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Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

People have figured out that one of the ways to get to overnight wealth is to solve the collective action problem and they're getting better and better at fostering it and at coming up with legal ways to avoid existing regulations against pump and dump schemes. Doing it "for the lulz" to hose a bunch of hedge fund shorts. Or creating NFTs around "things" you "own" and pumping them up. Knockoff dogcoins that have nothing to do with the playfulness of the original.

The sad part is that we could actually solve some real problems by coordinating collective action on, say, starting a new city that's designed around non-motorized transit within the city limits. But we don't. We get Snoop Dogg crypto instead.

It's all so depressing.

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I was following "Roaring Kittys" Youtube Channel when he had less than 400 subscribers. This was never intended to be a pump and dump, he genuinely made a case for a better valuation. The mania and hype started right after the short squeeze in january and I a agree that the community that built around it is mostly a shitshow. However many of the original investors are still invested believing in a business turn-around lead by Ryan Cohen.

The stock already sits at 600% valuation, what kind of turnaround will justify a multiple of that?

600% from what? Price discovery is broken when large market participants and market makers have access to mechanisms that enable unlimited shorting.

Current price is, in part, driven by asymmetrical risk/reward - there's a small potential loss (size of one's position in GME) and subjectively high chance of having a real stock squeeze (and having a 10/100/1000x reward) assuming that original 120%+ short interest was not closed and is still held in the form of various derivatives.

The assumption hasn't been disproved so far, partly because current regulatory environment is very lax on reporting (which makes it very hard to disprove the thesis using public data) and partly due to other indicators (like retail owning over 10% of float as of last earnings report).

> The assumption hasn't been disproved so far

This assumption is disproved every day by publicly available short interest data. If you operate on the assumption that all official data is false you can make all the wild claims you want, but you're not being serious and your theory is unfalsifiable.

It's entirely falsifiable in multiple ways: (1) a voluntary share recall triggered by GameStop would force an accurate share count; (2) an extraordinary action triggered by shareholders for a formal accounting; (3) a special dividend with no equivalent cash value (eg NFT); or (4) a majority of shares getting direct registered (DRS) with the company's transfer agent (ComputerShare) rather than through brokerages so that the unique market maker powers at the Depository Trust Company (DTC) cannot mask the underlying share count.

I will also say: you can read SEC sources about RegSHO limitations about how short interest can be manipulated and masked through "Failures to Deliver" (FTD). So this is not exactly an assumption, more of a preposition about magnitude.

> If you operate on the assumption that all official data is false

This is a strawman. It is possible to believe (and there is motive and opportunity in this case) that one "official" statistic is manipulated or does not show the whole picture without being a raving conspiracy theorist who trusts no official.

> Price discovery is broken when large market participants and market makers have access to mechanisms that enable unlimited shorting.

Actually, it's the other way round: you can only have accurate price discovery if people can take both long (buy) and short positions (short sell). If shorting is restricted, price discovery is much less likely, since only current owners of the shares can sell them. That's like only allowing current owners of the shares to buy more of them.

I think it's more that by law, long positions require disclosures, while short positions can be, and mostly are, opaque.

The more opaque information discovery is in general, the less accurate markets are in the short term.

The OP you are replying to here is obviously talking about shorting MORE than 100% of the float, which indeed should not be possible.

You need to stop getting your information from wsb conspiracy theorists. Here's an example of perfectly possible 200% float short:

Acme Corp has exactly 1 share of float, owned by Alice.

Bob borrows the share from Alice and sells to Charlie.

Diana borrows the share from Charlie and sells it to Eve.

Bob and Diana are each short 1 share for a total of 2. Total short position is 200% of float.

The better indicator of sketchy activity is FTDs, which may indicate that people are selling short without a locate.

Shorting more than 100% is absolutely possible and the reason it is possible and normal is explained in the SEC report.

600% from where it sat before the craze, which was the market price for a failing company. The company has seen revenue decline by 40%, lost roughly half a billion dollars in both 2019 and 2020, their EBITDA is negative, cash flow is negative, their margins are negative and falling. Their only plan to turnaround the ship so far seems to be entering the NFT market...

> subjectively high chance of having a real stock squeeze

Ha, that explains a lot. The only way to believe the stock will go up, is the fairy-tale short squeeze. The current valuation is extremely generous based on reality.

>market makers have access to mechanisms that enable unlimited shorting.

Uhh, what?

