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It's maddening how taking a pure 'value driven' approach to buying stocks does in fact lead you to ignore hype cycles and their somewhat predictable impact on particular stocks or classes of stocks, such that you feel like you genuinely left wads of cash lying on the pavement because you didn't believe your eyes when you saw them.
ON THE OTHER HAND, the markets also briefly went crazy for NFTs, and "The Metaverse" (actually amazed how little came of that), and of course you could have bought into Gamestop during that crazy era, and ended up with almost nothing to show for it. It was as obvious to me that NFTs were going to eventually implode as it was to me that NVIDIA would take off. Hence why I avoided NFTs and bought NVIDIA and told friends to buy NVIDIA, but didn't go in nearly as aggressively as I could have. Because I severely underestimated the effect of the crowd of people who'd rush in about three steps behind me.
Having operated in the cryptospace through the first decade of its existence (2017 was a CRAZY time) I've learned that its almost always the stuff you DON'T see that will get you. Maybe you make a fortune on altcoins but... your holdings were in FTX (or one of the other failed/fraudulent/hacked exchanges), or you fell for a phishing scam. So I learned that A) trying to time market swings is a fools errand, and B) focusing too much on making good trades and NOT thinking about and protecting against ways you can lose your bags due to factors beyond your control has a small but real chance of wiping you out without warning.
I will never, at this stage in my life, feel regret about not yoloing into Bitcoin in 2013. I bought modest amounts back then (and have the Blockchain transactions to prove it) and sold almost all of them over the years, particularly in order to put a down payment on a house. The stress reduction alone was worth the price. I'd have had to bought a ton of them and held through insane market swings to get truly life-changing wealth out of it.
Hmm. The longevity/anti-aging space is making some rumblings. There's a possibility AI will fuel rapid advancement there, and with the boomers retiring there's obvious demand. No obvious plays that I can see, though.
"Legitimate" and regulated prediction markets are VERY early on the scene but seem to be gaining traction. In a sense they're just another form of gambling, but if they gain real attention they could explode overnight. They could disrupt the insurance industry in a good way
And the one that I think COULD turn into something huge are industries enabled by Starship. Yes, many people (I won't say MOST!) are aware that SpaceX is testing a FUCKHUGE rocket. I doubt any are thinking one or two steps ahead as to what having cheap and plentiful launch capacity will mean. Spot any players that might be onto the killer use for copious amounts of low-earth-orbit capacity.
See, I bet you beat the market too. Not lambo-land but you're better off than index funds.
Yeah NFTs were a bit of a dud. I think the idea was good (I never wanted any and didn't buy any) but everyone hates them for some reason. Aren't they strictly better forms of digital cosmetic items? Why are CS:GO knives worth more than jpegs on the internet? Wouldn't it be good for artists if they got some set% of the resale value of their art? I don't think I've ever been more isolated and alone in defending NFTs though, pedophilia seems more popular.
No, I don't think it would be good to create a new class of rentseeking. I consider this question as part of the background to led to copyright extensions of lifetime of the author + 70 years, total travesty of the system that should never have been considered.
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Because NFT space was filled with lies, fraud, scams etc.
I hate digital cosmetics items
How NFT would even help here or enforce it?
Because it's a programmable contract. You can set it to do whatever automatically.
I don't even know how you can have NFT fraud. It's not like you're being sold a promise of future dev work, only for the devs to disappear. What you buy is what you get. Some people spent about $180 on gas for an NFT which just said how much gas they paid (which is pretty funny tbh). I have screenshots from the discord of this guy offering a bounty for the location of the devs: 'what will happen to them is none of your concern'. It's their own fault for buying stuff they don't need. If you do some basic checks it's very unlikely you'll be scammed.
And "if they got some set% of the resale value of their art?" is impossible as NFT cannot control what happens outside its blockchain
For example, people promising that NFT can enforce revenue share for artist. Like you just did.
People were selling NFT with promises of riskfree earnings. And other typical get-rich-quick scams. Googling NFT fraud will give you parade of examples.
That's not how it works. They stay on Eth or Sol or whatever chain they're on, that's the whole point. You can only deal with them through the chain they're on.
