President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Can you expand on that?

When those NFT's went on sale, the reports said that the sales generated $4.5 million.

Are you saying that those sales were all Trump buying them himself?

I find it hard to believe, mostly because that isn't a Donald Trump kind of thing to do. He's done plenty of things that were silly (some massive failures), but he usually leaves someone else holding the bag for it. It wouldn't be in character for him to waste $4 million of his own money that way.

If those NFT sales were real, I also wouldn't say his "scam fell apart." It's true that on the aftermarket, the NFTs all depreciated in value and some of them are near worthless today. But by the time that was happening, he had already been paid -- whatever amount he saw from the $4.5 million in sales as part of his deal with the shady entity behind it. So if anything, his "scam" probably worked. He got paid a few million dollars for lending his name to something ridiculous, and some shmucks are now sitting on something worthless for having bought what he was selling. Which, if true, would be a fairly Trump-like outcome.

 

My understanding was that they priced the NFTs at $99 each, and they took home $4.5 million.

The price then spiked (one sold for more than $43K) and crashed.

That certainly has all the earmarks of a pump and dump scheme, if it was a market you could easily short into (can you even?) I am just not sure what you are alleging. Are you saying that they didn't really sell the NFTs to others at $99 each, and instead he bought them all himself, then somehow pumped the price up (how?), and he dumped them? What proof do you have of that? And if he did that, how did he profit, because it doesn't make much logical sense. He would have made no more from doing that than the $4.5 million he could make much more easily by selling them to others for $99 and sitting back and counting the money he earned.

My guess is that it was what it looks like: 1) He lent his name to something ridiculous and got paid for it. 2) They sold $4.5 million worth of NFTs. 3) There was a ton of demand for them, and they had no trouble selling them. 4) Then, in the aftermarket, the price did (obviously) get pumped up (my guess more on a speculative frenzy than someone trying to manipulate it higher), and it became a game of who would get holding the bag. 5) The price collapsed (because in the end, people were paying thousands of dollars for something that is intrinsically worthless and sanity eventually wins).

If that did happen, it actually isn't a "failure." He sold someone the right to use his name and banked whatever he saw of the $4.5 million they sold.