World’s ‘First NFT Vending Machine’ Didn’t Work And Neither Did The NFTs
from the vend-what-now? dept
It’s difficult to overstate the amount of scammy bullshit that permeates the NFT space at the moment. On any given day my inbox is absolutely inundated with PR pitches for NFT-related products that are either pushing something that isn’t really new, don’t actually work, aren’t actually innovative if you eliminate the NFTs (the world’s first NFT-based escape room!) or are just outright scams.
The latest case in point: one company recently unveiled what it declared was the world’s first “NFT vending machine” in Manhattan. The company issues a press release heralding the amazing innovation of the idea:
Located just off Wall Street, the machine accepts USD credit and debit cards then dispenses a box with a unique code inside it for the chosen NFT, which is easily redeemable on the Neon platform. With no cryptocurrency, crypto wallet or specialized knowledge required, Neon has built the simplest, most accessible way to buy, sell and trade NFTs in the real world. The vending machine is open 24 hours a day.
Like most NFT-related PR spam, the launch was then picked up by literally thousands of news outlets, blogs, and other sources that were happy to parrot the idea completely unskeptically.
In this case the vending machine only really “sold” two “products”: a “color” for $5.99 and a “party pigeon” for $420.69. But when a reporter actually bothered to investigate the machine a week later, they found that neither the vending machine nor the NFTs it sold actually worked. First the machine simply failed to actually disperse any product:
As if buying a bag of Cheetos, I punched in my selection and tapped my credit card. The machine beeped, the metal coil began to turn – and then, nothing. My NFT was stuck. I banged on the glass, but it refused to drop. I noticed two security cameras watching me, and felt self-conscious. Was I the first person in the world to lose money while physically buying an NFT?
Then, when the reporter was finally able to purchase something, the something he purchased wound up not working at all:
“There was another snag when I redeemed my prize. I scanned my QR code, which directed me to a website and told me to create an account on the Neon marketplace. Then I had to enter a 12-digit sequence on my little slip of paper to mint my NFT. But instead of getting a color, based on a random six-digit “hex code” used by web designers, I got a five digit string that resulted in a blank square.”
Thousands of blogs’ worth of press release hype and it takes a week for a reporter to actually bother to see if the product being hyped actually works. This cycle repeats itself thousands of times every week as opportunistic folks (including the press) try to cash in on the NFT hype cycle.
Again, there surely are innovative and creative applications for NFT-based technologies, but right now the sector is just so filled with half-baked ideas, scams, and opportunistic gibberish it’s hard to see how this doesn’t ultimately derail the entire experiment and taint the conceptual brand in perpetuity.
Filed Under: nft, nft vending machine
Comments on “World’s ‘First NFT Vending Machine’ Didn’t Work And Neither Did The NFTs”
Cue Mel Brooks…
“I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING FOR SALE!”
The French peasants might as well be talking about web3…
What else would an NFT vending machine do?
You pay money and you get nothing of value in return, sounds like the machine is working just fine to me.
“$420.69”
AND NO ONE THOUGHT THAT WAS ODD??
Humans, how the fsck are you still alive?
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somethings have simply resisted logical analysis for much/all of recorded history
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You said to the immortal sociopath who’s been watching the hairless apes from the beginning.
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Chances are, they did think it was odd, and someone with more money than sense paid up specifically because of the childish joke.
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“with more money than sense”
This is one of the disturbing things about humans I’ve never managed to figure out.
How the fsck do people this stupid get rich or is it a function of getting rich?
I mean I know the usual pattern is they get rich & then get more evil to gather more money despite having more than they could spend in 3 lifetimes, but not all of them fall victim to nigerian prince level scams.
Stop making stupid people rich?
Here is a brain teaser, how is it people dumb enough to buy the $420.69 package are still smart enough to pay less in taxes than you?
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“How the fsck do people this stupid get rich or is it a function of getting rich?”
Some are born into money. Some get lucky and find work that pays a lot for relatively little intellectual skill requirements (see: The Peter Principle). Some simply don’t have the morals that stop therm from stealing from or defrauding others. The rest don’t actually have money, they just live off credit till the bailiffs come calling.
“Here is a brain teaser, how is it people dumb enough to buy the $420.69 package are still smart enough to pay less in taxes than you?”
The idea that not paying into the system you benefit from and forcing people with less than you to pick up the slack is “smart” is rather destructive short-term thinking and describes a basic problem of equating money with intelligence or worth.
