I’m sure retailers were but basically it’s about a group of suburban Chicago housewives who frontran the entire thing. The beanie baby market was very opaque and they compiled a bunch of information which gave them an edge. Not only bought and flipped a ton through superior information but pumped their own bags through magazines/price guides they created, created an authentication service and became the public face of beanie baby collectors. Some were traveling the country to buy up all of the retired or soon to be retired ones and then reselling them for 100x+.
Of course the movie also focuses on a few lovable(well really not so lovable imo) losers who basically lost it all (out of the millions who probably lost money). It really isn’t any different than NFTs or baseball card collecting or poker. A few people clean up and most people lose to varying extents.
They have $750m worth of deposits in their LPs with JEWEL as a mandatory side so that kind of makes some sense. There was a completely airdropped token called SOS today which actually briefly flipped the ENS token that was airdropped a couple months ago. It has a 1 billion dollar market cap and was just created this morning and completely given away to people who have used Opensea with amounts based on your transaction history. That makes a lot less sense to me tbh.
I mean there were fraudsters but they certainly weren’t all/mostly that. Virtually all of the UP NFT haul hasn’t been generated from anything underhanded.
The crazy thing is the authenticator person is STILL getting $25/beanie baby to have people mail her beanie babies to authenticate in 2021 and has authenticated something like a quarter million beanie babies lol.
My free tokens from this are currently only worth $65, but there may or may not have been some people in the discord who were airdropped five figures $ yesterday. Merry Christmas!
My problem with these NFT games is that they feel like the crypto part is the focus and the gameplay is just tacked on. Like people have said, truly viable CCGs and MMORPGs come out like once every 10-20years or so. If you want to compete with Magic and Hearthstone, you really really need experts in designing these kinds of games on board from day 1.
That’s surprising because the NFT art people were paying Lambo prices for was definitely all about the art and not a get-rich-quick instrument first and foremost.
Counterpoint: For 99% of human history if there was a pandemic or war and you were poor the options were mostly to sit around and die, or try to go kill other people and likely die. The fact that in 2022 there exists a possibility of exploiting a convoluted and moderately entertaining online ponzi scheme where you might lose the nothing you have anyway but could also 100x your roll in a month and half is revolutionary not dystopian.
