Think of it a little differently. You are a promoter putting together a music festival. You propose a venue, a list of artists, most of which are unconfirmed, get logos and a marketing push to get customers. You have two options

a) Wait until the venue is confirmed, all acts are confirmed put the tickets on sale and email them pdfs

b) Early in the project you tweet out a possible location, a few acts that have agreed to attend (but not yet signed), and start dropping hints about big acts that could potentially be there. You announce a pre-sale of 10,000 tickets at a big discount, each with a chance for meet and greets or VIP sections. You incentivize early adoptors with the idea that (a) the tickets will skyrocket if big acts are signed and (b) that they have a chance at getting even bigger upgrades. These tickets are all shipped in a box with a special pre-sale lanyard and randomized artwork which indicates the potential bonuses.

First off, which is the better marketing plan? Kinda obvious which will generate more excitement. In addition, (b) is a bit of crowd-funding.. by getting early adopters to send their money sooner, you can use that to actually land the better venues and artists. It's a win-win. Now if those big artists get signed the value of these presale tickets go up, and these early buyers can either rejoice in the fact that they bought tickets cheap, or they can flip them for a profit because now there are a lot less unknowns.

The team can release a new round of tickets, now at a much higher price because there are now big artists signed, and sell until the venue is maxed out. All this happened before anyone ever stepped into the venue for the actual show they paid for.

This is exactly what's going on with NFTs.
1) NFTs authenticate each ticket
2) Pre-sales (mints, genesis sets, etc) is a means of crowd-funding, people throwing a little money at the project owners which allows them to execute on longer term plans
3) Randomized benefits feed into the human desire to gamble, but statistically there is a 75% chance that NFTs will go higher than their mint price, but less than that on secondary, showing the value of getting in early
4) Projects derive like 5% profits off of secondary sales, which also help feed into the future utility
5) NFT team executes their long-term plan (aka the show) after all the above.
6) And most importantly the engagement. Those 10,000 people who had the opportunity to go through the build up process, form a community, and derive all kinds of secondary value from the pre-show engagement. If you actually came through, your next show will have 10x the amount of people willing to jump into a pre-sale, and you can now ratchet up the pre-sale prices, get more crowdfunding, and have an even better chance at signing big acts.

In other words, when you're focusing on the crappy photoshop art on the ticket the scalpers on the street are showing you, you're missing the entire show, the experience that led up to it, and the massive after-effect of a successful execution of all the above.

ATOM has been on fire the last couple days, I wonder if it's because everyone is discovering you can stake it for 14% on CDC's DeFi wallet.

Anyone got any of these?

https://www.lilbabyapeclub.com/

Not me. I think I might have given up on NFTs for now. The market seems to be saturated and it seems like you just have to throw piles of cash at the wall and hope something sticks.

Crypto scams. I simply can't believe the shit people fall for. Does no one do any math before throwing their money around?

People out there guaranteeing 5% compounding daily interest if you invest in crypto through them!

Let's do the math on that. Invest $1 compounding daily at 5% for 1 year...what do you get?

https://www.thecalculatorsite.com/compound?a=1&p=5&pp=daily&y=1&m=0&rd=0&rp=monthly&rt=deposit&rm=end&ci=daily&ip=&c=1&di=

That's right, at the end of 1 year with a $1 investment you would have $54,211,841.58!

Ooh, got a link?

That’s funny I got a cold call today asking if I wanted to invest in crypto currency with a scam firm… the guy making the call had little to no crypto experience though.

those are the worst.... fleecing the non-crypto people perpetuates the idea that all of crypto is a scam

You sure? NFT volume hit an all time high. I warned about over-saturation and I think it's just going to get worse from here, as rug pulls and bad teams keep coming.

Try a different approach... apply the same critiera to NFT projects as you would when you are deciding to put 10% of your assets in a stock. Do as much DD on an NFT project as you would on a stock, or even an option. Evaluate the space, the team, the long term value, the vibe of the Discord and twitter, all that up front work. There are a lot of flippers, but the reality is if you find the good projects, there tends to be good opportunities on the secondary market due to these flippers. NFTs are extremely high risk, high reward... expect 90% of them to drop in value, but the returns on the winners can be life changing. Did you see yesterday's $5M sale on a single BAYC mutant serum? It's insane... the good projects are massively amplified... and so far the blue chips are only as volatile as Bitcoin.

Urrrrrg!!!

ATOM is very close to hitting it's all time high, up 556% for the year. Woo!

Crap. I only have 50 of them. In at $17 though so that’s not bad.

Go LINK.

Link about the only coin I have up this week. Rest looks like it’s going to slide some more. Few NFT projects up pretty big this week though.

You should stake 'em!

That was the plan for the ATOM, but I haven’t had the time to setup the CDC DeFi wallet yet.

I have some of my LINK staked on Celsius but it’s only at 3% and I’m not sure that the risk of keeping it in a hot wallet is outweighed by a mere 3%.

Especially with all the “funny stuff” that’s being thrown around about Celsius…..

