And that’s a lot of the trick. Folks sell it amongst themselves to create the illusion of demand. Some sucker comes along and buys it, and the trap is sprung.

I wish I was a more unethical person. I feel like I could do really well in this space.

It’s easy to look at something and think “I can do that”, but the reality is such a scam would be a lot of hard work. To start with, no one would know your NFT existed.

If you’re really confident, then you should try it. You can always return the money if you’re successful.

I think that's rather the point of this whole thread, anyone can make an NFT for anything. Many are. If you're quick to somebody else's you can jump on their work, let them promote it as lol-satire while you do your trading to make it seem very popular and … profit!

> I wish I was a more unethical person. I feel like I could do really well in this space

Chasing money for ... ? The answer to that question doesn't usually lead anywhere good.

Stay ethical, if you are you're killing it.

Ethics pays more than in good feelings. If you decide to be unethical, eventually you'll be only surrounded by unethical people.

Most people cash out before this happens

I don't think most people cash out and move to the forest where the consequences of their actions never reach them.

Because of the mass recording of our society, I actually think a reckoning of some sort may happen. At least, future generations will have quite the magnifying glass to judge our actions.

I'm actually really hyped for 40 years in the future to see how historians interpret the mountain of videos we'll have.

My optimistic take is the next generation will be able to learn more from the past than ever before from it.

expensive way to give the team all of your ether from royalty splits over time, this assumption really ignores this disincentive or the trading section of the practically every nft discord, it requires assuming all the ENS addresses involved are also colluding and the same constructive entity wash trading

People looking from the outside of NFTs seem to believe this kind of wash trading is a dominant source of volume. In my experience, it's pretty rare and there's a lot of organic demand around each new "hot" NFT. A better way to think of these is each successful NFT series is a mini-bubble, people inside the scene develop an instinct for features might make an NFT desirable but no one can accurately guess the top. So they play hot potato with each other, where buying earlier increases chances of a successful exit.

> In my experience, it's pretty rare

How could you possibly know this? Basically the entire blockchain ecosystem is set up to prevent distinguishing whether wash trading is prevalent or not.

Edit: And even if you can establish that there's multiple people involved, they still might be colluding among themselves to create the illusion of demand.

Participation in discords and NFT trading telegrams. You can see what people buy and that often the hot potato ladder involves multiple verifiably distinct persons.

Is the last person who bought it before the interest diminishes the bag holder?

Yeah, that's right. Though crypto now seems to experience interlocked cycles of "rotations", so interest sometimes comes back after a few months

What are popular telegram groups and discord channel for NFT trading?

There is usually a Discord associated with each project (including the one in this post)

Public NFT trading telegrams are a very noisy/scam-y scene, I think that many people gravitate towards smaller private ones with a circle of <50 friends.

The creators can also set a royalty percentage for themselves which would give them a share of each transaction. Unclear if that's what they did in this case.

If you are in a state with a sales tax, would you have to pay that?