Market makers are allowed to be temporarily naked short because it's required for them to do the job they're supposed to do - provide liquidity. A market maker can sell short if they don't have any stock because they will almost certainly be buying it soon after. There's no evidence that any market makers are abusing this privilege with GameStop.

Yeah; it's not exactly what I'd called "unlimited shorting"; all of the pre-borrow and closeout requirements from Regulation SHO apply ... plus, as you say, the market maker exception is specifically there to stabilize markets by providing liquidity in the face of sudden rushes to buy.

I guess one man's price stabilization is another man's market manipulation.

It also needs to be mentioned that the entire business of MMs is to capture the spread by buying at the bid and selling at the offer. As such, they are passive market participants who will only transact if someone executes a marketable order against one of their resting orders. This means, they can only be as (naked) short as someone else is willing to buy from them. But they are also not interested in having directional exposure and will go to great lengths in order to balance their inventory.

The idea that MMs would somehow use their privilege to actively sell massive amounts of non-existent shares into the market in order to manipulate the price downwards is preposterous. That is literally the opposite of their business model and such activity would certainly be flagged by regulators.

Right - the entire Volcker reporting framework would instantly reveal anything of that nature.

Honestly it feels like a lot of the conspiracy theories around these meme stocks are based on reading a lot into a very narrow slice of regulatory text without any real understand of the whole.

This poster knows what they're talking about. The market making exception is there to prevent liquidity completely evaporating as it did during the flash crash. It's not there to encourage them to bend the rules -- it's to compel them to trade when it might be unprofitable.

Every trade has to be marked correctly, whether it's short with a physical locate or short on a riskless principal basis. Equity swaps trade and are marked as riskless principal trades (ie. they're fully hedged positions and the short position is the market maker's aggregate short position). That information gets aggregated at client level and reported to regulators.

After Dodd Frank equity swaps and rehypo became even more heavily restricted. Swaps go through a clearing house and rehypothication was basically dead the last time I worked in the industry (though that might have changed).

I'm 99% sure that the speculation about the "elites" and their sinister role in GME's trading activity is simply caused by booking errors and/or aggregation mistakes.

I think it's also worth pointing out that when selling short (naked or not), there's a big difference between adding liquidity and taking liquidity, and market makers are primarily (if not exclusively) in the business of adding liquidity.

If you're taking liquidity (i.e. "I want to sell right now"), you're directly applying downward price pressure to the market, by removing shares from the buy side.

If you're adding liquidity ("I'm selling, but I'm waiting for a buyer"), that's likely to have much less (if any) effect on the price.

> a market maker engaged in bona fide market making, particularly in a fast-moving market, may need to sell the security short without having arranged to borrow shares

It's literally called the "madoff rule" and the "madoff exemption" because he's the one that pushed the SEC to allow it.

https://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/regsho.htm

What exactly is a "600% valuation"? In 2020 Gamestop was valued at a level that implied bankruptcy within two years.

Their financials still imply eventual bankruptcy at the moment, even after the massive windfall from stock appreciation.

A lot of people got in when the stock was near the peak so they were left holding the bag. They're holding, hoping for a potential return on their investment as selling now would be at a loss.

I can't speak to the claims about potential profitability of GameStop's business ventures, but one theory endorsed by a lot of the /r/wallstreetbets and /r/SuperStonk redditors is that hedge funds still have significant undisclosed shorts and we have yet to see the "mother of all short squeezes" (MoASS), in which case the stock price can be well in excess of what is justified by future profitability.

Related to this theory, a lot of them believe the ease of closing short positions is facilitated by shady phantom shares and are trying to stamp that out by directly registering shares with the broker Computershare.

Disclaimer: I own GME stock.

He genuinely made a case for a better valuation, but the case was on its face ridiculous. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't his idea that there is some big digital play for gamestop? Which...sure..maybe with huge investments, but they'd be going up against the stores already built into the major consoles and mobile devices, and then the number of major game stores available for a PC. I'll wager 1 GME: Gamestop will never be a major digital player and DFV's thesis was wrong.

No, the original thesis was solely to survive another console cycle. As I said elsewhere, the 2020 valuation implied Gamestop defaulting on it's debt in 2021, because most analysts didn't even expect gen5 consoles to have an optical drive. It all blew through the roof when Ryan Cohen stepped in and speculation on Gamestop entering new markets started.

