As in, it's easy to be the best in your local club, but it's a real wake-up call when you try out at a regional.

Terra certainly has an element of complicated financial dynamics behind it such that people who know a little--but not a not--may think it's the greatest idea since sliced bread, and get eaten by the professionals. I agree with you there.

But a lot of the crypto ecosystem seems to be much more mundane than that. As far as I can tell, there isn't any financial wizardry behind NFTs; they're just a sort of weird social phenomena (is it a game? is it a market? is it sports betting?) where you can buy a thing at a price that has no basis in reality except insofar as someone else might buy the thing at an even higher price. I think that many--most?--people "investing" in NFTs realize and embrace the greater fool theory.

But, importantly, it seems to me that a random yahoo might actually be better able to predict when the gravy train will stop than an elite trader. So in some sense, it's quite egalitarian (if also stupid)!

The Luna "automatic peg" stuff is genuinely clever, but with genuinely surprising implications (at least for me, a casual observer/layperson) for dynamic instability.

But yes, I agree with you; they will be taking most the winnings because it's their job. That doesn't mean you cannot make money as an amateur. The real naive people can just send their money directly to the Blackrock bank account; saves a lot of stress.

If your luna stop loss was done in UST, you are also effed, even if you took the precaution of stop loss, because the "stable"coin dipped. Not saying that this was "safe" to do, but there are surely people out there who did this and got screwed, and I guess that would feel terrible.

Absolutely; there are proud whales saying they lost millions and laughing (not sure why) but I am very sorry for the people who lost a few k$ and now are in deep shit because they didn’t understand what they were doing. The ‘how can this be; I will get my money back right?’ type of thing.

A lot of crypto grifters (and even mainstream celebrities) have been actively encouraging these people to sink literally all their capital in coins or NFTs with unrealistic promises and FOMO. They did this because they knew it would work and drive up prices enough for them to be able to cash out by dumping their worthless void money on the unwashed masses.

Let’s be real, much of the market activity is money laundering, ransomware and other payoffs, and Chinese people bypassing currency controls.

It’s no coincidence that China cracked down on miners and the price dropped a few months ago. It’s plain as day now that with Russia being removed from the internet and most markets, buy-side demand for crypto is sinking.

First movers want to sound and convince others they are right and “now” is the right time to step in.

Most of it can be debunked if you had a good economy course that tells you how value is created.

Unfortunately, reality is a harsh mistress.

Now they might find some new investors, but it will only delay the inevitable.

Sounds like a classical pump-and-dump scheme.

Also known as "please continue holding the bag".

See Reddit's "apecoin" subreddit, which had two suicide threats yesterday.

Outside NFTs? C'mon. Signed JSON blobs with a URL you pay for? All equally worthless.

Let's not "my god is better than your god" this.

Why would NFTs be worth anything more than the digital tulip bulbs of cryptocurrencies? NFTs are just as worthless IMHO.

NFTs are a bit like celebrity signatures. They are worth what someone will pay. If a celebrity verifiably digitally signs something and they only do it once, that is worth something to some people as a collectible. It is not worthless as long as someone is willing to pay something. And, like other collectibles the market can have huge swings and sometimes never recover (like all my baseball cards lol).

For one thing, they're by definition tied to a shitty blockchain and you have to deal with any potential bullshit affecting said chain including fees, slow transactions, potential scams, etc. For another, they're not really an object, just a bit of json pointing likely pointing towards a flat image hosted somewhere else (that anyone can freely access via the link). Sure, they enjoyed a brief popularity and lots of media attention, but already the NFT marketplace seems to be waking up to the reality that most of these "investments" will never turn a profit. And that's the real issue I see: most of these purchases were not someone who wanted to collect something, they were made by someone who wanted to invest in an asset that would later be worth something. And so the actual value as a "collectible" has been inflated and is due for a huge crash, which is already happening.

I know some are meant to carry benefits towards the holder, like exclusive access to X service or community... that is a small minority currently though, and many of those benefits are shaping up to be just empty promises, and even then an NFT seems like a poor vehicle for systems that could have been done better without any "decentralization" or crypto integration.

NFTs are worth nothing to me, but so are celebrity signatures. That doesn't mean they are generally worthless b/c people collect all sorts of stuff.

Mobile games have taken this much further, with people buying fungible tokens for hundreds of dollars for the enjoyment they get, though this has become questionable as more of the game is engineered towards feeding an addiction which will cause players to pay more for their enjoyment.

The issue is the approximate cap on this value. Even by the inflated standards of whales paying for mobile games, we still see a cap of value around $1,000s for a month of value. Thus an NFT that provides value in a similar ecosystem should be able to max out at a similar evaluation, assuming it is tied to a system with as much investment in the fun as the big hit mobile games (which is often quite a lot of investment compared to what any single player, even whale, is spending).

We see NFTs going for much more than that in systems that have far less investment in being enjoyable, which I think can be contributed to people investing to get rich by selling at an even higher price.

In conclusion, I think that NFTs can have some inherent value, as much as fungible tokens in a game can, but that such value would be far below where the market currently is. Someone should only spend as much on NFTs when the enjoyment they get from spending on NFTs matches the enjoyment that similar amounts of money would bring from their other hobbies.

One of the big appeals from crypto people is essentially “all money is bullshit, so buy my bullshit”. The even nuttier people would position Bitcoin as gold.