Truth be told, I'd rather put my money in having physical precious metals than a jpeg of a goddamn monkey.
True, but the way that the Fox News gold scams work, they sell coins whose values as actual gold are worth something like $5 for $50, and often, you can't sell them for anything but raw melt value, since the market is flooded with scam-peddled gold coins. As an example.
I mean, yeah, you can get like 10% back, rather than having a solid chance of being completely wiped out, but at the same time, those monkey jpgs actually have a chance of being resold to a Bigger Fool, compared to basically just tossing 90% of what you spend directly into the fire.
That's exactly the problem with investments of any kind, it's a corporational version of a bet. There is a common golden rule about these kind of practices, always bet invest the 2% of what you currently own and you don't need, 5% if you really want to risk high. Don't pretend to be the the lucky guy that risks everything and won. Because for every few cases that ever happens there are thousands of many others that failed and go broke. After all, where do you think all that money won comes from?
That's exactly the problem with investments of any kind, it's a corporational version of a bet. There is a common golden rule about these kind of practices, always bet invest the 2% of what you currently own and you don't need, 5% if you really want to risk high. Don't pretend to be the the lucky guy that risks everything and won. Because for every few cases that ever happens there are thousands of many others that failed and go broke. After all, where do you think all that money won comes from?
Thinking logically is just FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt)! Oh, but We're All Gonna Make It, even if we're in a zero sum game, so keep those Diamond Hands, and HODL! Imagine being so dumb you still think NFTs are a scam and in three years, everyone won't be making all their personal information publicly available on the chain of a coin that's going to court because it's based on a copyrighted anime character used without permission.
The entire reason NFTs and such are a thing is because the young adult male wealthy 1% are angry there's no way to become the next Bezos or Gates once they've already formed their monopolies in the new hot market, so they're desperately praying for some new "Web3" to come along to overturn everything and give them a shot at monopoly. That's why only about 28,000 people around the world seem to own any. (And apparently, the US is third lowest in ownership...)
Gold scams work on fears that real money will lose value, a defensive bet based on panic of losing one's retirement, but NFTs and crypto work on FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), the belief that the people didn't get a chance to get fabulously wealthy on the last few bubbles or new technologies, and so they have to get in on the ground floor of a crypto that will start at pennies and be worth $100,000 per token in a year like BitCoin did.
I grab a silver eagle each week and have for the last 12 years. Between that and various bars it’s actually become pretty respectable of a stack. On the negative, precious metals only hold the line against inflation -they will never explode beyond it. It’s never been about spending in my lifetime, though.
As far as crypto I paid off a whole coin back when it was 11k and have at this point made over 40k in its current value.
I grab a silver eagle each week and have for the last 12 years. Between that and various bars it’s actually become pretty respectable of a stack. On the negative, precious metals only hold the line against inflation -they will never explode beyond it. It’s never been about spending in my lifetime, though.
As far as crypto I paid off a whole coin back when it was 11k and have at this point made over 40k in its current value.
But that doesn't address rom collector's point: Where do you think that money came from?
You aren't making anything. You aren't adding value. You therefore are playing a zero-sum game. For you to make money, someone else had to lose it. What's worse, all the time people spend in worthless activities like stock trading is time not spent doing anything productive for society, which relies upon people being productive to create positive-sum interactions for us to survive.
You're just swapping things that some Bigger Fool was willing to pay more to you than you paid for it in the first place, but for that next guy to make more money, they have to find an Even Bigger Fool willing to pay even more than they did, and so on infinitely. Either you need constant more money (inflation), which means that in terms of actual value the stuff stays the same, or you have a bubble that will inevitably burst.
