If this story is true, and it’s so perfect it may not be, it is possibly the most Reddity of all the posts in Reddit’s Relationships subreddit.
The gist of the story: dude [31m] loses a buttload of money “investing” in cryptocurrency and options trading, enraging his girlfriend [28f] who thinks crypto “investing” is reckless and stupid and maybe so is her boyfriend. So he decides to win her heart (and win her over to the joys of crypto) by proposing to her not with a ring but with an NFT (non-fungible token), which I don’t really understand but apparently it’s basically a worthless crypto token attached vaguely to something in the real or digital world, like say the Nyan cat gif. (Verge has an explainer that might be helpful but I gave up reading part way through because my brain was freezing over due to my complete non-comprehension.)
In any case, girlfriend [28f] did not feel stoked about his proposal.
Let’s let dude [31m] (who calls himself HandHoldingClub) explain his financial and romantic misadventures.
He starts off with a misleading title:
My [31M] fiancee/girlfriend [28F] is upset that I proposed with an NFT instead of a ring. What can I do about this?
Ok, but she’s NOT your fiancée/girlfriend; she hasn’t said yes to your proposal and may not even stick around as your girlfriend for very much longer if she has any goddamn sense.
For this post my fiance will be Jenna (fake name) I’m 31 and Jenna is 28.
Jenna and I have been together 4 years. We have discussed marriage and agreed we would both be interested in the right situation financially. Jenna has recently been mad at me as I lost a significant portion of my half of our savings in dogecoin.
You lost a significant portion of your savings on a crypto “investment” that was intended as a joke?
I did make half of it back with stock market options but then lost some more and she wanted me to quit so I did.
So in other words you’re still down big time.
Jenna does not have an investing mind and is more interested in saving your money in a checking account and then buying a house or something, but I want to show her how we can multiply our money with investing.
You’re not investing, dude; you’re gambling and you’re not very good at it.
Well things were going okay and then I found something that made my jaw drop. It was an NFT with significance to our life that she would love. I rushed to buy it with almost my entire life savings because I know this is a good one that could be worth a million when we’re older.
Worth a million what, regrets?
I got down on one knee and presented her the NFT and she started crying. She said I was TA [the asshole] and that how could I do this. I explained to her that in ten years we could buy a mansion with this and it’s a symbol of my love and devotion but she sees it as selfish and foolish.
In ten years, if you’re lucky, you may have enough to buy a picture of a mansion.
I don’t want to sell the NFT because it’s once in a lifetime and I don’t want to leave her.
I’m not sure you’re the one who’s going to do the leaving. You might have to buy yourself a NFT of a new girlfriend.
What can I do?
Unfortunately, dude, all of my good suggestions involve using a time machine to go back to before you started “investing” in crypto.
If you’re unable to get hold of a time machine or even an NFT of one I would suggest dumping your NFT for whatever you can get for it. Then never try crypto or options trading ever again. Put what remains of your nest egg into index funds, which are invested in real companies, not crypto will-o-the-wisps. Do your best to forget about your investment so it can grow in peace. Take up a more sensible hobby, like trainspotting, or planking, or heroin addiction.
Unless of course this is all fake, in which case congratulations for writing a post that manages to be horrifying yet completely plausible.
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God I hope it’s fake, but it could definitely be real. That poor woman. Good thing he let her know he was TA before marriage. Can you imagine actually being in a legal agreement with this person?
My dude, if it wasn’t “Once Upon A Time in Shaolin” then you would have been better off with the checking account and the house and the girl.
I’ve recently found myself embroiled in the world of NFTs; and I can very much believe this is true.
People have minted just about everything as NFTs. I jokingly suggested I should sell my soul as an NFT. Turns out loads of people have. There’s an NFT minting service that specialises in it.
Don’t worry; nobody does. It’s like quantum mechanics. People just think they do.
I was asked a while back if I could do a brief explanation for some people. I spent a couple of hours with a mate who was involved in the early days of Etherium (yet another cryptocurrency) and I was able to distill what he told me into 90 seconds. I don’t warrant the accuracy of this information; but the Decentraland people said I was “almost” right. So that’s good enough for me.
https://www.coachhousechambers.com/about-3
@Alan
I watched your video and had an immediate flashback to the time an Englishman tried to explain cricket to me.
@ Vicky P
There is something weird about a game that can last five days and still end up in a draw.
And that requires high level maths to figure out the score!