The 2020 valuation implied that it's very likely Gamestop won't ever make much profit again, whether it bankrupts next year or 20, if it never makes profit the stock is worth $0. And as we've seen through the cycle, this was actually true. Gamestop hasn't made an annual profit in over 3 years. With this "undervalued" gaming cycle you talk about, they made $80m in a quarter which they promptly blew in losses the next quarter and are increasingly losing money, to the tune of $100m/quarter. Instead of a typical small cap value company that is making 15 P/E, Gamestop is doing the opposite and losing that much money, -15 P/E, in a dying, declining growth business. Feel free to buy shares for $100, where every year they give you $94 value back, to sell physical copies of video games... Those are the actual fundamentals.

Gamestop stock value represents a lottery ticket that they will ever make some money again. It's not worth much.

> whether it bankrupts next year or 20, if it never makes profit the stock is worth $0.

A business is at least worth it's liquidation value at any time. And $GME was trading near liquidation value. Feel free to read up on Cigar Butt Investing if interested.

> A business is at least worth it's liquidation value at any time.

Only if majority shareholders will actually liquidate. If they are set on a futile attempt to light the money on fire, you don't have that $100 you lent your cousin Johnny to start his door-to-door knife selling business anymore...

It is actually astonishing how much GME/WSB'ers have continuously gotten wrong from this saga and keep trucking along in cognitive dissonance: alleged Robinhood + Citadel collusion, not understanding DTCC collateral requirements spike, short sellers / "wall street" covering and going bankrupt anyday now... First QAnon, then most of these WSB'ers probably derided QAnon'ers imaginary conspiracy world, only to jump on board the same flavor a months later?? Internet is doing some damage.

All my comments were in regard to the original thesis by Roaring Kitty, that it should trade at least in the $20s instead of below $5. I don't understand why you keep making references to current price and the resulted community, which we can agree is full of BS.

> People have figured out that one of the ways to get to overnight wealth is to solve the collective action problem and they're getting better and better at fostering it and at coming up with legal ways to avoid existing regulations against pump and dump schemes.

For what it's worth, Roaring Kitty's original video streams where he analyzes GameStop's stock should still be up on YouTube and probably cross-posted on other sites. He has hours and hours of commentary on the topic so if he said anything urging collective action or pumping the stock in an illegal way, somebody should be able to find it. As far as I remember, he was just doing a fundamental business analysis of GameStop and just pointed out that the stock was drastically underpriced given the upcoming new console cycle and his opinion that the actual business of selling physical games was not yet on the way out. Should commenting on a security that you like be illegal in a free society?

As far as your commentary about the increase of "pump and dump" schemes, I think the technology is more useful than you seem to recognize and that we're in the very early stages of blockchain tech and better uses for it will be found, but that's a separate issue I'd rather not go into here.

But as far as the pumps/dumps go, I think you're more closely looking at the symptom and not the cause. What's closer to the root cause of all of these financial schemes is the mental health crisis impacting young people. Many young people are feeling hopeless about the future for many, many reasons, and feel that financially making it through extreme risk taking is the only way to have a good life. Many are just dropping out of society. You can see this being impacted in some widely popularized stats like the number of young men not having sex, suicide rates, college attendance dropping, and many more things. What's going on with the mental health of the young is much more important to the future of humanity than the fixation society is currently stuck on.

"What's closer to the root cause of all of these financial schemes is the mental health crisis impacting young people." I think this is very true. I do think that it not only applies to young people, there are a lot of middle age plus people waking up and realizing they are probably never going to be able to retire without some sort of miracle moonshot. I know an intelligent 65+ year old nurse that just torched 30k on trying on a bad crypto investment. Imagine all these people that just rode the massive bull market up in stocks nearing retirement age with just enough to retire. Stocks are likely approaching a peak and suddenly these people that had enough to retire will find themselves on much shakier ground while inflation is pumping. Odds are high many of them will make a desperate gamble as well.

Yeah, I was more commenting on the people that cropped up around him on multiple places online. I don't have a commentary on the original analysis.

"The sad part is that we could actually solve some real problems by coordinating collective action on, say, starting a new city that's designed around non-motorized transit within the city limits."

The incentives are different. The people trying to get rich quick are not likely to do hard work to make/grow a city. Hell, it's hard enough to get people to do the simple act of voting (especially in primaries) or going to municipal or school board meetings.

Agree the cost of the first statement is quite high (time and money) where as clicking to buy a stock for a couple hundred bucks is not much effort at all.