This is also the reason why crypt"currencies" utterly fail to be currencies on purpose - currencies need stability for anyone to actually use them as a means of exchange, but that means they aren't useful as speculation tools, and who wants that?! They want a "currency" that experiences constant, uncontrollable hyperdeflation "TO THE MOON!", which would ruin any economy that would try to run on them since no use of such a currency could possibly give greater returns than just sitting on them... And people just sitting on them (and others desperately trying to buy more) is what the holders of crypto want, since, without any kind of economy that works on this stuff, the only way to make real money is to get someone else to buy your funny money off you with real money, preferably orders of magnitude more than you spent making up your monopoly money.
And that's before all the scams being done in open daylight just because regulation hasn't caught up yet. (It's considered poor form for the creator of an NFT to NOT perform a washing or pump-and-dump scam.) The entire economy is just scammers trying to convince their rubes that no really, they're going to get to be the scammers this time, and it's some other people who will be the rubes.
So... congrats if you weren't making it up, you managed to be near the top of the pyramid scheme just this once, and there was a Bigger Fool than you this once. Just keep in mind, there's no way you could have made that money without wiping out someone else's savings... and that if you try again, it'll probably be your own bank account that feeds someone else's.
There is a reason the people selling these "millionare with only a few dollars" schemes pretend a lifestyle they can't really afford. They go as far as presuming like their own rented luxury jewerly and vehicles. To convince others on social networks and conferences they can be as successful as them, if they follow and lend money. The bottom loses its money while the best liar remains on top, but below even better liars.
It's OK if you want to be part of the pyramid, it depends on morals and how earlier you are on it. Just make sure to possess the knowledge to retire before it gets late. So you better keep studying the market and don't just sit on the money.
For anyone who wants to know how investment billionaires (and a lot of billionaires in general) are utter scammers who have stacked their hedges against the rest of us, I recommend giving this (https://www.ft.com/content/5d840a5c-fa0c-4d08-9574-59f0d3e8c703) a reading. The person organizing that conference was effing Michael Milken, the junk bond guy.
But that doesn't address rom collector's point: Where do you think that money came from?
You aren't making anything. You aren't adding value. You therefore are playing a zero-sum game. For you to make money, someone else had to lose it. What's worse, all the time people spend in worthless activities like stock trading is time not spent doing anything productive for society, which relies upon people being productive to create positive-sum interactions for us to survive.
You're just swapping things that some Bigger Fool was willing to pay more to you than you paid for it in the first place, but for that next guy to make more money, they have to find an Even Bigger Fool willing to pay even more than they did, and so on infinitely. Either you need constant more money (inflation), which means that in terms of actual value the stuff stays the same, or you have a bubble that will inevitably burst.
This is also the reason why crypt"currencies" utterly fail to be currencies on purpose - currencies need stability for anyone to actually use them as a means of exchange, but that means they aren't useful as speculation tools, and who wants that?! They want a "currency" that experiences constant, uncontrollable hyperdeflation "TO THE MOON!", which would ruin any economy that would try to run on them since no use of such a currency could possibly give greater returns than just sitting on them... And people just sitting on them (and others desperately trying to buy more) is what the holders of crypto want, since, without any kind of economy that works on this stuff, the only way to make real money is to get someone else to buy your funny money off you with real money, preferably orders of magnitude more than you spent making up your monopoly money.
And that's before all the scams being done in open daylight just because regulation hasn't caught up yet. (It's considered poor form for the creator of an NFT to NOT perform a washing or pump-and-dump scam.) The entire economy is just scammers trying to convince their rubes that no really, they're going to get to be the scammers this time, and it's some other people who will be the rubes.
So... congrats if you weren't making it up, you managed to be near the top of the pyramid scheme just this once, and there was a Bigger Fool than you this once. Just keep in mind, there's no way you could have made that money without wiping out someone else's savings... and that if you try again, it'll probably be your own bank account that feeds someone else's.
I grabbed a Silver Eagle today on the way home from work. Felt pretty good about myself.
I just want to say that no one owes society anything, and if people make their money off stocks or other assets, more power to them. Have a lovely day.