Funny stuff? Then maybe you should convert it over to Fahrenheit.

Looks like someone turned off the internet in Kazakhstan. That’s pretty crazy.

Sexual assault, fraud, money laundering, stuff like that…

These some excerpts from the last few months.

“Celsius Network has suspended its Chief Financial Officer Yaron Shalem due to external fraud and sexual assault allegations, according to a source close to the matter who shared an internal company letter with Blockworks.”

“The Times of Israel can reveal that a second senior Celsius Network employee, its chief revenue officer Roni Cohen-Pavon, in May established a side business with a convicted money launderer.”

“States on Friday took action against Celsius Network, accusing the company, which purports to be one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency lenders, of offering residents unregistered securities.”

Time to buy the dip!

I've always told myself if BTC dips below $40k (where I bought in) then I'm in for some more. Getting closer ...

When it hits $413 again....Im in !

So....Never?

I've got 1K sitting here ready for days trying to figure out the bottom that's all going towards ETH.

Hey 8 days ago…

When does it stop being a dip? The big 3 took a shot, DiFi got whacked and Meta got shot in the ass. All because a country most people can’t spell stopped mining BTC because the Internet was “turned off”.

Probably had more to do with Fed hiking interest rates than Borats home country shutting off internet.

Btw
If you joined Cops Game on discord, thank you for filling the invite I didn’t get a WL. You can delete that group if you’re not interested in it any longer

Bitcoin is either going to win or fail. I don't see a viable in-between. Personally I don't see it failing this far along the adoption curve. So I think it's going to eventually win.

Based upon historical S-curve adoptions (which Bitcoin is following perfectly) it should be 90% adopted in the US by 2029-2030.

I can't even imagine what the value will be at 90% adoption (in the US). Global adoption wouldn't be far behind though.

Where I struggle with this is understanding how this can’t already be achieved with traditional centralised databases, and all of the things already in place and working perfectly well.

Let’s say I want to be a member of an exclusive golf club. I need to pay a large fee to join, which immediately excludes those that can’t afford that (thus exclusivity is ensured by the size/frequency of membership fee). I pay the money, I’m signed up. For the sake of argument I don’t get a physical membership card, it’s all done via an app or some other digital pass. I can only access the facilities by presenting this pass. What is wrong with this system that it is improved or fixed by NFTs? Do I need to be able (or should I even care) to verify other people are bonafide members? Can’t the club already do that with their database? What does ~the blockchain~ do to improve that discrete setup?

I’m struggling to grasp how anything on your list, basically VIP-only offers and services, isn’t already a thing experienced by people all around the world anyway by virtue of their capital or connections.

In a very general sense I could see how ownership of sufficiently valuable NFTs could signal to establishments that you are of a certain status in terms of wealth, etc, with them being able to authenticate that, but again that isn’t exactly a foreign concept anyway. If you have enough money you’ll get access to privileged services with your bank, or even access to banks that have minimum capital requirements anyway, and from there you’ll get VIP invites to clubs, events, services, etc that less well off people won’t even know about much less be able to enjoy.

I’m probably not articulating it very well but I can’t help but feel that NFTs are a solution looking for a problem, and despite people basically talking as if we might as well have been living in caves before they existed, I’m struggling to cut through the “true believer” hype and actually understand what it is they do that was previously not possible or seriously degraded. This scepticism is probably not helped by the fact that right now NFTs seem to be crypto squared in terms of being all about speculation rather than utility.

Good commit/questions…

Let’s go to the golf club.

The advantages an NFT club has over the golf club is ownship. You own the token rather than the golf club owning your membership: You can’t sell the golf club membership when you’re done with it.

Also with some NFTs there is sometimes a staking mechanism involved which will pay for you holding the NFT your golf club won’t pay you to hold the membership.

Looking at yet another dip I really start to wonder if HODL is the way to go if you only joined the club in 2021.

Selling at each ATH and then buying back in would have been a much better alternative the last 12 months.

Of course you can't time the market but it feels like after each new ATH a drop follows.

If we could all time the dips and peaks (on anything) then we'd all be talking to eachother from our own private islands. Hindsight is 20/20. I try not to dwell on it because otherwise you end up in a mental funk.

That being said, I put £1k (~$1350) into MATIC at the end of December when it was around $2.60 because I thought it was heading up. If you want I could let you know whenever I stick money into an altcoin because it seems to trigger a slump, almost without fail.

It's tough if you got in this year. A nice ride up and then boom, right back down to where you started or worse depending on what you purchased. The 1 year BTC chart doesn't look promising.

If you bought 1 year ago, you're up 4.7%. Nasdaq composite is up ~14% for the same time frame. It's been awhile since you could say that the stock market did better than the crypto market.

BTC (resized).JPG

S&P went up ~30%, Tesla 40%, etc.

Friend of mine seems to think all the money in cryptos is in launchpads and yield farming now, to the point where he's not even really looking at buying altcoins as an isolated thing. He seems to be touting various insane APYs and I'll be honest I don't understand how they're achievable, but on the face of it he claims he's making pretty crazy money from it. I can only assume its unrealised gains, though.