Some of the brightest people I’ve ever known work in healthcare, child psychology, education or research and get paid poverty wages, they accept that because of the greater good they do. Some of the dumbest people I’ve ever met work in fields that provide no value to humanity yet pay handsomely for work that nobody would miss, or even be better off without if it didn’t exist.
Being rich does not necessarily require intelligence, and in fact having a combination of empathy and knowledge can hinder a person if they don’t spend their lives chasing wealth. Also, giving the appearance of being rich doesn’t mean you actually are – in fact, the people who boast loudest about being rich are usually those who are not any such thing. Maybe the people who dropped that money on an NFT are people who got lucky buying BitCoin early or had more spare cash than more people for other reasons. Maybe the money they dropped is what they should have been paying to the IRS and they’re about to have everything audited and seized for tax evasion, who knows?
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This! The Peter Principle should be the second-most famous internet meme, and yet somehow it isn’t. We need to start the ball rolling, right here. (The first-most imortant meme? You need to ask?! (Hint: Mike hisownself coined it.))
My turn: you just described the Welfare Cadillac Syndrome.
Recently read the most lucid explanation about how NFTs work
Namely in this PVP comic strip.
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Well, that strip is pretty accurate…
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‘You sell an idiot nothing, and give them bad art as their receipt.‘
That does seem to be NFT’s in a nutshell, so yeah, I’d say they nailed it.
What????
Here is the BOX with your NON-FUNGIGLE token in it.
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We guarantee the box does not contain a fudgesicle.
BWAHAHA! Forgive me, reporter. Thank you for taking the bullet.
This reads like a line out of a sci-fi novel written by an inexperienced writer… or out of a “dystopian” short story written by a neural network in 2022.
Yes, it did work.
There is a vending machine. It takes your credit card information and dispenses nothing.
That’s 100% what NFTs are all about – non-functioning-things.
Stop saying NFTs might have valid non scam uses.
They are not just sometimes a scam. They are always a scam by its very nature. Fake scarcity in the digital world? That is by design an intentional attempt to defraud.
Everyone that defends the scam is either aggressively ignorant or in on the con themselves. ZERO exceptions.
The point of nfts is you buy a link to an image ownership is listed on a block chain if some people are rich and stupid they may pay 1000s of dollars to say I own this image . The main problem is it costs alot of energy to make and maintain the block chain also companys are buying nfts and claiming they are worth 1000s of dollars as we have seen with various crypto coin schemes most of the nft market seems to be run by scammers digital items skins have being bought on mmos and online games like call of duty for years which are linked to the gamer tag, or username account of the player eg it’s possible to have ownership of a digital item without using a block chain
Lacking the proper punctuation, this phrase jumped out at me. I think that AC’s post (somewhat above yours) was aimed specifically at responding to you. In the (expected) event that other postings will be inserted between the two, I’ll simply quote him (her?) here, for your benefit:
A vending machine for NFTs…
“Just in case I’m running out of NFT and I wished I had a way to get one right now”, said nobody ever.
Vend me oh vend me
That describes 90-some percent of vending machines in general regardless of the product on “offer”.
Guess it’s better than paying 14.99 shipping and handling for your NFT.
Lol.
Pigeons Buy Worthless Pigeons
So, I searched for “party pigeons” on Google, which lead me to https://partypigeons.io
This page tells you all about how your party pigeon is made unique, which apparently involves generating an image algorithmically based upon 70 attributes. (Except the pigeon might get one of the 10 “prize” party pigeons that are not algorithmically generated that are apparently offered as a bonus.)
If their 70 attributes are binary, that is actually 1.18 sextillion possible pigeons.
Which, if my math is right, works out to 168,655,945,817 pigeons for every pigeon…I mean, every person on the planet, more or less.
They claim the offering is limited to 10,000 unique party pigeons. But even if they do have a 10,000 limit in the software, all they have to do is turn that off to make $71 trillion or therabouts.
Unfortunately, everyone will be bored to death of party pigeons long before that point, and party pigeons will wind up being worth about $.0000001 each.
Which means all the pigeons who paid $420.69 each got as close to nothing as any NFT can offer.
But it’s not a rip-off, nosiree. Because aassuming the stupid vending machine works, the pigeons all get exactly the party pigeon they paid to buy and they can prove their ownership of all $0.0000001 of it forever.
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…well…
For some the ownership is worth more than the cost. Look at people paying outrageous prices for $500 double die coins to fill a collection hole.
Or Jack Mehoff going for $500 to finish a sport card year.
Or $500 for a free AOL disk!
Value and cost are not equal. The value a buyer believes is unrelated to cost. They will pay what they are willing to pay.