Seriously; can anyone understand this…?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duckworth–Lewis–Stern_method
I’m pretty sure that in a couple of decades, that NFT is going to be worth about as much as beanie babies are worth now, but okay.
@Alan
As a budding physicist about to graduate next spring, hopefully, if my divorce doesn’t throw off my educational track too much, yes, there are people who DO understand quantum mechanics, it’s just really hard to explain well to people who don’t have the mathematical background (e.g. all matter is best described as being waves and probability functions, and in a nutshell, those two things nicely explain a huge chunk of the “weirdness” people associate with quantum mechanics like uncertainty, electron tunneling, and how momentum and location are related as conjugates (the uncertainty principle). But I literally can’t even start to explain how any of it works without diagrams and even if I could draw here, it’d still be really hard for anyone who doesn’t have at least a basic understanding of derivatives and integrals. Joe Average has no need for that stuff when buying groceries so I don’t blame them for not knowing, but it is HARD to explain without it.)
But we still can’t explain NFTs or why otherwise sane humans would ever seriously invest in them.
@ seth
Oh indeed; I know there are actual experts who do understand quantum mechanics. I was thinking of Feynman’s quote.
But on that note, I think you may appreciate this.
As for NFTs generally; the key question is, what are you actually getting when you buy one? I put this to some people in the field. The answer is interesting.
Generally, you don’t actually get the artwork. That’s especially the case if it exists physically. The painting or sculpture or whatever stays what the seller. The situation can be different with digital art. Sometimes they will send you, or link to, a file. But of course digital works are endlessly reproducible.
You also don’t get any IP rights. That’s just the same as with art generally. If you buy a painting you get the physical object; but the artist (or whomever they have assigned the rights to) keeps the copyright. You can’t reproduce an artwork, or show photos or whatever, even of a work you own.
So in essence you get the right to say that you own the NFT. And that’s it.
That of course allows you to create value out of nothing.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Recently a gallery minted an NFT of one of their William Blake paintings; and used the cash raised for good causes. So they still have the painting, and the Blake estate still has the copyright. But now someone can say they own the NFT! (They also included a scan of the painting)
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/whitworth-gallery-in-manchester-mints-a-william-blake-nft-in-aid-of-community-causes
But the idea of ‘owning nothing’ is hardly novel in art. I attended a seminar by this bloke; and it was really interesting. But more here on all that for anyone who is interested; or can’t get to sleep.
https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3237&context=lawreview
@Alan
That is pretty brilliant, lol.
Dear Girlfriend: RUN!!!!!
Providing this is true, the guy is not only TA, but Tcompletewasteofoxygen.
@WWTH: At least Beanie Babies are a tangible object not subject to the whims of specific computers working. You can use them as paperweights or let dogs chew on them or something. Not so with NFT.
To be honest, NFT themselves are easy to understand. What’s hard to understand is what people think they are, because a lot of people make money off selling them mystical property that don’t make sense and often aren’t internally ocnsistent either.
Just like quantuum physics for the second part, but at least you don’t need an abstract mind or advanced maths to understand the concept of a piece of paper with an autority certifying when you wrote something on it and that it wasn’t changed since.
Alan wrote:
BTW, is there any simple explanation for why NFTs are associated with art or other actual content in the first place?
Is it like, a marketing gimmick in the form of roleplay where you pretend you’re buying goods while investing in some sort of indie cryptocurrency, and then you get a complimentary image file that represents the goods? Also, what slice of the cost is typically profit for the seller vs. used for generating a certificate for the payment? Is the last question misunderstanding NFTs too badly to make any sense?
@Lumipuna : that’s entirely social convention. Similar to how a certificate of property only have social convention value. In fact, NFT are basically a way to do certificate of properties, everything else is purely based on trust.
The thing is, unlike actual certificate, there is no body enforcing their value. The general idea is that NFT cannot be counterfeit or transferred without your consent, but that don’t replace a state or strong tradition of actually upholding the property. A NFT of a physical object don’t allow you to go to justice to retrieve that object if someone else take it from you, and the emitter of that NFT, in the state of the current law*, don’t have any obligation to respect his word toward what the NFT is supposed to represent.
If a country said “okay, we will use NFT instead of whatever we used before to keep track of owners of property”, then theses NFTs would actually mean something. But currently, the value of NFT is a pinky finger promise to whoever emit them that they will do something.
*depending on your exact country, the emitter might have some obligations, but don’t count on it, especially if you’re not a lawyer.