While it is sad that we can't get civic engagement higher I don't think you can equate these problems at all.

"While it is sad that we can't get civic engagement higher I don't think you can equate these problems at all."

That's my entire point - you're not going to get engagement from the vast majority of the GameStop people if it doesn't involve a get rich quick value proposition.

> The sad part is that we could actually solve some real problems by coordinating collective action on, say, starting a new city that's designed around non-motorized transit within the city limits. But we don't. We get Snoop Dogg crypto instead.

Is it perhaps possible that what's been solved is not collective action in a general sense, but transparently self-interested collective action for a narrow easy-engagement rapid-payoff set of problems?

Revamping city design, or setting up a new one, doesn't meet any of those criteria. It's not easy to engage with. It doesn't pay off quickly. It's not immediately obvious why a random person would want to jump on.

So, go ahead. Lament that the teeming masses have collectively made a decision that's not the one we would like them to. It is a modern tragedy. For my own part, I think there are lessons to be learned in why one decision was collectively made and acted on and not another.

Right, but it is righteous and still widely profitable. It's more work, but it's lasting, honest value.

This is why it is so depressing.

Widely profitable for who? For society or directly in dollars for the individuals involved? Righteous by whose definition? Honest by whose definition? How widely shared are those definitions? Rhetorical questions, please don't answer.

Someone has solved a particular kind of collective action problem. Now we have a playbook for addressing a specific type of situation. It doesn't seem to be a general solution or readily adaptable to a general solution.

Perhaps we could be happy that we have gained a useful tool. Even if it's not quite the tool we might have wished for. Otherwise we're essentially lamenting that all the money and effort that goes into, say, consumer goods R&D (or another unworthy cause) isn't instead used for medical research (or another worthy cause).

Right. And if only we could all just band together, we could create world peace and end hunger! It's so easy you guys! Just everyone cooperate!

You honestly think starting a meme cryptocoin is equivalent to the effort required to build a new city!? How are these things even remotely related?

> if only we could all just band together, we could create world peace and end hunger

I mean, that does sound like a true proposition. So why is it that we can't band together?

Because humans evolved in a tribal setting with at most ~200 people per tribe (see Dunbars number), and as social animals have a very keen instict for in- and outgroups? Any group larger than that number (and often much smaller) will start to fracture into sub-groups that then compete with each other for status and resources. You can see this effect even in groups as small as 200-person startups, where there can be vigorous "us vs them" dynamics between the dev and marketing teams or even between dev and ops.

This kinda sounds like a copout.

We can escape the fatalism of Dunbar's number and in/out-groups through leadership and recursively hierarchical structures. See any large (>~200 persons) company, collective action (civil rights, wars, social movements), nations, etc.

I was asking a rhetorical question tbh.

Take it up with evolution.

The payoff to kickstarting a city is absolutely bonkers. It's long term, but the compounding implied interest rate is still enormous. I don't think it is anywhere close to ending world hunger.

I agree that it's depressing that people don't realise the power of collective action. It would be lovely to see in labour markets or in rental markets for example.

However, the sums of money and level of commitment involved in starting a new city are radically different to that in buying a bit of GameStop or Bitcoin or whatever.

Even if you chucked in ten grand your friends might think you're crazy.

By contrast that's not even getting you half of the materials of a house. Or an apartment. Even if it's a prefab with no interior. And we haven't even started talking about making a city yet, what with all of the roads and power lines and decision makers and those juicy bits.

It's actually just a far harder problem to solve.

Pump and dump is the very opposite of collective action: no real value is created, you're just fleecing a bunch of optimists in a very zero-sum game.

(Mind you, a lot of high profile VC deals look like that as well! Remember Wework?)

It's not zero sum if you're on the winning team. That's the collective action. Beat up the nerd, steal his lunch money.

The collective action problem that’s been solved is getting people to collectively click a button. It’s why you see tons of people upvote things or change their profile pictures in support of a movement. But getting them to go past that is still as hard as it’s ever been.

Taking this more meta, and possibly utopian...

Collective action, or rather, any effective form of organisation is (arguably) the limiting factor on human progress. Corporation, country, tribe, union... all forms of organisation.

