Unsellable, a new company started by investors and entrepreneurs Skyler Hallgren and Zach Miller, buys NFTs for a fraction of the original price. The key is that they provide sellers with a receipt to prove their losses for tax purposes.
“While harvesting our tax losses from stocks in December of 2021, we realized that our NFTs presented a problem. While every investment class has its losers, many of the NFTs we invested in were not only down big; they were now totally worthless… illiquid… unsellable,” Unsellable’s website says.
Unsellable claims that it will buy any NFT purchased on the Ethereum blockchain for more than one cent. Unsellable purchases the NFT, regardless of the quality or rarity, for one cent in Ethereum, then provides investors with a receipt, which allows them to write off the difference between the purchase price and the sale price on their taxes.
And they build up a stock of NFTs which might – maybe, you know – be worth something and they’ve built that stock at 1 cent each.
They build up a stock of stuff that is and will remain worthless.
NFT, to make money, requires someone to buy the thing from you – you can’t monetize it in any other way.
And all you’ve really got is a token with a serial number and a hyperlink – what is at the hyperlink can be changed by whoever has access to that server.
Banks write down the value of their assets, non performing loans, at their discretion. And humans can’t?
Hmmm. Are NFT’s bought as investments or as personal items? I’m not sure. We’ve got some original paintings around the house, purchased because my wife thought they were pretty pictures, which they are, but most of any value probably lies in the frames. I’m skeptical that we could take a write-off if we ever sold them.
The bit that makes the money is not any future value of the NFT but the $4 commission on the transaction.
Looks they’re going to be holding the modern equivalent of jumble sales.
Speculate with a cent a go.
Presumably they could buy hundreds of these things for the price of a night out.
It would only take one of them to hit paydirt…
It’s like metal detecting… hundreds of Heinz lids but you might just find a Roman hoard.
Worth a punt if you have a mind to.
“Banks write down the value of their assets, non performing loans, at their discretion. And humans can’t?”
Can’t let the peasants operate under the same rules as their Lords and Masters now can we?
“Geoffers”
All of them were initially bought with the same thought – “what if I hit it big’. They’re all worthless now.
The way these guys are making money is off the transaction fee. It’s basically just a different grift preying on people who lost a lot of money hoping the government will give them a break. The government won’t.
@Agammamon
I’d presume what’s at the hyperlink part of the original contract of sale. So presuming the contract’s transferable as being part of the NFT, that’d be actionable in law, wouldn’t it?
Thing is, there is no ‘contract’. You bought a token, that token has a serial number and hyperlink in it, and that’s it.
Nothing else is transferred. You don’t even have any rights over the thing linked to except normal copyright as it’s just a damned .jpeg. And even copyright only applies if its an original, non-procedurally created, thing. Which almost none of this stuff is.
Things like Cryptopunks and BAYC are ways to procedurally generate an image on demand – on demand because minting the token costs crypto and this allows you to push the transaction cost onto the buyer.
There was talk about how artist could get royalties and residuals from downstream sales – lies.
The token doesn’t know what a sale is. That’s part of the exchange to tell the token it’s being sold (vice ‘transferred’).
So you just use an exchange that doesn’t have this functionality to bypass it.
At least with tulip mania you got pretty flowers. Here all you get is a shitty uninteresting jpeg and then 500 people copying it to their profiles to mock you for paying for it.
Primer for crypto in general and NFT in particular.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
https://youtu.be/C6aeL83z_9Y
Some interesting thoughts on the legal position on NFTs.
Includes discussions on copyright and contracts.
Dear Mr Worstall
What the business appears to be doing is allowing investors – if that is the correct term – to realise a tax loss, which will be of value at their marginal rate. If the tax system allows this, then job done.
Whether the NFT is worth anything ever is irrelevant to the transaction, provided the fee charged makes a profit for Messrs Hallgren and Miller (peace be upon their pronouns).
There is scope for Messrs Hallgren and Miller to sell the NFTs (not financially thriving?*) on, possibly back to the original purchaser – a bit of bed-and-breakfasting, if allowed, otherwise hang on to them and maybe, just maybe some will have a realisable value.
Happy New Year.
DP
* The best Mr Duck could come up with.