Bloke clearly has what is essentially a straightforward gambling problem and is calling it “investment” so he doesn’t have to admit it. He also plainly hasn’t “quit” because he went on to do exactly the same again by gambling yet more money away on the NFT. “Jenna” isn’t upset because he didn’t by a ring but because he’s gambling again.
I also suspect financial abuse, as he distinguishes between first losing “my half of our savings” and then losing “my life savings”, which suggests very strongly that when he refers to first losing “our” savings it’s really her money he lost.
I would guess that the story is a real one, precisely because he obviously isn’t telling the truth, and why lie about something you made up anyway? (Although it could be a really good piece of fiction writing with a very effective use of the “unreliable narrator” technique.)
Run away now “Jenna”! If you really do care for him you could suggest he seeks help for his gambling problem first, but you don’t want to give him any more money or put yourself in any position where you are financially involved with him or he has any access to your money or anything valuable that you own.
Looking at Finnish news today, I saw a perfect investment opportunity for confident crypto enthusiasts:
OneCoin-huijauksella rikastunut suomalaismies houkuttelee sijoittamaan kultakaivokseen – GTK:n asiantuntija: “Toivottavasti ihmiset eivät lankea tällaiseen” | Yle Uutiset | yle.fi
Finnish businessman named Kari Wahlroos (who currently lives abroad) is seeking investors for a highly dubious “gold mine project” in remote northern Finland. Back in the mid 2010s he was a major figure involved in the international cryptocurrency scam called OneCoin (that fleeced at least 40 million euro just from people in Finland). He pocketed millions and was never criminally charged.
The current mine project is called Tuohivirta, which translates roughly “moneybill flow” (it’s apparently a spoof on the formal business term kassavirta, “cash flow”). There’s a screenshot of English language promotion material that mispresents findings of the Finnish Geological Survey institute (the institute subsequently took those claims off their own website). An expert from the institute calls this whole thing an obvious scam.
This June, an unnamed Finnish citizen filed priority reservation for applying a prospecting permit in the area in question (highlighted on the map further down, next to the Lokka reservoir). It’s not yet an actual “mine reservation” despite what the Tuohivirta website claims. The unnamed person then tried to transfer the reservation to Wahlroos, but this wasn’t legally allowed. One of the other people involved in Tuohivirta is a Vietnamese person who is also a former OneCoin leader.
Tuohivirta now claims to be on the second round of seeking investors, though there’s no way to independently verify that anyone actually contributed on the “first round”. They want individual investors to contribute at least 10 000 euro – oh, and did we mention it can be in cryptocurrency?
Ohlmann – thanks but that’s not really what I asked. Alan claimed an NFT isn’t even meant to certify ownership of anything, other than the certificate itself. So I wondered how it’s supposed to be different from a regular crypto investment.
@Alan Robertshaw:
That at least sounds like a variant on the “adopt one of our trees/paintings/zoo animals” fundraisers that organizations have been doing for years, except they’re auctioning bragging rights to *one* item in their collection.
@Lumipuna : the answer stay that the link between the NFT and anything else is entirely a social convention. The NFT is just a declaration that cannot be modified afterward, how people react to that declaration is up to them.
When Alan say that NFT aren’t meant to certify ownership, that’s a bit more involved than that from what I have seen. No country or serious regulation autorithies use NFT for ownership, or would even consider them as an appropriate proof, so they don’t give legal ownership. They however *are* sold as meaning ownership to a vague, not really defined thing (generally called “a picture” or “the NFT of X”, both of which aren’t really defined). The vagueness is a feature and it base itself on the fact there’s plenty of non-legal sense to ownership.
It’s similar to that guy who sold real estate on the moon. His paper and stuff did not give any legal ownership, but the buyers did think it would give them ownership in an unspecified way, and his marketing was done very carefully to upkeep that line of thought without engaging his legal responsibility.
A socially accepted version of that are micro transaction in MMOs. When Blizzard “sell” you a mount, they don’t grant you ownership to anything in a legal sense. But the buyer agree that being able to use the mount in game count as ownership, at least enough to be worth money.
The current NFT basically play the same concept as theses two. Whether they are obvious scam like real estate on the moon, or shady but acceptable way to make people pony up money is debatable. I am in the “obvious, full on scam” camp because I believe almost every single NFT owners have convinced themselves of claims they don’t have. I don’t see the William Blake painting NFT reported by Alan as a good thing by any mean either, and in the best case scenario the buyer just created a lot of potential for family feuds or lawsuit, because even if *he* understand what he bought, that don’t mean everyone in his family do.
