[bigdollopenergy]

I recently heard someone say "I'm not stupid enough to make money in this market", and I think it rings very true.

With the short squeeze speculation on stocks, the crypto run+crash and NFT's. The market is a very confusing place nowadays. You'd have to be bonkers to invest in these things on paper, but yet, lot's of people are making bank from it every day (and vice versa).

NFT is probably the most confusing of the bunch. I understand the technology and what it actually is, but I see little to no value in it. I strongly suspect that the vast majority of these NFT sales are just people buying from themselves to inflate perceived value or just money laundering. That said, it actually looks like this false hype has turned into real hype somehow and people are actually making money from this. NFT's are probably the closest thing we'll see to Tulip mania for long time, at least cryptocurrency has some (largely unrealized) utility and potential to become something widely used in the future.

In order to make lot's of money nowadays, you shouldn't ask yourself "What is actually going to make a profit and/or provide utility in the future?" but rather "What are all the stupid people going to pile in on next so i can get in and out before it crashes?".

[matheusmoreira]

> I'm not stupid enough to make money in this market

> What are all the stupid people going to pile in on next so i can get in and out before it crashes?

Haha that's awesome. I spent so many hours researching stuff to invest in so I could make a good decision or at least an educated one. Company stock, cryptocurrency projects, whitepapers... And then I watched people making ridiculous amounts of money off of DOGE of all things just because a billionaire tweeted funny dogecoin memes. Then people pumped the huge wave of animal shitcoin scams that came after to ridiculous prices as well. Now I'm watching people spend millions on non-fungible tokens that do nothing.

It's the kind of mind screw that makes you lose all sense of right and wrong. The world just stops making sense.

[sirsinsalot]

I mean it's what happens when entry barriers to "invest" are low enough and you have meme marketing. Everyone in the middle of the bell curve piles in and things of average reasoning happen. A bit like football making billions from people watching some people kick a ball about. You can monetise the banal with fun.

[musicale]

> football making billions from people watching some people kick a ball about

Presumably ritualized tribal combat has a long history.

As does religion.

[sirsinsalot]

And collecting trinkets

[xwolfi]

Nah, it's a common story. When electricity and physics-based innovations started in France, people were so enamoured with novelty they started believing in anything remotely associated.

Hence magnetism and homeopathy, still limping along to this day, came to have huge amounts of followers. "if you can turn on a powerful light at night, surely you can cure with magnetic fields coming out of your hands".

Here is the same, if you can store value simply by convincing each other without central authorities (bitcoin), surely you can explore it to its conclusion with NFTs. Ill remind you that before the 2017 crash, we were already seeing joke tokens, it just disappears once the hangover starts.

[matheusmoreira]

> if you can store value simply by convincing each other without central authorities (bitcoin), surely you can explore it to its conclusion with NFTs

Cryptocurrency has actual value though. I don't think bitcoin has any inherent value, it's just famous because it came first. Technology like Ethereum and Monero are extremely valuable though. They aren't made up tokens that do nothing.

[nimbleal]

If you’ve ever played poker where you’re the only serious player at the table and everyone else is very loose you’ll know it’s almost impossible to win. By taking lots of risky bets the other players aren’t doing any favours for themselves personally but as a group they’re (unintentionally) teaming up to guarantee one of their number will have an unassailably large stack. That’s much how I feel about the current investment market.

[TheDudeMan]

Anecdotes aside, I wonder if this is really true. I wonder if it has been tested. Poker bots are strong enough that it should be testable. Is there really a scenario in which a stronger bot reliably loses to a group of weaker bots?

[nimbleal]

I’m not bot-level strength of course but yes, this would be interesting to model/test!

[kevinventullo]

I don’t follow; can’t you play conservatively until you have a great hand and bet accordingly? If the other players are loose, they’ll call with anything.

If they observe you are doing this and don’t play so loose against you, then I would take issue with the claim that they are not playing seriously.

[nimbleal]

You could wait until you have the nuts, but that might never happen. If you play too conservatively you risk just leaking blinds until you have nothing left, and because almost everyone goes in on almost every hand, you're playing against quite diminished odds that you're going to have the best hand.

Perhaps an excellent player might be able to crack the code (or at least be up over the course of enough games), but I'm not an excellent player.

[daniellarusso]

So, I have been working on a very stupid idea for some time now, that actually started as a social fart sharing app, record your farts, etc.

Then, I needed a way to make sure people were actually sharing farts, and not other noises (like burps or dog barks).

So, ML to the rescue. Train on a corpus of real fart audio and other sounds.

But then, I needed to make sure the farts were not copies or derivative works.

So, audio fingerprinting.

Then, I figured why not throw in blockchain (does not need to be distributed to be able to use the buzzword), to ensure the verified, original farts could not be tampered with.

Now, I believe I have a way for anybody to create unique content that can be ‘converted’ into an NFT.

Investors?

Possibly you!

[paradygm]

Someone already beat you to it https://nypost.com/2021/03/18/nyc-man-sells-fart-for-85-cash...

[daniellarusso]

That proved the market exists. The US alone could create trillions of dollars of NFT value in hours.

