I guess Commander Keen and Duke Nukem NFTs will be coming down the pike soon.
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I can see the interest for some pro players participating in e-sports to have NFT items although I agree that itâs useless to have the items as NFTs rather than simply unique items in the ownerâs account. But if publishers can monetize (AKA cash in on the fad) the sale of unique in-game items better as NFTs, more power to them.
Tell me your age without telling me your age.
~45
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There is a huge market for video games and in game items are a part of it. Doesnât make you stupid if you enjoy that and want to pay for it. Its just a form of entertainment.
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I believe time will tell that it makes you stupid if you value it way higher than you should and if think itâs a good long term investment.
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Speaking of crypto, is anyone on here âinvestingâ in stable coins that are paying large âinterestâ percentages?
My main argument is in the part you omitted: âwho pay real money for digital items, at least some if not all of which will be purely decorative, not âfunctionalâ.â
I understand that âfunctionalâ digital items may have some entertainment value, but the cost of this entertainment has skyrocketed to unbelievable heights with the proliferation of mobile and online-only games. I just canât get behind continuously throwing real, significant money into such games. 10-15 years ago you could spend 100+ hours playing something that costs $20-$50 and doesnât need you to constantly âfeedâ it with more coin. And you can still do that now â the point is that back then that was the norm. The norm now is you are prompted to buy a $0.99-$4.99 loot box or some other stupid item every hour. IMO only children fall for this trap, because they donât have a good grasp on the concept of money. And children is what these things are targeting.
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Iâve been thinking about it for > 2 years, but never dove in. I donât fully understand it (specifically where this interest comes from and why itâs so high), and I donât believe the principal is as stable as they claim. And there have been some articles recently that agree with this thinking â Circle claims that each USDC is backed by a dollar in their vaults, but an audit claimed thatâs not even close to reality. And thatâs not the only example.
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As far as I understand those, they just lend your money to borrowers at higher interest rates than they pay. And IMO borrowers willing to pay these high interest rates do not sound that safe (otherwise theyâd borrow at lower rates elsewhere).
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Exactly. But it has been paying pretty good interest (relative to banks) for as long as it has been around.
The problem is that those borrowers canât just borrow USDC, they have to stake another cryptoasset as collateral. And thereâs a mechanism to automatically sell that cryptoasset if its price drops to below the acceptable threshhold. I just donât believe this house of cards can survive a real drop across the board.
I have a nagging suspicion that the bulls who have significant cryptoassets are staking them and borrowing stable coin at high interest rates so that they donât have to sell their âassetsâ and pay taxes on the gains, while also hoping that the principal will increase in value by more than the interest theyâre paying. Thatâs the only logical explanation I could come up with. But that also means theyâre spending the stablecoin with no intention of paying back the loans.
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45 - Yeah thatâs the ticket. I may have some problems explaining kids ages, but will cross that bridge when I come to it. Glad that I didnât mention LodeRunner or, heaven forbid, Spacewar!. Iâm happy to say that I never played Spacewar! on one of itâs original machines.
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Played it. And Duke Nukem (and was keenly aware of Commander Keen). And Iâm < 45. 
But it was a good guess, you just happened to be an older gamer.
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How dare you! 
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I was talking about paying âreal money for digital itemsâ generally. Or specifically about in game video game items. I donât think that simply paying money for digital items makes you stupid. People buy software all the time for example. People buy video game items for entertainment value. To each their own.
Whether or not buying NFT as an investment is a little different. Maybe NFTs are a fad and wonât be worth a penny in 5 years. Maybe not. Like you said there time will tell. But buying them doesnât make you stupid either.
Again, doesnât define you as stupid to buy something you enjoy in a game. Being digital and decorative in nature doesnât make it stupid.
Squandering money you donât have is another matter. But lots o people do that on lots of different stuff of dubious value.
If something is for entertainment then the value is really a matter of the individual buying it. Everything someone enjoys doing for entertainment other people will not value. If someone enjoys going to pro sports someone will fidn that of no value but doesnât mean its âstupidâ. Likewise, if someone enjoys buying unique avatar skins in their video game then others wonât value it but its also not stupid.
Its not really stupid to spend money on something you enjoy if its for your own personal entertainment.
But you are probably right that a lot of money spent in video games is children who may be taken advantage of to varying degree.
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So did pyramid schemes until they collapsed. Thatâs my issue with the extremely short track record of some of these exchanges along with opacity of their actual reserves.
Yeah not a great prospect. Thatâs some of my concerns too. If default rates rise, this could snowball into a fiasco in a hurry. Who wants to be the bag holder in this case? Maybe Iâm mistaken about the actual risk but it feels higher than advertised and the difficulty to price in this risk is making me stay away from it altogether.
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As far as I understand, that isnât the case at all. No one is paying 18% interest on their loans.
Right, if enough loans default, the ânetworkâ would have to sell the staked cryptoassets to cover the loans that are defaulting. This could bring down the price of the underlying coins (like ETH and BTC), which could put other loans that are backed by those cryptoassets to go below the allowed threshold, which would trigger further sales and declines. Snowball!
Maybe not right now, but the interest rates are not fixed â they change all the time and are a function of supply and demand. Check out the borrow rate for USDT on Oct 31 here. USDC had also been above 12% a few times (briefly). I donât know where to find more historical info, Iâm sure there were times when it was higher.
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People also buy lottery tickets for entertainment value. Theyâre still an investment, but only for the math challenged. 
You canât win if you donât play! 
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