@fourthstartcg, I’ll take the bait. You are the most short sighted person I’ve ever seen on this forum. If it isn’t pokemon related, you dismiss it instantly or make a mockery of it. Whether you want to admit it or not, efour is one of the most valuable collecting resources because of the diverse opinions and experiences members have. It isn’t about pushing everything to meet your agenda, but rather about letting diverse points of views be discussed. Lock the thread. Delete my comment. You control the conversation.
You are taking things way too seriously. I made a joke and someone quoted me with a massive text block.
Once you start talking about “agendas” and “controlling the conversation” you’ve gone full conspiracy. Take a breath, walk away from the computer, and ask yourself if jokes in an NFT thread are really something to get worked up over.
Saying it’s a joke is a poor excuse. I believe you’re dismissive.
It’s not a conspiracy theory. If I start a thread on another certain card game, it will be locked or deleted. This is my way to access diverse opinions from collectors all over the world and yet I feel like certain topics can’t be discussed or have to be tip-toed around.
1 Like
Probably cause this is a Pokémon forum and not a general TCG forum.
@qwachansey , there are side collection topics for MTG, Digimon, Harry Potter, Boxing, Hockey and Metroid. That’s only the most recent page. I don’t understand why certain ones are okay and others aren’t.
We’re talking about NFTs in this thread.
I believe the entire point of a joke is to be dismissive, but that’s another argument.
This is completely off topic, so I will indulge it for a little bit, but as per the rules if you have any additional questions or complaints about moderation practices the correct avenue is to bring it up in PMs with a staff member, not a public thread and certainly not a public thread on a different topic.
There is literally one (1) TCG that we do not allow discussion on. Meta Zoo has constantly been shilled on the forum by people either directly or indirectly compensated by the owner. The owner has slandered E4 and its members, and trolled the site several times. Despite this, we still allowed conversation for months, hoping that something positive would come out. Eventually it became clear that there would never be a positive thread that just focused on collecting or appreciating the game. Every question was about money, long-term future, or generally inviting all sorts of arguments. The well has been poisoned here on E4 so we take action to stop the further devolution of conversation.
You are more than welcome to discuss NFTs or other TCGs on their own dedicated forum. But cherry-picking one situation to spin into some narrative about “agendas” and “controlling the conversation” is ridiculous.
As noted, let’s get this thread on track. Any further posts on this topic will be removed.
7 Likes
The first NFTs I bought were Funko Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It’s on the WAX blockchain which claims to be carbon neutral. I’d have to do more research to confirm it, but hadn’t thought too deeply about it before today’s discussion. I liked the Funko NFTs because you get physical Funko pops for completing a master set and/or acquiring the legendary or grail NFTs. This is a great middle ground for me because I have a hard time seeing long term value in the NFTs themselves, but can clearly see value in getting a limited Funko pop. The market was pretty active and lots of items were cheap. People would be willing to trade $0.50 common NFTs so it appeared as if there was some genuine interest and not just stonkers trying to flip. On the downside, buying WAX to use for purchases on the secondary market was a nightmare to figure out. There’s lots of improvements that need to take place before widespread participation. I’m also curious to see the longevity of the NFT values.
I think Funko is in a unique position to appeal to both NFT collectors and physical Funko collectors. It’s the only NFT project I’ve been genuinely interested in.
5 Likes
@primordialaa, A lot of people ask me to make my youtube thumbnails into NFT’s. Since I can’t tell what is real life and a meme in the NFT world, is this possible? Asking for a friend 
Certainly possible although I wouldn’t imagine there would be a significant market for it (I’ve been surprised before). You’d need to put them into ipfs and make a contract that points to them. I *think* opensea has a process to do this easily but I’ve never been on that side of it so I’m not entirely sure. Obv just make sure the images don’t have any TPCi / anything they would get you in trouble copyright wise
1 Like
I can recommend Opensea! Very easy to create your own NFT (just upload a .PNG or .JPEG file) and set-up a collection. You need a wallet (e.g. Metamask) to create the NFT though.
No joke, I have some btc on some cloud-mining service which was worth $1200 at some point. When I tried to sell it, they said the amount was too low to withdraw. I’m literally too poor to participate in this market. Having read this whole thread makes me think some people live in a different world than me.
Another poor man’s anecdote: I was willing to put some money into ETH when it was $19. Bought some for $50 and sold for $500. If I would’ve been more open-minded I could be retired by now.
1 Like
Alright, my 2 cents for whoever cares:
Very interesting thread with a new world that doesn’t make sense to me, but is very intriguing.