I brought up the way that crypto provides no benefit to the economy primarily because whenever people start talking about regulating the stock market like in the aftermath of 2008, the propaganda always gets blasted that the people who own stocks are "the makers", and people who work for a living are "the takers", and it's really the fault of the people who support the economy that the economy broke, not the ones who do nothing but profit from holding stocks bought with daddy's/granddaddy's/great-granddaddy's money. The value of the stock market as a whole is fairly indirect (with only a tiny minority doing the start-up investment that provides ANY justification for ANY of this), but concepts like short selling and in particular crypto scams are absolutely a negative to the overall economy that also are directly responsible for bubbles and crashes with no actual positive to society. It cannot be overstated that the cause of market crashes is too much wealth accumulating in the hands of the investor class beyond the point where there are any sane investments left to make, causing them to look for insane investments to make. This is how the sub-prime mortgage crisis was caused - nobody was making any real money to invest in, so all the money went to buying mortgage-backed securities, so they had to make more mortgages to be able to make bonds to sell than there were people who could actually buy homes, necessitating either what was basically fraud or outright fraud on the part of lenders and their regulators to get people into houses they actually couldn't afford by hiding their true cost.
Unlike companies that actually make something that adds value, from advanced electronics to the service industry to pork bellies, which can actually pay out dividends, these totally speculative "assets" are based solely upon basically just hype. Speculative value is just the belief that a Bigger Fool will buy your "asset" later for an even higher price, so as soon as it actually seems like the market is cooling off, all that hype evaporates and you have a crash as people race to offload their worthless, worthless "assets". A company that actually adds value by providing products or services has an actual value in the economy to justify itself and can survive a "market correction" for being "overvalued", but crypto is just hype, so its true value is nothing. (Just look at all the failed attempts to create new crypto or NFTs that are functionally identical to all the others, but failed purely because their creators couldn't afford to hype them enough.)
With that said, the mindset of "I don't owe nothin' to nobody" is itself kind of telling and fairly toxic. It is the ethos of the career criminal and the con man, that if they can take something from someone, they didn't deserve it because they didn't defend it. And frankly, that is kind of the point - because zero-sum trading inherently can never make money, just waste resources, it is effectively no different from simple burglary on the macroeconomic scale. "NFT trader" simply has a much more prestigious hype around it than "burglar" does, but effectively, you're just trying to take money from other people's wallets and it has the same flaw in that it's ultimately unsustainable. The more people who steal for a living instead of work, the less real production there is for there to be things to steal... Only parts of crypto can even claim the defense that they are legally different - even if morally equivalent to - stealing, since, again, crypto is fundamentally based upon multiple old-school fraud schemes that absolutely are illegal, but where regulators haven't caught up to them yet. Fortunately, the blockchain is not nearly as anonymous as it was advertised so all crimes are actually recorded in perpetuity and publicly available for any government or private actor to view and prosecute.
Crypto is a net negative to the world economy. Due to the fundamental structural flaws of crypto, it consumes massive quantities of resources to produce nothing but fraud and hype that will vanish in the morning sun on the other end. Crypto is rapidly becoming one of the top emitting industries of greenhouse gasses, and if you've had trouble buying a video card for your computer lately, or the ones that are available cost twice as much, crypto is the reason why, and again, nothing of any value is produced for this. The "mining" process is an entirely artificial one that could be changed at any time to one that does not consume a solid percentage point of the world's resources and could cost nothing at all if the owners of crypto just felt like changing it. The current system favors them, however, so they won't. Hey, they Don't Owe Nothin' to Nobody, after all...