I'm down in fiat terms 25% on all my crypto as of today, but as said I seem to have a knack for choosing the worst time to latch on to them.

Some of the gains are pretty crazy, but you also deal with the impermanent loss like I'm experiencing with CAKE. Staking for 65% doesn't help when the underlying asset drops 50%. I don't know much of anything when it comes to yield farming.

Looks like I didn't time the dip as well as I thought yesterday, it's still dipping! I'm in a holding pattern now just trying to consolidate my coins on different platforms into where I can stake or earn on them to keep generating income. But if ETH drops to below 3K this weekend I'm buying a bunch more.

I transferred all $ETH to Gemini (coin, not the crypto exchange) at 9% APY while this dip occurs. We may be looking at another bear market, and hey, fine with me. If $ETH drops to sub-$2500, I'll buy in and have WAY more down the road.

If anyone wants a degenerate play on cardano go to wenlobster.io put 3 Ada into the adress there and you either get 500k or 500m lobster tokens. It's not on any exchanges yet so like minting nfts. Apparently a few others like this have 5 to 10x

Looks like we are eyeing $35k as the next stop on the way down. I guess it's that entire "don't try to catch a falling knife" thing. Anyone care to call the bottom.

In the worst case I don’t see it dropping below 31 for anything more than a wick.

I wanna wait till Monday for CME to open to take a guess at bottom. Bears are definitely in control atm.

I’m not entirely sure what to do at the moment. My head is telling me to pull out for the moment and go back in when we’ve reached whatever the bottom of this is, but that would just crystallise my losses.

I’m one of those mid 2021 entrants though, so I’m not up at all, I’m probably 35% or more down and not doing any staking or farming, so not passive increase.

Interested to hear thoughts?

I’d definitely recommend moving around assets to take advantage of passive income if you’re going to continue to HODL.

I’m going to do what I always do, pop in here, whine like a mule because I’m losing my shirt and then probably buy some more.

Has anyone moved ATOM to the CDC wallet? Does it require a memo? I’m getting an annoying message from Coinbase about possibly needing a memo along with the address.

EDIT -> I answered my own question with a test send. No memo is required when sending to the CDC DiFi wallet application. I don’t know about sending to anywhere else though.

For anyone staking, which validator do you use? Just what I think is the local wallet listed as DeFi wallet?

There are a ton of choices.

E519E7BD-7592-45E8-B46B-8123A1D7B835 (resized).png

The most straight forward approach for assets you believe will go up over time is to HODL and buy the dip.

Remember the old saying "buy red, sell green"? If you are doing the opposite you are doing it wrong.

EDIT: I will add this caviat for the crypto market... It is actually important to have an exit plan, else you are at risk of losing 90%. That's the "high risk" part of the "high reward". I keep thinking all these dips are long time crypto holders with PTSD as they bought green in late 2017 and then rode it down 90% 2 months later, so they want to do everything they can to avoid making the same mistake. We haven't seen any run-up like 2017 so I'm not seeing the same risk. What I am seeing is the typical whack-a-mole market where crypto X pops 5x in a short time, then crypto Y pops 10x, then crypto Z drops 50%, etc. It's quite literally impossible to keep up, and that's why many crypto investors trade only Bitcoin. That's the long way of saying.... pick up to 10 assets you really like and focus on those. If you want to ask about individual ones, we could probably help. I think I've already stated that most of my 2021 purchases have lost money, and my 2020 purchases are all green, largely because everyone assumed BTC was in for a 100k year, and everyone was wrong... and in that is another lesson. money is made by going against what everyone thinks... rarely with them. Buying now is without question the opposite of what everyone is doing. Is it risky? yup. Is it less risky than buying a month ago? absolutely.

I'm staking ATOM in the CDC Wallet with SG-1, they got a lot of praise in multiple reddit threads.

Are lobster tokens worth anything or convertible to other coins?

Thanks. I did some digging and ultimately went with Stake.Fish for ATOM and Jerry’s Pool for CDC. This was before you saw your post.

They both seemed to have a good bit of their own asset staked compared to the other pools I checked.

Not yet, from what i understand they will be avaialble on some of the swap exchanges soon

Those look like good staking pools, glad you got in there! There is some good returns. Now you and I should figure out how often we should restake our rewards, with the CRO I found an estimator that said the sweet spot was every 2 days.

Anyone here holdling Luna bags?

I have been doing some homework and Terra looks like an incredible blockchain. They have excellent DeFi platforms, and lots of excellent projects launching.

It’s native stablecoin UST is one of the only truly decentralised stablecoins available. It’s adoption is growing with Binance recently offering it on several trading pairs.

Due to the high 19% yield on UST and the fact that Luna needs to be burned to mint UST, I have a feeling that Luna will be one of the strongest coins at the tail end of the bull market. People will look to purchase Luna in order to mint UST for staking during the bear market.