![]() ![]() ![]() It was a relatively ephemeral incident where, as is often the case in investing, there were some winners and some losers. But generally, most of the efforts to pull a concrete meaning out of GameStop fall flat. There have been all sorts of efforts to ascribe some bigger takeaway to the GameStop story - perhaps it was a populist uprising or a sign that there was something very broken in the market. They rallied behind a guy who goes by Roaring Kitty in one YouTube video about GameStop, he pretended to smoke a cigar while wearing a cat mask. An army of day traders on the Reddit forum r/WallStreetBets drove up the price of the game retailer’s stock in a matter of days, forcing halts in trading and costing some hedge funds that had been betting against the stock quite a bit of money. One of the first big stories of the year was the GameStop saga, and it was a fun one. You can see this clearly in the markets in 2021. is to create ever more detached financialization that can just generate what the industry calls wealth and what the rest of the world just doesn’t see.” In other words, the confusing status of value today is a feature, not a bug. And the purpose of our financial systems. “A machine is what it does, and the purpose of the system is the output of the system. Historically, the economy was theoretically based on labor and value creation at the individual level, and on the structural level, voting shares in companies based on their financial fundamentals and future value, said tech industry veteran Anil Dash, CEO of the programming company Glitch. Lately, the hype aspect of money has felt more true and important than ever. “Everything’s hype, a social media world, right?” Becerra insists there’s a utility to the apes - there’s merchandise, events, and he sees having them as the “new world flex,” like a watch or a nice car. But why certain groups of people have trained their focus on certain items is hard to parse. The social aspect is clear in much of what’s going on now, whether it be a group of investors on Reddit trying to take down a hedge fund betting against GameStop or people paying thousands of dollars to claim ownership of digital art they could effectively have for free. ![]() This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Money is fundamentally, unalterably social.”īy submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice. “Money is a made-up thing, a shared fiction. “Money feels cold and mathematical and outside the realm of fuzzy human relationships. As Jacob Goldstein wrote in Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing, all money is sort of a collective myth. Psychology has always played a role in money and investing - and there have always been bubbles, too, where the price of an asset takes off at a rapid pace and disconnects from the fundamental value. The concept of value is a fuzzy one, and valuation is often more art than it is science. ![]() Or, at the very least, value has rarely felt so disconnected from reality. Between NFTs, crypto, and GameStop, AMC, and other meme stocks, money has rarely felt more fake. Then again, everything about money feels a little strange at the moment. He’s right that NFTs - non-fungible tokens, little digital assets that exist on a blockchain - are having a moment. “They’re important to me because of the value that they will continue to increase by,” he says. But Becerra, 40, insists it’s worth it - he believes in NFTs, or at the very least, the moneymaking power of them. At some point, you’ve just got to let sunk cost be. The experience, he says, “felt like death.” He’s gone to great lengths to get the stolen digital assets back, paying hundreds of thousands more dollars to retrieve the tokens, including, most importantly, his three bored apes.įor many outsiders, it’s hard to grasp paying so much money for a trio of cartoon monkeys once, let alone twice. During troubleshooting, they raided his wallet. Scammers pretended to be interested in buying one of his NFTs in a Discord channel and tricked him by saying they could help him fix a problem with his crypto wallet. He got bamboozled out of what he claims is some $2 million in cryptocurrency and NFTs and complained on Twitter about the incident. Calvin Becerra went viral earlier this year for a less-than-ideal reason. ![]()
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