"

Seems the $2.5 billion figure was the high water mark.

The Dorsey NFT was put up for sale last spring and drew bids of almost $300.

Even the article you've excerpted paints a pretty bleak picture of the vaporousness of the whole thing.

[TlalocW]

3. I think NFTs of digital art are stupid

But it would be like limited edition prints etc. of physical artwork -paintings, commemorative plates, coins. I think those very rarely go up in value or crash no matter what the Franklin Mint or Precious Moments claim, but some people still think of them as an investment. Just each image would be used to create 100 unique NFTs/tokens for example. Of course, Trump won't do that. He'll either offer as many as he can, or if he does do an initial run and stops, he'll bring them back for another "limited run." Or, I supposed he could offer special variant versions of the them like they do with Pokemon cards or comic book covers - put a gold border on some of them. The possibilities - while stupid - are also endless.

[AntivaxHunters]

4. I think they're a great avenue for artists

to sell their work and we all know in this society artists are not valued & exploited.
NFT's help many artists & that's a GOOD thing!

[W_HAMILTON]

13. I just did a quick Google search to see what artists thought of them...

...and most of the articles are how they view them very unfavorably.

I did this because my initial impression is that, no, NFTs do not benefit artists in any appreciable way. It seems very much like a scam, or -- as is the case with most crypto -- maybe it is that many scammers are attracted to it and that's why it seems so sketchy. Either way, artists can easily sell their real life or digital works of art as is, even commissioned works, without any NFT whatsoever.

Why do you think artists like them? The only thing I can think of is that maybe it gets more people to buy their work since it basically turns their pieces from just art and instead into something investible...

[Liberal In Texas]

5. Art of his "Life and Career" ???

He truly is deluded. Space suit, football owner, race car driver, cowboy, jet pilot etc. The only one that actually would be indicative of his "life and career" is the golfing one.

And look how much they reduced his fat body. Too bad the artist couldn't work in 45 more times.

[Srkdqltr]

6. Yes but.....you get nothing really. How do you own digital unless it's a program that others can

use?

Ever hear of "The Emperor's New Clothes"? ... Ever see "The Music Man"? add to this "The XPresidents Trading Cards:.

[DFW]

7. I once knew a woman, seemingly rational

Until she said with a straight face that she had ordered Sarah Palin’s book (this was about 12 or 13 years ago), and couldn’t wait to read it, probably a feat of which Palin herself was incapable.

Come to think of it, I never heard from her after that. Maybe the wisdom contained in it sent her straight to Nirvana.

[Liberal In Texas]

9. About that same time

I was in a bookstore (remember those?) and an old guy cornered a clerk and wanted to know where the Sara Palin book was and that of course wasn't enough. He had to go on about how she was going to be the next president and how great she was or some crazy rant. The clerk and I just looked at each other and shook our head.

As we all know, she's pretty much been relegated to the political dustbin and I'm sure the old guy was hugely disappointed.

[Deep State Witch]

8. He reminds me of Homelander

If Homelander let himself go.

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/boys-penis-homelander-trump-billy-joel-season-3-1369258/

[Blue Owl]

10. The RNC is stuck playing 52 pickup

[JCMach1]

11. NFTs can be limited of course

Trump can also make a % on subsequent trades

[H2O Man]

16. Recommended.

I am planning to invest my life savings in these. They are sure to increase in value.

You really can't make this shit up. I had wondered if he planned on revealing some of the classified documents on-line. That would have been a bad idea, but this appears to be worse for him.