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Comment by dcow | Hacker News Reader

That anyone would use a game cosmetic as a retirement portfolio is so unbelievable it has to be trolling, right? I think we might just be witnessing the grief process unfold…

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It's not trolling. People living paycheck to paycheck, without much in the way of financial literacy, are big consumers of "made to be collectible" widgets because they're desperate for appreciating assets and don't know how to do better when they struggle to save up a few hundred dollars (in no small part, because of their gambling addictions.)

Funko pops, baseball cards, knife skins, it's all used this way.

It's not always instructive to assume people making seemingly bad financial decisions are acting irrationally.

People living paycheck to paycheck due to child support orders, alimony, or other judgements taking a giant cut of their paycheck are likely buying collectibles instead of on-paper stocks or commodities because they can actually keep those without the state being able to as easily take them.

Also, the sketchy looking guy buying tons of $20 scratch-off tickets could just be laundering drug money rather than making some irrational gambling decision.

I know enough people in this kind of circumstance, my own coworkers, who would be in much better financial shape if they stopped gambling. It's very common for them to one day complain that they can't afford lunch, and the next day to come in fuming because they just lost $500 because sportsball team lost.

> Also, the sketchy looking guy buying tons of $20 scratch-off tickets could just be laundering drug money"

I know these people personally, they aren't drug dealers.

What are they, then?

Regular honest hard working people, who struggle to make ends meet in large part due to gambling addictions and related poor financial decisions. Financially the guys who gamble are even worse off than the alcoholics that don't; there's only so much money you can spend on shit beer a week. The gambling addicts lose far more money far faster. If they were all tossing dice and losing money to each other that wouldn't be nearly so bad, but the way of modern industrial gambling is that it's done through apps and run by far away corporations or even the government, who take their money and basically make it disappear from the community. There's no winning it back, everybody but the casino owners loses in the long run. I used to be libertarian on gambling but not after what I've seen. It hurts not only those who choose to gamble, but also their families and communities.

There's a podcast by 99% Invisible about state lottery. Basically the journalist reporting the story kind of reversed his view on state lotteries over the course of reporting the story. Going from: It's good that we have state lotteries because the money goes back to fund social activities to: It's bad to have lotteries altogether, mainly because of the societal cost of gambling that you've outlined.

Nobody launders money this way.

If you're referring to literal only scratch-offs, maybe. Gambling in general (the point I was addressing using the example), you couldn't be more wrong.

You said "buying tons of $20 scratch-off tickets". Of course I was referring to literally that. If you want to say gambling in general, no, not even that is correct. It can only be done where you mostly play against a complice and the house takes a small fixed cut. Nothing to do with lottery shit, that didn't make any sense at all.

The fact lottery tickets were one of the less practical examples does nothing to dispel the point that gambling is a commonly used method of money laundering, which was my point. Your point on one specific form of gambling might be valid but completely unmoving against the principle.

There is no need to have an accomplice, someone could just bet $20 an improbable lottery every time they sell a "hit", eventually they would win big and then have legal taxed income washed and only have to explain how they came up with $20 to end up with thousands in earnings. Who cares if they lose 20,30,50% to the house and taxes when they are happy to pay that to stay out of prison and making high margins.

In fact, watch videos of various change and counterfeit scammers, they quite often use the lottery tickets to launder their proceeds and as part of their crime.[]

[] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKXmEkyl7Bw

You really seem to think that crime money is free, huh

Yeah, I mean the stock market is made to either pay passive income if you have millions or to slowly accumulate value through compound interest—expecting anything else is just gambling. If you’re living paycheck to paycheck, neither of the first two are particularly helpful even medium term — and it’s not… entirely irrational to go all in on option (C). I’d be really curious to actually know the scale of how many people became millionaires from crypto — I have no intuition for what order of magnitude it is. Regardless, there’s clearly a growing belief that the world is now full of such moonshots.

Collectables are a self-explanatory asset class. Children can appreciate and understand the desire for a holographic Charizard card. Series I savings bonds are harder to understand.

There’s a difference between a physical baseball card and a digital weapon skin. One is permanent, the other is only real as long as the game it’s used in is operational. And we know games have a lifespan. It’s not like csgo/2 weapon skins exist on a chain somewhere… That’s the nuance I’m calling out. It’s not correct to equate a weapon skin to a baseball card even though they are a similar type of social phenomenon.

I saw an absolutely shocking number of posts from people clearly on minimum wage at best with 20k or so in CS skins, buying loot boxes every week, and no other investments. Obviously no way to verify the accuracy of such statements, but my sense is you would be horrified to know the scale of the market.

I might have shared your surprise a decade ago, but we live in a world where many people use something with even less utility (cryptocurrency) readily in their retirement portfolios.

At least those cosmetic items in video games actually do something.

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