[52-6F-62]

You a Letterkenny fan?

https://youtu.be/fgsltPQQGxY

[daniellarusso]

There are some aspects of their implementation I had not considered, but being desktop only, it is a different product, in my opinion.

[Sylamore]

Allow me to introduce you to season 1 episode 3 of Letterkenny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1IAUWIWjo8

[daniellarusso]

Product adjacent. Nice effort from the degen devs, though.

[wyre]

I had a very similar idea for blockchain-based, social sharing network, except instead of farts, it's poops. I would call them shitcoins, obviously.

This could be a network for farters and poopers.

[ajcp]

...do you take personal checks?

[daniellarusso]

Sure!

[betwixthewires]

Money laundering. That's what most of it is. It's confusing because the story they tell you about why they want them is not why they want them. Just like art dealing and expensive watches, the market must be propped up by this story about creativity and workmanship and aesthetic value and intrinsic value, but what it really is is the ability to park a lot of money in something that is easy to move around.

[Philip-J-Fry]

From what I saw most of these really big NFT sales are going to the same few people.

I think some people have just gotten very very crypto rich over the past year or two and this is just something they are spending their money on.

[anonyxyz]

For the huge sales yes, but it's not for nothing. They are pouring 10s of millions into NFTs as a land grab in a potential new economy. If they lose it, nbd, since they have "fuck you" money anyway.

[randomsearch]

Similarly I’ve engaged with financial experts online. Conversation goes:

Me: “but this is a giant bubble! None of this is intrinsically valuable! You’re buying to sell! A huge crash will wipe you out!”

Them: “you must be new around here... there is always a bubble, the key is riding it as long as you can safely do so.”

I found this so enlightening. I wonder if economic cycles are a result of this thinking.

[vwcx]

Yes, but no one mentions the downside: that timing the exact bubble end, catching the proverbial falling knife without getting cut, is nearly impossible for the vast majority of bubble investors. The key would be to take your profit we’ll before the collapse, which you’ll notice is antithetical to the whole “HODL” and “never sell” mantra being spoonfed to the first-time meme stock/coin investors.

[echelon]

It gets even crazier.

https://nft.gamestop.com

GME as an NFT?

[jazzyjackson]

Actually its one of the few use cases that makes sense

Gamestop's whole business was used games. I mean they'd sell you a new copy happily, and you could sell it back at discount and spend the money on a different used game

Playstation / Xbox digital stores killed the market, now I pay $60 for the new assassin's creed and can never sell it, there's no such thing as a used game anymore

If Gamestop has streaming rights for certain games, then NFTs can represent who ones a copy of a game. If you're bored of a game, sell the license to play to someone else. (This is not even mentioning in-game items that could be traded on secondary markets)

Of course GameStop could conceivably build a tech stack that lets them manage 'who owns what license to what game' and a whole marketplace around that, but why build it yourself when people are already out there sending NFTs from one wallet to another.

[yakkityyak]

It seems like any potential success GameStop could have in the digital world solely depends on Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo/Valve explicitly allowing them to do so. And I see no reason why they would do so, considering not only could these companies completely handle reselling of digital games on their own market, there's little-to-no incentive for them to allow resale of digital games at all.

[illwrks]

What if they got a small % of the resale, with a blockchain as a verified record of sales?

- Games and consoles made years ago still generating revenue. - It would incentivise companies to support repair and continued use of old products.

I think it would be instant buy-in from those larger companies.

[guycook]

There's already an attempt at doing this on PC [0] led by Brian Fargo of Interplay / inXile fame. I can't speak to how effective it is or how many people use it but it seems to be still operative after a year on public beta.

One key issue I see is that it's still quite centralised - you have to resell through their store and can't just exchange a game license for crypto at an arbitrary price. No surprise though that this is a necessary step on the way to getting publishers on board.

[0] https://store.robotcache.com/

[vijayr02]

> In order to make lot's of money nowadays, you shouldn't ask yourself "What is actually going to make a profit and/or provide utility in the future?" but rather "What are all the stupid people going to pile in on next so i can get in and out before it crashes?".

This has always been true [0]. Your comment had generated a thought for me: maybe as humanity has covered its essential needs, the idea of what has utility and value has progressively become less clear? Or is it just a side effect of QE and Central bank excess? Time will tell...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest

[prestigious]

What do you think of something like Veefriends where there is a real world value attached to it (tickets to a conference)?

[bigdollopenergy]

I'm not referring the technology itself. That's actually quite useful with real-world applications that may be worth investing in. The ticketing use case and also Gamestop's rumored use of NFT for reselling digital game licenses are actually awesome ideas. I'd invest in companies using this technology provided they had a valid business case for it and aren't just chasing the hype.

The craziness i'm pointing out is the apparent sale/purchase of NFT tokens for lackluster pieces of digital art at insane amounts. You aren't really investing in the technology in this case, you're investing in that piece of art. It confers no proven legal privileges, meaningful ownership or protection from being copied. It just gives you the ability to prove to someone that at a specific point in time you made a token for that bitstring or bought it from someone who did. Would these pieces fetch the similar prices on the art market right now where you can actually buy real proven legal rights/ownership of the piece? I highly doubt it.