These are all very different, have very different strengths, weaknesses and abilities. Tribal chiefs are not very likely to be effective at the same things, in the same way as a CEO or a prime minister. Linux, GNU, WWW, Wikipedia and such are another form. Rare, relatively. But novel and productive. What these organisations produced is again, qualitatively different from what commercial entities produce. There's a medium-message dynamic between form and product.

A lot of things are clearly doable, but our forms of organisation don't produce them. We're basically limited to the things that are forms of organisation can produce. Organisational methods are a limiting factor to the same extent that resources, science and such are limiting factors.

This starts (according to YNH) at the start of history, or rather, we might define "human history" as the point at which our methods of organisation develop past biological determinants. IE, chimps operate in troops. Gorillas in harems. Geladas in a complex herd structure. Modern humans are (again, according to YNH) the homo subspecies with the ability to switch. That said, we're not that good at it.

For the most part, human cooperation of this epoch is defined by working tirelessly against each other in such a way that sometimes produces emergent benefits. Within

^In a literal sense.

> Modern humans are (again, according to YNH) the homo subspecies with the ability to switch. That said, we're not that good at it.

Our species is very clearly lacking a crucial ingredient for our continued evolution: the ability to align our actions (and motivations, and rewards), on a societal scale. If we're still here in a hundred thousand years, I think the anthropologists of the future will look back to today as falling before some critical phase transition in the way our collective consciousness operates. Whether that's a hive mind, or some technological approach to consensus (which I'm almost loathe to say out loud given the Baby's First Computer approaches we're coming up with these days), or just us all waking up and realizing that we should be living life in service to one another, who knows. Our contemporary penchant for individualism, while producing many interesting emergent artifacts, is causing us to eat ourselves alive.

>>lacking a crucial ingredient for our continued evolution: the ability to align our actions (and motivations, and rewards), on a societal scale.

I don't think these are contradictory statements. Our society is both defined and limited by the quality of our "collective consciousness," ability to operate cooperatively and such. It's not zero, and it's not unlimited either.

Personally, I don't see this as a purely ideological or philosophical limitation. Our ideologies and philosophies tend to trail culture, IMO, not the other way around. Neither do I think that individualism vs collectivism is a defining dichotomy. Both individualism and collectivism are, likely, inevitable. Also both individualism and (especially) collectivism compete within themselves as much as they do with each other.

And yes, the ways that we cooperate are clunky, maybe immoral, and not really designed. Money is a cultural construct, for example, that creates cooperation. So is religion, tribalism, legal systems, etc. Is money a collectivist artefact? I think it's very hard to argue otherwise. Money is useless if you are alone, and requires a collective consciousness to even exist. Equality and collectivism aren't synonyms.

If you truly believe in the concept of a collective consciousness, then would you not also be forced to conclude that there are others that have considered these questions as well, and possibly that they have answers for them?

Just curious, do you believe there is some greater organism or what have you with the ability to integrate human consciousnesses (something like Gaia theory)?

If so, what do you believe that organism/being (or whatever it is) would feel or think about what humans are doing now, acting in the world?

> do you believe there is some greater organism or what have you with the ability to integrate human consciousnesses

Haven't seen any evidence for it.

There has been concerted action against collective action for over a century in the west. That the only way people feel comfortable expressing it now is with the cover of financial schemes is a temporary, I agree bullshit, phase. People are building cultural experiences to validate the effort to themselves and will come around to it without the need to be scamming someone. Just give them some time, the pursuit of novelty alone will solve this.

This reminds me of, on a very differently-colored website, someone whining, "Why doesn't 4chan's Anonymous work on cancer?" They were sad about it.

You have confused a short-term low-effort collective action not much more different than a Tweeetstorm with some kind of long-term civilizational megaproject, and all over your very own pet issue. Come on.

> ...starting a new city...

Curious what you mean here, and how it relates to collective action?

What I'm trying to point to here is that in the developed world the vast, vast majority of the value of a dwelling is how many dwellings exist around it. That's because land value is an arms race. So many people want to live in, say, Toronto that large sums are poured into mortgages. The materials cost is only a small fraction of the value of the home.

But it doesn't have to be this way. People could put all this energy they're burning on crypto and apply the same principles into getting everyone to agree to some sort of better city with sustainability and low-cost-of-maintenance built in by default. That way we could have affordable housing spring up. It would take work to vet; escrows, webs-of-trust, etc. But it's totally doable in the new work from anywhere future.

Plenty of affordable housing in depressed areas (Appalachia). The problem is the lack of jobs, or safety, or some other thing people want.

