Ask HN: Did you 'invest' in NFTs or memecoins?
I was just wondering what happened to those, particularly NFTs of 'digital collectibles'. As I understand, most of the ones that sold for hundreds thousands or even millions are worth 0 now?
Did you get heavily involved in that space? If so, what's your story? Interested to hear about experiences with 'yield farming' as well - another term I have not heard in the last few years.
Then it actually went up and the whole memecoin space was taken over by grifters.
There's a delay to these things; the value of these communities went up because of the community and it collapsed because the community was taken over as well.
From the outside, looking at all these graphs, it's hard to link them.
Bored Ape was about some celebrities just having fun with technology. It was funny and the music videos were fun.
See also: CB radio, Usenet, the World Wide Web.
Eternal September
A digital collectible just felt like a straight-up scam from day one. Eventually everyone else was able to take a step back from their FOMO and see it as well.
They really need to start making laws and putting people in jail for all these virtual rug pulls.
I was never a direct part of any launched projects though, I mainly just sat in on their calls and helped the devs debug a few things when people got stuck on something.
As they got excited about various NFT projects, I usually got something to be part of the group and show my support, usually a cheap one (like $30 here or there), but a few times I did spend more than that stupidly (like $100-200). Thankfully nothing too crazy though.
I spend more on my board game hobby every six months than I did the entire time I was paying attention to NFTs. Other people in the group did go full degen sometimes though, and spent way too much on it. I tried to dissuade them from the worst of it, but there were some true-believers in the group, thought everything was an investment.
I also never put any new money into it, it was always with Ethereum I had already bought long ago cheaply, so while the coins were worth $1000+ at the time, they were like $40 when I bought it originally.
I still have all the NFTs I bought, I never sold any, and whatever I bought all went to zero probably. That's usually what I do, I just buy things and never sell them, unless I have to make space, and usually then I sell for a massive loss (like my board games, why do they have to take up so much damn space?)
I still maintain that smart contracts are interesting technology, and would like to see something more interesting done than using a Collectible Card Game model with pictures that tries to get people to spend obscene amounts of money for pretty much nothing.
At the time it did seem like more than that though, it wasn't just buying a picture like people like to claim, it was like buying a membership to a club. My local Pickleball club wants people to spent $1500 a year for their memberships also. But as it turns out most of those NFT clubs were more promises and vibes than execution (Bored Apes did seem to be one of the rare ones to actually pull off something that felt more like a VIP club, and do various in-person things with owning the NFTs). But I never owned any Bored Apes, just followed the news about them for a while.
At one point I wanted to create a decentralized game achievement system with it, kind of like existing achievements but you don't need to rely on a console system or the game itself to track it, you just have a digital and system agnostic trophy, generated and signed by the game so you know it's official, that you can keep as long as there are smart contracts, but like every idea that pops in my head, I eventually get distracted by other ideas.
Would I have made a lot of money? Probably not.
I did speculate a little in 2020-22. I have LeBron NFT 1 out 1K from Superbowl promo during crypto com boom and crush... worthless now but I didnt spend a penny on it.