Another possibility is that you have a high risk tolerance as well as an uncommon knack for this sort of thing that most people don’t have.
In total, I did this with about 40 different farms. There was a time when there were several new ones every day. For a while it was pretty much a 24/7 job as maximizing apy required constantly jumping to some new hype. I was constantly afraid of depositing into a contract that would allow the owner to steal everything, but the worst I noticed were locking bugs + two contracts that allowed the owner to mint infinite tokens (of these two, only one used it to clean the liquidity pool).
The list of farms in that reddit post is obsolete (I think only sushiswap is still running, but with low roi), in general this particular way of making money has run its course.
There is a line from a movie ...
"Short everything that guy has touched"
So yes, it is crazy and complex and difficult, but the rewards are vast for those that dare enter the world.
Timing markets at the hour level is fraught with risk and cannot generally be done without information not known to the broader market.
A major disservice, doubly so in a risky space like cryptocurrency and on a public forum. This really just makes the space seem even less trustworthy.
How that value is earned and calculated are interesting questions.
Not directly, but to a hypothetical criminal with millions of USD in illegally obtained currency investing into tokens, hyping said tokens (including, of course, giveaways) and then selling tokens on a peak could look quite compelling. I presume typically laundering loses money, but in this case it could even be possible to make a profit.
I believe it’s more than fair to request specifics since we can’t know whether poster’s solvency depends on a token appreciating in value—after all, if it does, what’s a better way to maintain token value than promise millions on a public forum?
Ding ding. Which is why returns won't last as the information asymmetry curve is flattened.
If you want to dabble in crypto, make a Coinbase account and go 50/50 BTC and ETH, and don't sell until you retire.
If you want to play with the fast money Defi, then you need to do a lot of self-study and learning.
Key word trivially - some contracts are custodial, so if someone hacked the owners (or they turned out to be scammers) funds could be stolen, which arguably has a reverse Lindy effect in the beginning. Fortunately people are starting to demand at least timelocks and/or multisigs. Another risk is how well liquidations function during a price crash, for protocols that need them.
The current risk premium was and still is absurdly overestimated, but that was a good thing (for me) as without it three or even four digit APYs wouldn't last a day, but thanks to the unwarranted risk premium they lasted about 2 months. During the short peak three weeks ago it was possible to make even ~8% per day (on millions of dollars - good liquidity), completely risk free (trivial staking contracts). The great crypto bullrun of 2020 already happened and few outside of ethereum even noticed.
You will see billions flow into defi on ethereum as others realize the real level of risk too (which guarantees those astronomical returns are never going to return - but even 10% apy on dollars is good in the current environment).