Crypto cannot work as money as they originally promised, because the people who own it don't want it to be stable and they made the process of transacting currency (the fundamental purpose of any supposed currency) so badly programmed that it can cost over $10,000 in transaction fees just to make a single purchase. It stopped working as a purely speculative asset when the whole market crashed and people started losing faith in the scam, so they had to make some other shiny hypeable thing require you buy crypto. NFTs are just a serial number in a blockchain that exists to get you to buy crypto because nobody was buying crypto just to own crypto anymore. However, only 0.1% of the people who fell for crypto (which is itself only 0.05% of the global population in a supposed global currency) bought NFTs. Now, they're making "NFT games" to try to get people to "play games" to "earn money", by which they mean buying NFTs (which you have to spend hundreds of dollars doing before you can "play a game" "to make money" since demanding money of anyone entering the system is the only way they can pay out the people who are already in the system, like some sort of pyramid where those on the top make all the money but those who come in at the bottom ar--) as a middleman for buying crypto as a life support system for the crypto scam that's already drying up...
If crypto trading were completely banned from all markets today, it would be a net positive to the whole world, and its economy. The resources being burned to produce nothing but hype could be reallocated to things that actually perpetuate the economy, both locally and globally, which would mean, for example, less inflation as more productivity was generated out of the existing money supply, so that people could afford more with the money they have now. (It's only in video cards that crypto's cancerous effect on the economy is so readily apparent, but it does trickle back through the entire economy.) It would mean an easier time combatting climate change before we head into self-imposed civilization-wide collapse, which is also kind of a thing worth doing. The only people who would lose from that are people like Peter Thiel who are the billionaires at the top of the pyramid making money off of every scam the people further down the pyramid... and enh, society doesn't owe him anything, so if the world makes it's money off of screwing over crypto scammers, more power to them. Have a lovely day!
Always confused me when people said that stocks are just stealing money from other people. It's buying and selling like anything else
It's not exactly stealing but rather an activity being seen as dishonest, because beginners get dragged with lies like "be rich with only five dollars", "risk free", "be your own boss with no work", etc. They constitute the base of the pyramid so others take off their earnings.
However our capitalist system is exactly like that. At least in the physical world you get something in exchange. What you buy may have a value unless a meteor hits the Earth shutting down the system and wiping everything off. An scenario prone to happen more frecuently in the digital world with servers shutting down or a technology replacing the previous system making everything worthless.
In regards to stocks and to lesser degree crypto (which for all intents and purposes is a separate thing from NFTs), it's a well established rule that you ought to know what you're doing if you're going to get involved, and if you don't know exactly what you're doing, and you're not going to invest time heavily into it, you should invest in near surefire securities, like bonds or stocks like Google. If you buy into a penny stock or brand new crypto that you're sure is going to take off and it crashes, that's on you. There were a hundred different choices that involved less risk, and probably a thousand people telling you not to. If you chose to listen to some weirdo without checking into what they were saying or getting a second opinion, that's your own fault. Saying the system is rigged when in reality it's one's own shortcomings and lack of research is just being irresponsible.
You are treating NFTs like they're separate from crypto, and treating crypto like it's a normal company you can buy stock in. Neither is true.
NFTs are part of the crypto they are linked with. The NFT you spend money to buy is simply a chunk of data in the blockchain. (Typically, this block of data is nothing more than a simple web browser hyperlink to a website due to how expensive chunks of the blockchain are. Therefore, while the hyperlink is immutable and part of the blockchain forever, there's absolutely nothing stopping someone from changing what is on the webpage on the other side, allowing people to re-sell the same image or whatever they claimed "you bought" after swapping the "image you bought" out with some random algorithm output.)
NFTs are sold essentially only as a marketing gimmick by the people who own lots of crypto as a way to make other people buy crypto (and you are required to trade NFTs in their associated crypto) because there's no other way to get real money out of crypto than some Bigger Fool buying it from you. Otherwise, you're left with monopoly money when whoever owns the crypto pulls the plug. Therefore, those who have crypto desperately need to invent new reasons to get other people to buy their crypto from them so they can cash out, and NFTs are just one of those fads.
