Everything Will Be Okay

Hello, stranger.

The NBA Finals will be starting soon. Before long, a champion will be crowned, and “Top Shot Series 2” will come to a close. There’s a good chance you might feel angry or disappointed when that happens, and there’s a better chance the reason you feel that way is because you think you lost money you didn’t expect to lose.

I want to speak to you, not as Packrip Ewing, Top Shot collector and basketball fan, but as a guy behind his keyboard in the suburbs of New York.

Just a regular ol’ dude with a 9 to 5 job, a family, and friends, trying to get back to living life after a weird and unpredictable 2020, somehow in the middle of an equally weird and unpredictable 2021.

A better and different flavor of weird and unpredictable, of course, centered around non-fungible tokens and other speculative, viral, social investments and collectibles, instead of, well, you remember. I don’t need to remind you.

What is upsetting you are unrealized losses conditional to the projected value of your collection based on the low ask of a Moment at a moment in time. I say “you think you lost money” because you haven’t lost anything until you actually sell. And if you have purchased a Moment for one price and sold it for a lower price, I have bad news for you.

That’s your decision.

Nobody else is responsible for you consciously choosing to lose.

I get it. Losing is a shitty feeling.

You came across this incredibly exciting, shiny, fun new thing, and got really into it because it’s the kind of product that is really easy to get really into.

So you spent.

And you spent more.

And then maybe you spent a little more.

Maybe you tapped into your savings, or the vacation fund, or rang up a tally on your credit card that is more than you realized, buy after buy, because Top Shot is a really compelling product and the store is never closed.

Now you’ve spent more than you planned and everything you bought has a “lower value” than it did when you bought it and every day you wake up expecting that to change and it doesn’t, and you just feel angry because you don’t want to lose money doing anything, let alone something you enjoy.

Because you do like Top Shot. Maybe even love it. Nobody spends this much time and money doing something they don’t actually enjoy.

It’s frustrating when you commit yourself to something and it doesn’t go as you planned it to. We have all been there. That’s life!

But it’s not the end of the world and it’s nothing that you can’t overcome, whether it’s with patience or with a more conservative approach to your money that will help you be more responsible for years to come.

Because this is about Top Shot, but it’s also about your expectations.

What you expected to happen has not happened, and that’s a feeling you’d like to avoid when you can.

You didn’t think buying NBA NFTs would get you this riled up because six months ago you didn’t even know what an NFT was, and now, maybe, you overextended yourself financially to buy them and the reality of that decision is starting to weigh on you.

The easiest thing to do in this situation, frankly, is to blame someone else.

It’s not your fault that you feel the way you feel, right?

Someone else is responsible for making you feel this way, and while they are, all these other people are having fun spending money buying other new toys and those toys are becoming more valuable.

And you’re just sitting there with a pile of toys you bought two weeks ago that you are starting to get bored of, and you don’t have the money to buy the new toys, and you can’t sell your old toys, so you get upset and want things to change.

And things will change, one way or another, but maybe you just don’t want to wait as long as it may take.

But one honest truth is this — just because you are unhappy and other people you listen to are unhappy doesn’t mean that the project itself is any less credible or qualified to achieve the heights and highs that made you so excited about it to begin with.

Maybe that’s too nuanced and balanced of an opinion for the Internet, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Because even at a “low point” when a few hours on Twitter will make you feel like the sky is falling, which is actually the primary sentiment from any time spent on Twitter, Top Shot at its worst is still more successful than every other NFT project.

In the last 30 days:

• 75,997 people have purchased 1,643,929 Top Shot Moments, accounting for $45.24 million in sales.
• The average number of Top Shot Moments purchased per person is 21.
• There have been more unique people buying Top Shot Moments than any other NFT to exist.
• The total volume of transactions to occur on NBA Top Shot is 600,000 more than the total of transactions to occur across the other 19 top NFT projects combined.

If you literally just didn’t go on Twitter so often and didn’t check you account value and just bought stuff you really liked and didn’t consider whether the price was higher or lower 24 hours or 96 hours later, you’d still love Top Shot.

If you’ve spent and spent and spent and your account value just keeps going down, just show up for pack drops and stop buying anything else.

Nobody is going to judge you.

You don’t have to buy something new every day, or every week. You don’t have to participate in challenges.

If you are convinced that Top Shot is truly going to fail, there’s probably nothing I can say or do to change your mind. That’s fine. I’m not trying to get you to buy my bags.

The only thing I am trying to sell you is a little perspective. The possibility that if this is the “bottom” or close to it, things will go back up. Because nothing is down forever. That’s true for Bitcoin. That’s true for Ethereum. That’s true for Netflix. That’s true for Apple. It’s true for every asset in every market to ever exist. If you think about every single decision or investment you make in a 24 hour or 48 hour or 3 month time horizon, you’re not going to make it.

Zoom out. Take a breath. Focus on something else. Smoke a joint. Whatever floats your boat.

Things go down, they go back up. Today’s bottom could be Bitcoin and Ethereum’s 2019. Or not, I have no idea! We’re all just guessing, man. Nobody knows what the hell is going to happen. We can just try to be smart about it and be there for each other.

When you decide to buy and when you decide to sell is on you. Don’t be bitter because you bought at the top and sold at the bottom or overextended your personal financial situation to try to get rich quick.

That’s on you. Not Roham. Not Jacob. Not Marketing.

Accept responsibility for your decisions, for better or for worse, and get the hell out or buckle up and hang out for a while. I’m not going anywhere.

Enjoy the NBA Finals. Enjoy the next pack you open. Enjoy the rakeback and whatever other surprises lay ahead of us. Collect what you love, grow up, and stop whining like an entitled brat online. It’s just money. The rest is what you make of it.