The whole point is that "got some set% of the resale value of their art" stops working as soon as someone takes art outside blockchain.
Typical image NFT is just a weird link to image, nothing stops people from copying art outside blockchain. Pretending that it is not easy and trivial is a typical fraud by NFT crowd.
Again: NFT is unrelated to ownership of art, does not enforce anything outside blockchain and so on.
Yes? That's known by everyone who's done a 50 second browser search. They're just tokens that confer a certain status/exclusivity. Having a CS:GO knife skin doesn't mean you own the art of the skin. Having a CS:GO skin doesn't mean you can take it off Steam. The 'right-click save' meme is braindead. I can right-click save the Mona Lisa and nobody cares. I can right-click save any gacha game waifu and nobody cares. People want to have them (and no this doesn't mean that Biccus Tittus actually belongs to them in a legal sense, the game might shut down tomorrow and they lose it). People fundamentally do not understand what NFTs are and what the purpose is.
I seriously don't get why everyone on the planet woke up and decided 'let's hate this.' Ok, bored apes and goblins look pretty weird. I don't want them. I wouldn't trade perfectly good Eth for them. That's fine. I just move on.
And @RandomRanger was suggesting that despite this NFT would be useful for following:
no, they cannot do this. They, at most, can ensure that artists get some $ resale value for NFT transactions on blockchain. Which is much less useful.
NFT people kept lying, for start.
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There was a time where serious press coverage of NFTs was constant on eg CNBC or in the WSJ. That's really it. Which comes back to "NFTs" as we understand them in this conversation, weird ugly cartoons of monkeys, have become the standard understanding of NFTs as a concept, which are just a blockchain chunk that represents one particular thing. The latter has significant applications and value, and I predict will ultimately come to be vital to understanding a lot of property law within a few years. The former is just a toy example that built out the infrastructure, in the same way that Nvidia was a name mostly familiar to PC gamers before the last few years.
Latching onto one of @Corvos examples below, Gucci handbags. Gucci has a massive problem with fakes, especially as Chinese manufacturing improves in quality and European manufacturing becomes divorced from tradition in capitalist modernity, there's a whole universe of fakes so good that they've been passed back as returns at Gucci retail stores and reshelved as real bags. This has lead to escalating cycles of complicated verification methods, created by Gucci and imitated by the superfakes just as quickly. Simultaneously, designer resale sites like TheRealReal and Grailed and Poshmark have allowed for a much more liquid market in luxury secondhand goods, allowing willing sellers and buyers to connect from far off, rather than having to go through a consignment shop or similar, which Gucci sees as a threat to selling new bags.
Gucci, among other brands, have proposed using NFTs to verify authenticity of bags. Each bag would be sold with a particular NFT, associated only with that bag, and at each sale of the bag the NFT would be transferred to the new owner. This would serve as an "unfakeable" verification of the bag, in the sense that no more of them could ever be created. This is actually fairly common with desirable variants of luxury goods: there are more Paul Newman Daytona Rolexes today than were originally made, because so many other Daytona specs/colorways have been modified to resemble the desirable variant. Impossible with an NFT verification: Gucci makes 1000 bags, with 1000 NFTs, and no matter how good the fake it will never have the NFT attached that makes it "real."
The NFT comes to represent the brand value of authenticity, divorced from the value of the bag itself. It makes the bag it is attached to real. In theory, if you get a Superfake which perfectly meets construction specs of the bag you purchased originally with NFT, and you sell the Superfake on to someone else with the NFT, the Superfake becomes the Real bag and the bag you own, originally manufactured by Gucci, becomes the fake. Hell, one could imagine a world where Gucci releases specs for the bag, you get it manufactured by whoever you choose, and you bring it in to a Gucci outlet where they verify that procedure was followed and then issue the NFT that authenticates the bag as Gucci.
It would also allow the authorities, here Gucci, to control transfers of their bags if they maintain control of the ledger. They can refuse to endorse a transaction, even if the physical bag changes hands they refuse to transfer the NFT and recognize the change of ownership. Hell, one can imagine Gucci selling bags with morality clauses, and revoking the NFT-authenticity from bags that belong to an Epstein or a Weinstein. It's a way to give Gucci complete control of the transfer of their bags, the way the government attaches a title to cars or real estate and controls the transfer.
