NFTs are one of the most controversial tech things around at the moment, and for good reason. Artificial scarcity in digital spaces seems to be all the rage, and trading jpegs on the blockchain for stupid amounts of money is popular for some reason. But mistakes can always be made, often by user error, and that's how one NFT-rader got fractions of a cent for their rock jpeg that was valued at closer $1 million.

The world of cryptocan be a tough one to navigate. There's heaps of currencies, weird apes, unfathomable environmental impacts, and just a lot of confusion. Many game developers have straight up called outNFTs as a scam. The legitimacy of crytpo can be so bad thatSteam found over 50% of transactions using bitcoins on its platform were fraudulent. It's a scary crypto world out there, and not even crypto broNFT aficionados are immune to it.

Reported byVice, Dino Dealer on Twitter is one such crypto trader that recently made the simple error. When listing their precious EtherRock NFT they erroneously put it up for 444 gwei instead of 444 eth. This is the difference between getting basically nothing or around $1 million USD. Once listed for the low low price, it was immediately purchased by a bot for the equivalent of someone whispering the word "money" from at least 100 kms away.

Dino Dealer posted about the event onTwitter, pleading at the end for snipers to show mercy. They also contacted the owner of the bot, hoping for a do-over but have received no reply. Because this is all blockchain, the transaction is available for anyone to see and smile at if they choose. Given it's a very basic jpeg of a rock, it feels like the bot got about what it paid for anyway.

EtherRock is a pretty quintessential example of NFTs. It's a series of images of the same clipart rock with variations in colour, so a lot like the famous Ape images you might have seen, but literally just rocks. Or rock. The same rock. One has sold for the equivalent of $3.5 million USD. The worst part is you can't even bang your head against one since it's just a digital jpeg.

Hope’s been writing about games for about a decade, starting out way back when on the Australian Nintendo fan site Vooks.net. Since then, she’s talked far too much about games and tech for publications such as Techlife, Byteside, IGN, and GameSpot. Of course there’s also here at PC Gamer, where she gets to indulge her inner hardware nerd with news and reviews. You can usually find Hope fawning over some art, tech, or likely a wonderful combination of them both and where relevant she’ll share them with you here. When she’s not writing about the amazing creations of others, she’s working on what she hopes will one day be her own. You can find her fictional chill out ambient far future sci-fi radio show/album/listening experience podcast at BlockbusterStation.buzzsprout.com. No, sadly she’s not kidding.