These aren't normal companies, the owners of crypto have no stake in them, and they can shut everything down, take all the money, and start up a new account under a new name at any time, and already have repeatedly. Scamming is so baked into the system of NFTs that those who buy into them actively get angry if they don't see the maker of the crypto perform washing scams. There is legitimately no way that NFTs can actually make money, it can only take money from other people who get suckered into the scam, unlike a real business where buying stock pays dividends.
You DO understand that the values of stocks of real companies are supposed to be based upon the payouts of dividends, right? The stock market isn't ALL just smoke and mirrors that has nothing to do with the real economy. These stocks are supposed to pay their investors back at some point with the business that the business does, not just get endlessly speculated upon. That's what separates a real company's stock from a scam.
I obviously could go on, but since you are allergic to actually reading what people have said in this thread already while at the same time preaching that if you get scammed, it's your fault for not reading up on things, maybe watching something with pretty moving pictures will help, like Line Goes Up, Folding Ideas's discussion of the topic. (Just get yourself snacks and a drink, because like anything that actually bothers to go in-depth and explain the concept properly, this is a long one. Like has been said about the Global Warming "Debate", the problem with the "discourse" is that it takes a scientist 30 pages of peer-reviewed study to properly officially debunk a claim a line a huckster spews out with 30 seconds of thought, and too many people are persuaded by bumper stickers more than arguments that take the time to actually support their arguments.)
It's not exactly stealing but rather an activity being seen as dishonest, because beginners get dragged with lies like "be rich with only five dollars", "risk free", "be your own boss with no work", etc. They constitute the base of the pyramid so others take off their earnings.
Yeah, you have to be very careful with the stocks. Some family members of mine ended up losing a pretty sum when a relative recommend investing in a new company that was bound to be big. Needless to say, the company quickly folded and sold off all their assets. Those who had owned stocks in the company were reimbursed... only if you they were super wealthy and owned a ton ass of the stocks, so small time owners like my relatives got nothing. The assets that were sold off were bought off by the those who held the most stocks in the company to begin with and were quickly put under the management of a "new company" that had nearly the exact same name as the old one and now the company is worth like $3.5+ billion.
I think NFTs are a scam. I never said anything about NFTs other than them being separate from Crypto. They're separate from crypto in the sense that one is treated as a non unique asset, where NFTs are treated as unique assets. You're putting a lot of words in my mouth and made a lot of assumptions about me, and I can't say I appreciate it.
Crypto are traceable and serialized in the exact same way that NFTs are. That's one of their core functions, and part of why they're not as "untraceable anonymous money" they were hyped as.
Beyond that, you're defending the idea that it's moral to make money even when it directly harms others "because nobody owes society anything", or that these are just "normal stocks". That is, again, the fundamental point of view of the sort of scammer that builds and perpetuates these systems thrive within. If people didn't treat all stocks as just magic infinite money generators, where any "stock" is just as good as any other, provided Line Go Up, and stopped to think about how the system actually works, they'd be able to recognize scams when they saw them more easily. If more people challenged that point of view that stocks just make money from nothing, these scams would have far less room to grow, and there would be far less global economic crises.
It's the way that Wallstreet buys and the way that they sell that is so predatory that it becomes akin to stealing.
Yep. I dunno if anyone else was actively involved in the GME thing last year, but one pretty major point was when the exchanges shut down buying new shares (for retail investors). You could still sell, but the investment firms that had been shorting the stock were essentially given a "get out of jail free" card.
In a call between the two, Denino appears remorseless, stating, "Part of the responsibility is on them [the fans] as well, for putting too much emotion into it." Streamers and internet personalities can obviously leverage their relationship with their fans, just as any celebrity can, so it feels disingenuous to then criticise fans for their engagement with the parasocial dynamic.
Denino said on the call, "Sometimes you have to look out for yourself." Coffeezilla said he could return the money if he wanted to, to which Denino replied, "If you want the answer, yeah I could give the money back, it is within my power, but I am going to look out for myself and not do that."