this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2026
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Nah, it’s genius. A fantastic way to laundry money. It’s like buying paintings but you don’t even need to pay someone to appraise it or a good painter with some sort of good technique.
Yeah, but do paintings typically lose almost all of their value? I thought the idea was that the value should either stay the same or go up.
Either way, in this case, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
The point here is say you are in business with X party but it's illegal. X party can buy an nft worth nothing or generate one. You buy the NFT for the amount of your bill with X party. You've now technically not paid them for whatever illegal thing, instead you bought an nft from them. You could also break this down into multiple NFTs, buying 100 $100 NFTs from various "owners" that don't link back to X party through shell companies, and you've now paid them $10,000 "for pictures of chimps".
NFTs only exist for money laundering and illicit transfers. Once they've been transferred their value no longer matters, the business has been done.
And at least to some degree scamming people even if that's not the main focus. I know a few people that got full on scammed by it
Cash only exists for money laundering and illicit transfers and scamming
For Logan Paul, yes, he wanted it to go up.
But if this painting was laundering at work, the important part is that the seller can point to this transaction as "real". The IRS or the FBI might be looking into his sudden gains of half a million dollars, but when they do, they find that he sold Logan Paul half a million dollars of art.
The NFT part makes it incredibly easy to generate said art. Before NFTs, rich people would mark up paintings, and those had to go up in value, because they would buy them at 100,000$ and sell them for 200,000$, so the government would see 100,000$ of profit, but the next guy with the painting, he'd have to sell it for 300,000, claiming 100,000$ in profit, and the next guy, 400,000$, you get the idea.
NFTs can lose value in a way real art isnt allowed to because anyone can claim that's the price, and after the sale, they can be discarded as trash, essentially. New ones can be made in bulk for no effort, and its alright to sell 1000 NFTs at 100$ each, because you can just keep making them and "selling" them and no one has to care about their value in the same way because they're mass producible without that crashing the market.
Thank you for that thoughtful response. That all makes sense.
Real art can simply be destroyed if you want
You can also just never sell it, but buying it doesn't help you launder your own ill-gotten money, just other people's. The issue is creating it. It's not that big an issue, but NFTs are way more efficient.
Buy it, insure it, get "hacked" and then get your clean money from the insurance.