@i-am-letosexual on Tumblr

Well, it’s a good thing he at least tried to address concerns before today.

Because today we all found out:

1. There ain’t one NFT. There’s 1,105 of them. That means that instead of his NFT using approximately 75 kWh (the same amount of energy as an average US household would use in about 2.5 days (source)), his NFTs are going to use a collective 82,875 kWh (the same amount of energy as an average US household would use in about seven and a half fucking years).

2. There’s three tiers. This doesn’t affect the environmental impact, but it does speak to the business tactics of the people behind this project. All along, it’s been touted as an animated NFT of Colin dancing to a song that was chosen by him and the TSR crew. NOT TRUE. Only five of the 1,105 NFTs being sold are of this - and those five “bad boys” are being sold to the highest bidders. The other 1,100 NFTs are not what was promised at all. This is like Apple advertising a new iPhone for weeks, then revealing on release day that only the five richest people can buy the iPhone they’ve been advertising - but everyone else can choose one of these two new iPod models, instead. It’s a bait and switch, people.

3. They’re ridiculously expensive. Not only are the five dancing Colin NFTs going to the highest bidders, but the base tier ones, the lowest priced ones that only provide virtual “perks” and the presumed glory (source needed) of owning an NFT are going to be sold for .1 ETH (Etherium) a piece. You probably don’t know off-hand how much real world money that equates to. It sounds like a low price, doesn’t it? IT’S NOT. Each of the basic first tier NFTs costs $179 US dollars. We’re not even given a price tag for the second tier NFTs… but we can safely assume they’ll be asking a good deal more for those. The third tier ones are listed as having a value of 13 ETH (equivalent to $23,202 USD), so I’m assuming that’s the starting bid.

Yes, you read that right. TSR is looking to make at least $300,000 dollars off of Colin O’Donoghue’s NFTs.

Listen, I said I would continue to support Colin himself, even though I am not supporting this project. I said I was moved by his attempt to smooth things over and address fans’ concerns. But now I see why he actually did it - because he knew damn well that if we were unhappy already, we’d be seriously disturbed once all this additional shit hit the fan. It wasn’t him listening to us or trying to make things right - it was pre-emptive damage control.

I allowed myself to fall into the seductive belief that Colin just got in a little over his head, maybe didn’t fully understand what he was signing up for, and maybe it was too late to back out now or else he would… hell, I even let myself imagine that maybe poor, innocent Colin was being taken advantage of - that his fame and fandom were being used to make money for greedy NFT bros.

But you don’t accidentally stumble into a $300,000+ profit business venture. You don’t unintentionally lend your voice and likeness to a three part video tutorial to walk your fans through the process of turning their real-world cash into virtual currency that they can fund that venture with. You don’t innocently try to do damage control two days before dropping a metric shit-ton of exactly what everyone’s afraid of onto their proverbial doorsteps.

WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK.

This isn’t what I signed on for.

i-am-letosexual reblogged

iverna

I’m actually legit mad about this so here’s a breakdown of the problem. The short version: it’s a scam. Literally. The long version:

NFTs have value when people agree that they have value. If I put an NFT up for sale, and someone buys it for $5, it’s now worth $5. The person who bought it will be hoping to sell it for more than that, to make money, and the more money an NFT makes, the more valuable it is to potential investors. And the artist gets a cut every time the NFT is sold. There’s more to it but as I understand it, that’s basically the system.

What TSR is doing is putting up NFTs with added incentives to buy them. The NFT itself is just a graphic. But if you buy that graphic, for $170, you also get “access as a guest” to a TV show hosted by Colin. If you buy the other graphic, price unstated, you also get tickets to a concert with Colin and some of his pals, and a few other bonuses.

Very few people would spend $170 on a digital graphic. It’s not custom-made, it’s just a graphic. You get the exact same thing if you just right-click and save. But people would absolutely pay to go to a concert with Colin.

The NFTs with the concert extras don’t have a stated price; I’m going to assume they’ll be a lot more expensive.

But say someone buys the NFT for $170. It now seems to be worth $170. It would never, ever, be worth that all by itself. The person who bought it can now sell it for $170, or more; TSR gets a cut of the price, and the person who buys it thinks they’re getting something worth $170, even though in reality, the only reason why $170 was spent on it in the first place was that there were all those extras attached to it. Extras that the new buyer won’t get.

What TSR is doing is artifically inflating the value of the NFT by making it look like people are willing to spend this much money on it. It’s like if my art prints usually sell for $10, but I offer one for $100, which comes with a free smartphone. Someone would buy it because $100 for a smartphone is a bargain. I then claim that my art prints are now worth $100, because look, someone bought one for that price. So someone buys just the print for $100. They spend $100 on an item that’s worth $10. That’s a scam. (And, depending on the specifics, it can also be tax evasion.)

The whole thing is a scam and a glorified pyramid scheme. Because the only way to make money with it is to sell to someone else, and rip them off. The value of the NFT is a sham from the start. It’s a pyramid scheme built on nothing.

And to add to the scammy vibe of all this, the “extras” are all very vague. Is the concert in Dublin going to feature Colin, or is he just attending it? No idea. What does “access as a guest” mean, will you be a guest on the show or just in the audience, is it real or virtual? Again, no details.

It sounds great, but when you boil it down, even the extras have potentially relatively little value (depending on how much the NFT costs). The value of things like getting to meet Colin, taking a photo with him, etc, would be nothing if you’re not a fan of his. It costs them basically nothing, but they can make a ton of money with it and inflate the value of their NFTs with it.

It’s clever, and unfortunately it’ll probably work and some people will get dragged in. I just wanted to explain it in case it helps at all. I think it’s a rip-off, and the fact that they’re using Colin’s fame from his time on OUAT for this, to essentially rip off his fans, is just gross in my opinion.

delightfully-difficult-pirate

Here is a good video breaking down what an NFT is and why they are legally problematic crap and very easy for scammers to use to bilk money out of people.

This is really informative, thank you! It’s long but well worth a watch because he really explains it well, and it’s all very relevant. And his point about the art itself being bad made me laugh because it’s so true, god, it’s all so bad.

He actually brings up the other BIG potential pitfall in this, which only occurred to me after I wrote the initial post. Which is that most of what you’re buying, i.e., all of the promised extras, are potentially not part of the NFT. Meaning they’re not officially part of what you’re buying. Meaning that if you buy the NFT in order to get flights to Dublin and a dinner with Colin, TSR can say “haha what, no, that’s not in the contract” and there’ll be nothing you can do. You can’t claim you never got what you paid for, because officially, you only paid for the NFT. You have to trust them to do what they promised, which, given what they’re doing here, I would not.

I realised that before watching this video. Then I watched, and… he literally talks about a case where exactly this happened, some NBA player promised all kinds of things associated with his NFTs that he then backed out of. No refunds. No recourse. Tough luck.

So it’s not even like buying an art print that comes with a free smartphone. It’s like buying an art print that I told you will come with a free smartphone, but the smartphone isn’t actually mentioned anywhere in the product description or sales terms. You’ll just have to trust me to actually give it to you.

Well, that, or they do make the plane tickets and dinner and meet and greet part of the NFT, in which case, as explained in this video, if the person who buys the NFT sells it to someone else, that someone else might also then be entitled to all those things. That could get really awkward, not to mention expensive.

So at best, this whole thing is just straightforward fraud. It could easily be a lot worse than that. I wouldn’t touch any of it with a ten-foot pole. Yikes.