My hot take about crypto is that NFTs (and related things) weren’t Beanie Babies for zoomers, they were sports betting for social media clout. Nobody[1] expected their grandchildren to inherit their monkey pictures, and lots of ordinary people really did make lots of money by winning their bets.
It worked almost exactly like Fantasy Football, but with influencers instead of athletes. You saw a guy make a post announcing an NFT, and you quietly estimated how successful they would be at promoting it based on what you knew about them. Once you had a number, if you liked it, you decided on a spread to bet on. A conservative bet of −1/2sd, assuming your initial estimate was on target, was like taking an easy spread at low odds.
There was, of course, an audience participation element[2] that made it more engaging. If you promoted something you bought, you were throwing your own clout into the ring, and your spreads needed to account for the second-order effects of buyers promoting their purchases. A smaller influencer with reliably influential followers might be a ‘sleeper pick’ compared to a big influencer whose followers are mostly lurkers. You could bet on how cool you were, or how cool your friends were, and get a quantifiable answer, and a lot of the big losses came from people overestimating themselves in this respect.
My hot take about crypto is that NFTs (and related things) weren’t Beanie Babies for zoomers, they were sports betting for social media clout. Nobody[1] expected their grandchildren to inherit their monkey pictures, and lots of ordinary people really did make lots of money by winning their bets.
It worked almost exactly like Fantasy Football, but with influencers instead of athletes. You saw a guy make a post announcing an NFT, and you quietly estimated how successful they would be at promoting it based on what you knew about them. Once you had a number, if you liked it, you decided on a spread to bet on. A conservative bet of −1/2sd, assuming your initial estimate was on target, was like taking an easy spread at low odds.
There was, of course, an audience participation element[2] that made it more engaging. If you promoted something you bought, you were throwing your own clout into the ring, and your spreads needed to account for the second-order effects of buyers promoting their purchases. A smaller influencer with reliably influential followers might be a ‘sleeper pick’ compared to a big influencer whose followers are mostly lurkers. You could bet on how cool you were, or how cool your friends were, and get a quantifiable answer, and a lot of the big losses came from people overestimating themselves in this respect.
Well, I’m sure somebody, but nothing approaching a majority.
Glibly, “Competitive Ponzi Scheming” described it accurately enough.