Ask HN: Did you 'invest' in NFTs or memecoins?

I bought a whole bunch of dogecoins in the past, back when it was actually a memecoin. Meme tech communities were awesome. I got tired of crypto at one point and turned most of it to cash, and the rest to DOGE.

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.

NFT's were always a ponzi scheme. [1][2]

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_o3nZHzCwA

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpqreZlmHGU

No, definitely didn't touch any of it. Once I found out that all you got was actually a URL to a CDN that is not guaranteed to be serving that data forever, I knew it was a house of cards, a complete facade. If the "digital asset" you were "purchasing" had all of its bits and bytes living in the global public ledger, I might give it a bit more attention or support. But definitely not the way it was set up.

The collectibles market is already one I avoid, as the greater fool theory runs the show.

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 did let myself get sucked up into it for a while, mainly because I found a group that wanted to develop their own projects and felt it would be interesting to join them and learn how to code smart contracts (and I did learn a decent amount about it).

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.

No. Could I have made a lot of money? Yes.

Would I have made a lot of money? Probably not.

I exited crypto in 2017 after the fork because there was too much community fighting, I didn't think it would take off.

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.

> 5 years ago there was a lot of talk, even on here, of getting rich from NFTs and memecoins, discussing airdrops etc. Bored Ape Yacht Club and the like.

Please remember 95% were never actually rich. They simply had a number in an account go to a high number temporarily before crashing down. Very, very few would have cashed out at or near the top.

Some of the reason the memecoin thing happened was a dangerous illusion of wealth caused by a misunderstanding that unrealised paper gains are almost completely incomparable to realised gains in a liquid and secure asset.

Never got involved.

I think of bitcoin and all the crypto products the same way I think of baseball cards. The underlying asset is worthless cardboard. Value is pure speculation. Sure you make real money speculating, trading cardboard for real cap gains, but it's cardboard at the end of the day.

Value can vanish in an instant. As old baseball card collectors die off, there's no new wave of young people willing to pay a cool million dollars for a rare card. And exactly that has happened to many crypto products.

Bitcoin has enjoyed the "first wave" effect. But the days of 5000x gains on a "cardboard" underlying asset are going to be harder to find. Bitcoin is not going to 5000x again from it's current price. New crypto products will not either.