Spend a couple of days following trends to finally buy some stuff a week ago.
What I’ve learned:
- Setting up doesn’t take that long, but does cost a few hundred dollars before even being able to sell (mostly gas).
- Be familiar with everything before buying and read about safety breaches and scams, it can be tricky.
- You pay fees for both buying and selling (2.5% to opensea, and sometimes to the create another 3%), opensea always wins.
- Made a few hundred bucks, felt cute, might delete later.
- It feels like gambling to me in a pyramid scheme environment, early adapters are just naturally more successful in this environment.
- I have a hard time getting genuinely excited about this “art”, but if it would make me big bucks I guess I love the item too. “Established” projects are out of reach, new mints are all lame copycats.
- The environmental part is making it even harder for me to enjoy, I love the concept of Ethereum 2.0, that’s why I bought Ethereum in the first place. Hope they are able to roll it out within a year.
Tldr: I tried it, stil feels meh, still intrigued
3 Likes
I’ve found a couple projects that I think were still launching/“minting” items but then I couldn’t figure out how to mint the new ones at the floor price. I’ve got some ether that I mined long ago ready in a coinbase wallet (I literally heated my house a couple winters with two to three mining rigs so more green than running in the summer) that I was going to spend on opensea but yeah I couldn’t figure it out and all I could seem to buy were ones being flipped.
So are there any people out there who genuinely collect NFTs for fun who haven’t sold and made a large profit? Cause every post I recall seeing on here is either from someone who has made thousands-millions, or someone replying to that persons profit post who is obviously hyped and just bought in. I’m trying to figure out if there is any actual collectible merit to any of these or if it’s just that most people like making money and so they like the thing that makes them money. Basically, are there any not for profit collectors?
2 Likes
Everyone is a mix, as they should be. Like I said earlier, everything I’m collecting is very specific & just from artists I enjoy. But just like in Pokemon I’m using flipping to support that as much as possible rather than putting in more $.
Since the content creator thread was locked i’ll just post this here
There’s plenty and I’m one of them, but the space is definitely crowded with speculators at the moment. If you follow NFT maxis though you can get a sense of how much they love some of their NFTs just like people here and their collections. Also people are building pretty cool online galleries to show off their collection eg: oncyber.io/vvd
Real question - If any of you who partake in NFT’s found out via proven research that your NFT was the equivalent of lighting a small forest on fire just to create a little bit of code for a pixelated character, would you stop and try to get out the moment that research came out?
1 Like
Everyone should do what they like, including this, But when it hurts the earth in such a spectacular way, I am extremely against NFT’s. Even when there is crazy money to be made, the amount of energy it takes to make some weird characters (which some people love which is fine), it will eventually costs more to cope with the consequences of using that amount of energy.
Yes, some part of the energy that is used by minting crypto, or making NFT’s is renewable. But that energy could also have been used by something that is actually needed by society. The best way to make the world more green is to make energy more green, but also by using less energy, which NFT’s really do not help with.
It is a stupid, anti-earth, far from society concept.
I agree that crypto wastes a lot of energy but I’d like to put a counter-point to the discussion just to play devil’s advocate:
If we look at Pokemon cards, there is energy wasted and pollution created to manufacture cardboard used for the cards, manufacturing the ink, the packaging, actually printing the cards, distributing them (sometimes they need to go overseas in highly-polluting ships), etc. Then there is the aftermarket of us, where cards printed 20 years ago are continuing to contribute to adverse environmental conditions because we are flipping these cards and wasting airplane fuel to ship them around the country/globe. Honestly just take 10 seconds to consider the amount of fuel + cardboard/plastic packaging wasted with people sending cards to PSA in the last year. The backlog is literally over a million cards; that’s a lot of plastic. And that’s not even considering the amount of waste generated by PSA to send the cards back to customers…
Conversely, digital goods need energy to maintain the network they exist in, but many of these other real-world actions that contribute to pollution are not applicable.
I know I am pushing things a bit to the extreme here, but I’m trying to say that other forms of collectibles are not guiltless at all. Further, crypto is also being continuously pushed to renewable, cleaner energy (there are huge economic incentives for miners to do so).
Overall I think the criticism of crypto being wasteful of energy is just going to be a temporary problem. In the long-run the economically efficient thing to do is move to renewable energy, and for this reason it will for sure happen. We may in fact live to see a day where people criticize physical trading cards for being so much more wasteful than NFTs. If I had to put money on it today, I bet we do see this future.
That being said, I do believe a lot of the current NFTs are really just pump-and-dumps and very few will care about their collectible status a decade from now