Multiple artists report OpenSea automatically closing their support tickets reporting stolen artwork; OpenSea removes ability to report

Artists going through the greuling process of reporting individual NFTs created without permission from their work reported tickets being automatically rejected. Artists were also required to provide personal information to OpenSea, who in some cases forwarded the personal information to the scammer behind the theft, opening the artist up to doxing and other harassment. Eventually, OpenSea disabled their contact form that had previously allowed artists to report stolen work.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 receives so much fan pushback on planned NFTs that the studio scraps the idea within a day

A gas-masked character from the STALKER 2 gameS.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 artwork (attribution)
Pushback from fans led S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 creators to quickly reverse their decision to add NFTs to the game. The studio announced their NFT plans on December 15, which involved collectible cards, in-game items, having one's name added to walls or other scenery in the game, and even the possibility to have an NPC added to the game that resembled the NFT buyer. In subsequent updates the studio stressed that the NFTs would not be mandatory for gameplay, and later downplayed them further by saying that the NPCs they would add to the game "aren't even involved in the story". Fans were incensed, and the next day the studio scrapped "anything NFT-related" that was planned for the game.

NFT collector who owns the NFT associated with the Bored Ape artwork used in this site header would like me to stop using "their" ape

Screenshot of a Twitter conversation: "Hello Molly Hope you are doing fine I believe you are using my ape on your website without my permission. Can you please prove you own this ape as I believe there is only one looking like this and it is mine"Screenshot of the messages (attribution)
The apparent owner of Bored Ape #5262, of which this site header is a derivative work, contacted me on Twitter to say "I believe you are using my ape on your website without my permission. Can you please prove you own this ape as I believe there is only one looking like this and it is mine" in an event that truly transcended parody. While this would be hilarious even if it was a prank, the Twitter account who DMed me does appear to belong to the person holding the NFT on OpenSea.

Melania Trump announces an NFT collection which will begin with a painting of her "cobalt blue eyes"

A watercolor painting of Melania Trump's eyes and eyebrows"Melania's Vision" NFT (attribution)
Lest it be mistaken for a grift, the press release was quick to say that Mrs. Trump had promised to donate a portion of the proceeds to children leaving foster care. The NFT platform is "powered by Parler", a far-right social network. Trump intends to release multiple NFTs, and the first will have a starting price of 1 SOL (approximately $150). Solana Labs was quick to clarify that the "project is not part of any Solana-led initiative".

Tweet from a crypto miner answers the question of where all the GPUs went

A tweet from Jaxson Davidson: "Here's is look inside building 1/4 of my mining farm. Almost all 3070s in this building. My new building will be all 170hx cards. Hoping to have it finished by EOY. #ETH #RVN #Mining" It includes an embedded video of racks upon racks of GPUs.The now-deleted tweet showing racks upon racks of GPUs (attribution)
Crypto miner Jaxson Davidson posted a video showing one of four buildings in his crypto mining farm, showing racks of thousands of GPUs — GPUs that gamers and other consumer buyers are finding painfully expensive, if available for sale at all. He said the GPUs were bought "under the table", for an average price of $1,200 per unit, and is using the farm to mine Ethereum and Ravencoin. Davidson deleted his Twitter account following some pretty fierce backlash from gamers feeling the GPU shortage, as well as crypto skeptics who were shocked at the display of energy expenditure.

Another typing error proves costly to an NFT collector

A cartoon character in all pastels. Background is orange, the character has green hair, blue skin, and a white sweater and hoop earringDoodle #1961 (attribution)
A misplaced decimal point caused an NFT trader to sell their "beloved" Doodle NFT for 0.37 ETH (about $1,500) instead of their intended 3.7 ETH (about $15,000). The trader tried begging on Twitter to buy back the NFT, then to get back "maybe the ETH i lost.. minus all royalties and such..". Two days later they posted, "well, i don't think i'll ever get back what i lost.. had to take a break yesterday to not go crazy over this. 3.7 ETH is a lot of money to lose for me." This happened two days after a different trader made a similar, $300,000 mistake.

Laurent Correia rug pulls $960,000 with his abandoned "Billionaire Dogs" NFT project

Laurent Correia, a French influencer and the creator of "Billionaire Tips" sports betting app, launched an NFT project called "Billionaire Dogs" in December. Promising perks including large cash giveaways and rare NFTs that would also grant luxury cars to their owners, the project launched on December 12. Buyers were invited to purchase NFTs for 0.1 ETH (~$400) in the presale, or 0.2 ETH (~$800) in the public sale.

The project had an underwhelming reception, and the team quickly decided to reduce the supply of available NFTs from 6,500 to 2,000. Two days after launch, the funds were transferred out of the project wallet and to various addresses, including $400,000 which went to Correia. The project also deleted their website, Discord, and Twitter account that week.

Correia, for his part, has continued to post on his "Laurent BILLIONAIRE" Instagram account, where he shows off his private jet and tropical vacations with no mention of the Billionaire Dogs Club. His "NFT" Instagram story shows his pricey NFT purchases beginning on January 14.

A hacker racks up a $45,000 AWS bill for their victim, only to generate $800 worth of Monero

A tweet from Jonny Platt (@jonnyplatt): "Excited to announce I just received my Christmas present from @awscloud! Horrified to see it's $45,000 in charges due to some scammer hacking my account + mining Crypto for the last few weeks Had no sleep last night. It's now 23 hrs since my support ticket & no reply."Tweet by the owner of the hacked AWS account (attribution)
A hacker gained access to someone's Amazon Web Services account and used it to spin up servers to run Monero miners, ultimately netting 6 Monero (XMR) worth a total of about $800 over the couple of weeks they were running. All this work, however, cost the hacked individual about $45,000 in AWS fees, providing a particularly salient example of why people don't typically use AWS to mine crypto. Fortunately, Amazon waived the bill for the owner of the compromised account.

Bug in major cryptocurrency trackers shows wildly inaccurate data

A graph of Bitcoin price showing an enormous, brief spikeBitcoin price on CoinMarketCap (attribution)
Some people were briefly elated or devastated when they looked at Coinbase or CoinMarketCap, both major cryptocurrency trackers. A glitch caused some cryptocurrency investments to appear to have surged in value by millions or billions of percentage points; others saw their investments appear to tank to nearly nothing. Some DeFi projects relying on data from Coinbase halted trading, and erroneous data from the glitch persisted into the following day. CoinMarketCap made light of the glitch on Twitter, writing, "How did it feel to be a trillionaire for a couple hours? 😂" Hopefully no one quit their job based on their mistaken windfall! At least one person speculated that bots relying on APIs from these services may have traded on the "market movement", and one project relying on their data reported losing around €300,000 (about $340,000) due to the relative value of their assets being inaccurate.

Fans are outraged when the Twitter account of now-deceased Stan Lee shills an NFT

An illustration of Stan Lee wearing a blue superhero costume and sunglassesOne of the NFTs (attribution)
Stan Lee fans were outraged when the Twitter account belonging to Lee, who died in 2018, posted a message to promote an upcoming NFT based on one of his characters. Fans fairly universally felt this was disrespectful to Lee's legacy and contrary to the values he'd held through his career.

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