@ lumipuna
That’s a good question. No doubt someone had done a proper analysis of all this; but as far as I can tell, this is the basic story…
People started building communities online. Stuff like Second Life and similar.
Within those ‘games'(?) people traded things; and so they developed their own in-world currencies.
These games evolved into ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organizations‘; and the DAO’s utilised crypto currencies.
People ‘sold’ artworks within the DAOs and thus they ended up on the blockchain as NFTs.
Then marginalised people and groups just started to use crypto and blockchain generally, to bypass the gatekeeping in the traditional art market. And also to utilise ‘smart contracts’ to protect their IP rights. Although a lot of the time it was almost like a Patreon thing. People knew they weren’t actually getting anything material, but they wanted to support a particular artist they liked.
So at first NFTs were quite a niche thing. Then that Beeple sold at Christies for 69 million; and suddenly NFTs were all the rage generally. And here we are.
But it is all a bit in flux at the moment. Like this for example…
https://www.apollo-magazine.com/basquiat-nft-intellectual-property-copyright/
I like moon custafer and olhmanns’ adopt an animal/selling the moon/naming a star examples.
Of course an NFT can represent anything; so it could be a substitute for the normal bits of paper that gives you the title to an actual physical real world thing too.
But with another bit of synchronicity; this just popped up in my emails. So if anyone else wants to register…
https://academy.difc.ae/?cID=730&utm_source=DIFC+Academy+Subscribtion+list&utm_campaign=31d1ffd2b9-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_05_29_09_57_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_224081d197-31d1ffd2b9-116262848
ETA:
It costs around $70 to mint an NFT. There are various options though; including some organisations that claim to do ‘carbon neutral’ NFTs. The amount of electricity used to verify NFTs, and blockchain transactions generally, is a major issue with them.
Thanks, Alan.
So, apparently it started from a subculture of very online people using cryptocurrencies for small transactions in online trade of digital items (and digitally transmitted services?) that either couldn’t be replicated or had only very context-specific sale value. And then it became a gimmick for digital artists selling copies of their work to fans who either liked playing with crypto or wanted to pretend-own an artwork. And then it became a popular speculation thingy and now (I hear) people are just making NFTs decorated with some random art they saw online.
Ok. And I gather these can then increase in value due to intertwinement of trading and minting that’s somehow inherent to cryptothingies and which I won’t try to understand further…
Ohlmann:
Ah, you mean those online games where you buy can access to useful features and tokens one horse at a time? I understand that’s technically serving access to a service, not “ownership” of anything, though vendors certainly like to muddle that distinction in their marketing.
Good point. Well, at least that’s more legit business to lawyers like our friend Alan demonstrates.
@ lumipuna
Yup. “a younger, digitally native, generation” as it’s been described.
It’s funny though, when Christies auctioned that Beeple people asked if they would accept crypto. The initial response was “Eh? Of course not.” But then that was seen as not exactly putting money where mouth was. So now they do. For some stuff anyway.
https://news.artnet.com/market/cryptocurrency-sothebys-christies-1982054
That Beeple though had an initial reserve price of $100. The idea was to show how accessible art was. Then the bidding reached $69 million.
But in fairness, Beeple puts his work out as Beeple_Crap so it’s not like people don’t know what they’re getting in to.
Also, note the taped banana here on one of his works:
That’s quite symbolic; and a bit of a clue. More details here for anyone who wishes to follow up.
I was just talking with a friend (named Dave) over the weekend about money, investments, and retirement. It’s always been a subject I’ve been interested in discussing, but the one friend I had who enjoyed it too is no longer in my life but I putter on thinking about it. Dave said he didn’t really get it, and I said it’s actually easy. But it’s only easy if you aren’t trying to get rich quick, get hot tips, trade over and over. It sounds infinitely boring, but investing in low fee index funds in a 401k or Roth IRA – and not touching it until you retire – is the best way for the vast majority of people to manage their retirement savings.
All of these crypto schemes and digital whatnots are just another iteration of the Tulip frenzy, as someone else mentioned the Beanie Baby frenzy, and any other of the countless financial frenzies that have happened over the years. A few people get lucky, the rest get caught up in it and end up losing all of their money and more.
If you crave excitement and whatever, sure, but regular people should just play it cool. I can’t believe the woman in the story is even still with this guy. Not only is he just a gambler, he’s super impulsive – what else has he done on just crazy whims? I say dump him and get him out of your life quick woman!