I envision a world where notaries and title agents are largely NFT brokers, with the NFT representing true ownership.
In this view, the monkey jpeg weirdoes are working out the kinks of a system that will be very important. The scams, the theft, the complexity of transfers, all need to be worked out in this toy example to be ready for primetime. They're monkeys getting shot into space, their deaths teach us how to get humans up there.
On the other hand, for people who don't realize the future value of the technology, they don't get why CNBC and the WSJ are reporting on this weird new form of Neopets.
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I think the rage-inducing element is the total divorce of monetary ‘value’ from any other possible source of value whatsoever.
A Gucci handbag, jewels, stocks in Nvidia… we can quibble about the true value of these things but there’s SOMETHING beautiful or useful there under all the posing.
With NFTs the value is literally zero. There’s nothing. You haven’t bought the image, because anyone can have it just by right-click-save. You haven’t earned it like a video game skin; it doesn’t look cool on your weapon. You’ve literally spent money to buy a token saying ‘I spent money’. It’s financial games and screwed-up monkey politics in its absolute worst, most braindead and bestial form.
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An NFT is a receipt, meaningless without an external authority validating it. Most NFTs are receipts for links to a private webpage currently hosting a jpeg. Unless this is accompanied by legal contract linking this receipt to some government using their monopoly on violence to enforce copyright on this jpeg (most NFTs are not), the ownership of this receipt does not in any way correlate with ownership of the art. But once you have an external authority validating it, and government enforcing any real world effects, you don't need a blockchain anymore.
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That was not the reason. NFT hatred was a thing on day 1 of NFTs reaching public consciousness, before there was time for any scams to even theoretically be exposed.
Because scams happened before NFTs reaching public consciousness.
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NFT hatred was a thing on day 1 because people accurately predicted that the NFT space would become full of lies, fraud, scams etc.
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I 'beat the market' but I didn't leverage up or otherwise really demonstrate the courage of my convictions. So my returns were modest in the grand scheme. I was a HODLer more than anything. I was overly sensitive to getting wiped out. That said, I've seen so many people get wiped out I suspect I would have come out behind had I been willing to take bigger risks in crypto.
That is, if you're the type of person who will leverage their bets and accept more extreme risk/reward ratios, you're probably not the type to have sensible exit strategies. Or, you're the type to abandon those sensible exit strategies when you smell more profits, until you eventually overextend.
So I'd guess I'm just not 'built for' that type of behavior, although I think I'm better for it.
Because they're attached to a popular game, and the items can be used to show off status in the popular game. Not vice-versa, where people think that the item itself, rather than the social status, is the point. NFTs never quite got popular enough to confer actual social status outside the NFT sphere, and trying to export status from the NFT world to the real world works about as well as trying to export status from, say, an MMORPG to the real world.
It really came down to the attempt to shove NFT items in many, many places where they didn't really add much, and to 'force' people to get familiar with blockchain tech, which already had a shoddy reputation elsewhere.
I think the one cool use case for NFTs might have been to allow you, the player, to carry NFT cosmetics between games, which is to say you could have a unique outfit, or item, or vehicle, or whatever, and it is tied to your identity in an 'immutable' way, so you can import it to a new game and immediately have access to it, which is to say, add some 'permanence' to your digital property.
For example, I play racing games of various types, and I have a couple cars that I favor and I have some livery designs that I like to recreate in each new game. If I could get an NFT for the cars and liveries that allow me to import those cars from Forza Horizon to Need for Speed to Gran Turismo, and be assured that I would immediately have access to them in future games, I would be enticed to do so.
That would have required significant coordination between different game devs, which seems improbable.
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We were hanging out in the same places back then and I feel the same. The best cast scenario where I had followed through and found a way to get my money into Mt. Gox when they changed their rules as I was waiting for my money to clear Dwolla and ended up with 30 coins for $150. There's no world where I hold them and sell for $2 million. I was going to pay off my house no matter what. My regret is I planned to drop some money every month after I sold but was lazy... that was dumb.
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