People don't want affordable housing. They want affordable housing in the existing cities where they (and everyone else) want to be.

> The problem is the lack of jobs, or safety, or some other thing people want.

From op: > But it's totally doable in the new work from anywhere future

"getting everyone to agree to some sort of better city"

They're talking about creating a new city, not reusing the existing empty housing.

Even if you can work from anywhere (which ignores many industries), this only satisfies that one requirement. Some people might see the snow and cold as a deal breaker. Others might not want to move there because it's far from family. A typical theme on related posts of relocating for remote work is that they want some combination of educated population, technology culture/groups, and some sort of specific government/community resource. The list goes on.

The nature of the housing problem is that people want to live in very specific areas and then it snowballs. Remote work today should allow a considerable number of people to move out of SV, Toronto, etc. Yet most are staying. There are cheaper and better (depending on specific desires) options, yet they are not often explored. It's basically group-think. I don't see a new city solving that, since once it becomes popular, it too will suffer from demand effects.

Right, but like people didn't do all of that negative thinking with some random dogcoin. They poured in. If you told me there were 10k well trusted artistic people with a great deal of interest in starting a high density, non-car-centric city in the middle of Ontario I would join. I would buy the lot of land on Kickstarter. I would list my friends that I trusted. I would help solve the problems around figuring out internet and transit.

But nobody in Canada is offering this to me because even though this is better for the world, this takes real work. Instead they want to pump crypto and stock market scams because the payoff is short term and because they're naturally cynical.

"Right, but like people didn't do all of that negative thinking with some random dogcoin. They poured in."

Because the ante is low. Throw a few hundred or thousand at a chance to be rich is way easier than to uproot your life to move to a fledgling city that nobody knows how it will work out, and you still have to work.

"But nobody in Canada is offering this to me because even though this is better for the world, this takes real work."

Maybe this is an opportunity for you to offer it to yourself and others. Start the movement! If you wait for others to do it, it might not happen. If not you, then who?

Free private cities should be a solution in this case. Finding a better optimum by optimizing the city towards the specific population living in it not taking the mean, where everyone is unhappy to some degree

>The sad part is that we could actually solve some real problems by coordinating collective action on, say, starting a new city that's designed around non-motorized transit within the city limits.

I have been dreaming of doing something like this lately! The issue is where would we do it? How would we get people to move there? Who will fund it?

> cities designed around non-motorized transit

Buses and trains have engines and motors. You probably mean designing around public transit rather than personally owned vehicles.

> The sad part is that we could actually solve some real problems by coordinating collective action on, say, starting a new city that's designed around non-motorized transit within the city limits.

In general it would seem that human beings don't actually want to make the world a better place, but if you can find a way to sell it as a get rich quick scheme it might actually work.

Maybe it isn‘t even a better place for the majority? Just a utopia for a few? Take into account that e.g. 20-30% of the population are smokers

...I don't follow. What does non-motorized transit within city limits have to do with smoking?

doesn’t that overnight success come at the expense of a lot of the normal people trying to strike it rich too? seems like a few break through but it’s the same old exploitation for most

> Doing it "for the lulz" to hose a bunch of hedge fund shorts. Or creating NFTs around "things" you "own" and pumping them up.

Well... hosing a bunch of hedge funds is at least going to give you a good laugh as a return for your money, not to mention that the entire GME saga showed once again what a house of cards the financial system is and how incompetent hedge fund managers, regulatory agencies and politicians are - while NTFs are just a plain scam.

The "hosing the hedge funds" thing around GME was a big scam, and it seems that people are still falling for it. The GME pump and dump had no effect on the Wall Street establishment, and it's not even clear that any short sellers got squeezed. The pump started on r/wallstreetbets, following their normal modus operandi of sparking upward momentum in stocks by coordinated options purchases. The faux-populist narrative developed as a way to pull in first mainstream Redditors and then lazy journalists. At the height of the frenzy, average people were surrounded by messaging from most media outlets that buying highly leveraged GME options was righteous and would make you rich, and anyone questioning this narrative was derided as a "corporate shill".

By contrast, NFTs are refreshingly honest, even if their long term value is questionable. An NFT is the direct digital equivalent of a numbered print of an artwork, signed by the artist. There is no pretension of political righteousness, and mainstream media is inundated with messaging that they are a scam. Everyone involved knows exactly what they are getting, and has been endlessly warned of every possible downside.

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