Starbucks Sold 2,000 NFTs In 20 Minutes (theverge.com) 49
Yesterday, Starbucks sold all of its 2,000 NFT "Journey Stamps" in under 20 minutes. They were the company's first paid collection of NFTs and were priced at $100 each. The Verge reports: The coffee company first launched its NFT and Web3 push in December, when it opened up a new membership program called Starbucks Odyssey. An extension of the existing Starbucks rewards program that gives customers perks like free drink upgrades, Odyssey promises to deliver new benefits and "immersive coffee experiences that [customers] cannot get anywhere else" as members complete games, quizzes, and make purchases. Rewards might include virtual classes, access to merchandise, or a trip to a Starbucks coffee farm at higher membership tiers. Free coffee, notably, isn't listed as a possible reward. Purchasing an NFT gives members additional "points" that they can use to level up their tier.
i love the uneducated (Score:4, Funny)
Re:i love the uneducated (Score:5, Insightful)
Starbucks drinkers are your stereo typical rural right winger.
Tell me you've never been to a Starbucks without telling me you've never been to a Starbucks.
Anecdotally, the people who I'd assume fall on that side of the political spectrum by virtue of their "blue collar" employment, get their covfefe fix at McDonald's, Dunkin' Donuts, and Wawa. The latter of which actually does have fairly decent coffee.
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He was so nice when he was coming to see me as his drug dealer, but when he did his job and treated me like a profit center, I didn't like it!
Ugh. (Score:2)
I defer to Picard on this one. [tenor.com]
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The earl-grey tea drinker?
The man knows his coffee...
Re:Funny how Slashdot is so anti-NFTs (Score:4, Informative)
The reason is that NFTs are just hyperlinks to JPEGs, it's hardly a "technology."
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Because NFTs manage to simultaneously run afoul of both the liberal ideology of moving towards a post-scarcity economy, and the conservative ideology of earning money from the fruits of your labor by producing a useful good or service.
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a post-scarcity economy
A particular NFT may be unique, but an infinite variety of other NFTs can be produced, so there is no scarcity It is similar to cryptocurrencies: The number of Bitcoins is limited, but anyone can introduce yet another cryptocurrency.
producing a useful good or service.
If people are willing to pay for them, then, by definition, they have value. Your subjective judgment that other people are stupid is irrelevant.
Re: Funny how Slashdot is so anti-NFTs (Score:2)
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A particular NFT may be unique, but an infinite variety of other NFTs can be produced, so there is no scarcity It is similar to cryptocurrencies.
You wouldn't be able to produce a NFT that Starbucks (or as I posed earlier, that porn site I don't really want to name) recognizes and grants specific membership benefits for holding. The artificial scarcity is based on the fact that the entities issuing the NFTs chose a hard cap rather than continuing to mint additional NFTs as they sold (which obviously would defeat their purpose as collectables). What's wrong with artificial scarcity? Allow me to cite a line from The Hacker Manifesto:
This is our worl
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Yeah, right. How long do you think it will be before they pitch "Get your Series 2 NFTs right here!"
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For the record nfts were invented because the government cracked down on tax evasion scams using art and the people doing the scams thought that they could replace the art with nfts and get away with it. The market for the scam collapsed when the tax evaders were told by the various governments that an nft is no different than a painting for the purposes of tax evasion
Re:Funny how Slashdot is so anti-NFTs (Score:4, Insightful)
For the record nfts were invented
...to pump Ethereum.
Minting NFTs "burns" the coins, ostensibly making the remaining coins in circulation more valuable. Sure, after the fact people came up with all the dumb apes and money laundering schemes, but the initial idea was just so people HODLing Ethereum could potentially see greater profits.
Why? Because there's a limitless field of other shitcoins out there, and you've gotta give the Ethereum developers credit for working extra hard at polishing their own turd. The analogy fits, because as Mythbusters proved, it is actually possible [youtube.com].
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In this case, users can freely transfer NFTs out of their account for multiple membership tiers. You can directly sell or trade those perks reliably without anyone else getting involved
It's probably easier to implement the backend functionality of offering an option to transfer your membership benefits to another user's account than it is to integrate support for NFTs in the first place. Furthermore, if you're thinking of a scenario where you'd be able to use your Starbucks membership at another company, well T-Mobile has already been doing something similar for quite awhile. Every Tuesday there are deals for T-Mobile subscribers, and somehow that all manages to work without any need fo
You now what else does that? (Score:3)
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Care to list some of the good uses?
How about as a way of differentiating reasonably sensible people from techbros with more money than sense? It's like they're self-marking themselves, so we don't have to bother with a normal litmus test. Question: Have you ever spent money for an NFT? Yes? Uh... okay... I'll be over in this other line...
Other than that? No, it's a ridiculous fad, and except for the very first few NFTs which became internet-famous, 99.999% are worthless as dog shit.
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NFTs are just another technology with bad uses and good. This is supposed to be a technology article aggregator, but the point just made seems to just sail over every poster's head here, time and again.
The I'm not really clear what the use here is, FTA:
Once logged in, members can engage in Starbucks Odyssey ‘journeys,’ a series of activities, such as playing interactive games or taking on fun challenges to deepen their knowledge of coffee and Starbucks. Members will be rewarded for completing journeys with a digital collectable ‘journey stamp’ (NFT). Members can also purchase ‘limited-edition stamps’ (NFTs) through a built-in marketplace within the Starbucks Odyssey web
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There is literally no point, all they did was monetize the equivalent of a QR code, which itself is just a machine readable bookmark. Well shit, I guess an NFT pointing to a picture of a QR code that decodes to the bookmark of that same NFT would be something to laugh at; and if anyone us
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Re: Funny how Slashdot is so anti-NFTs (Score:4, Interesting)
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something encoded in the link itself
Congratulations, you just invented the serial number - for short we can call it a ticket number.
Re: Funny how Slashdot is so anti-NFTs (Score:3)
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Two venti NFTs please (Score:3)
Starbucks ... NFTs ... priced at $100 each.
Cheaper than their coffee. :-)
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It's all about that base.
PT Barnum called it (Score:4, Interesting)
Although H L Mencken deserves honorable mention.
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To call the collectibles market "irrational" would be an understatement. To borrow from that earlier story about vinyl records, you really don't want to know how much the orange pressing of Taylor Swift's Reputation album goes for these days.
That being said, there's also a picture going around Reddit recently of some guy who bought an entire wall full of Nike shoes that he couldn't flip, so buying collectibles as an investment is always a huge gamble. With NFTs, there's also the added possibility that in
Trump (Score:2)
Sounds like someone watched Trump sell a big collection of NFTs and wanted to play copycat...
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One of the major porn tube sites (which I'm not giving free advertising) also had their NFT collection completely sell out too. I guess it remains to be seen how much demand there really is on the secondary market, though. They claim owning the NFT entitles the user to the following features:
No more ads on (removed).com
Special badge
Unique display for your avatar
Unique nickname color
Unique pack of stickers
WL spot in all our future crypto projects
Access to a closed Discord for NFT holders only
Lifetime subsc
Sounds unpleasant. (Score:2)
Like one of those carnival dunk tanks? Whether hot or iced coffee, that doesn't sound pleasant.
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Maybe they mean like a coffee enema, which would be fitting because they can blow their fucking NFTs and their shitty burnt coffee out their fucking ass.
trip to a Starbucks coffee farm (Score:2)
Twenty minutes (Score:3)
Completely unregulated market. (Score:2)