ALBΞRT
1.8K posts

ALBΞRT
@AlbertBlocks
🎲Speculative Attention Economist 🚫Not financial advice









My net worth peaked at $1.2 million. None of it was real. I don't mean that philosophically. I mean it was located on servers that have since been turned off. I own eleven properties in the metaverse. Three in Decentraland. Four in The Sandbox. Two in Voxels. One in Otherside. And a beachfront villa in Horizon Worlds that I bought for $214,000 because Mark Zuckerberg called it "the next frontier." The frontier closed last week. It's a mobile app now. Last year I mass DM'd 340 people the phrase "you don't understand how early we are." I have since stopped doing that. Not because I was wrong. Because most of them blocked me. I got into metaverse real estate in November 2021. Everyone was buying. Someone paid $450,000 to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor. In a video game. With no legs. The avatars didn't have legs. I thought that was bullish. "The legs are coming," I told my Discord. "Legs are a roadmap item." Three hundred people reacted with rocket emojis. I called myself a "digital land baron." I put it in my Twitter bio. I put it in my LinkedIn headline. I said it on a podcast that had eleven listeners. Three of them were bots. The rest were my alts. My virtual property has more square footage than my actual apartment. My actual apartment has furniture. Location, location, location. My most valuable asset was a plot next to a virtual Gucci store. Gucci left in 2023. The store is still there. Nobody's in it. It's like a mall in Ohio but with worse graphics and no food court. I held. Diamond hands. That's what we said. "Diamond hands." It means refusing to sell while your investment loses 94% of its value. We turned financial paralysis into a personality trait. A guy in my Discord paid $2.4 million for a 618-parcel estate in Decentraland. Prime district. High foot traffic. I asked him what "foot traffic" meant when the platform had 38 daily active users. He said I didn't understand the technology. I didn't. I still bought more. We had a DAO. A decentralized autonomous organization. That means we voted on decisions. There were nine of us. Three never showed up. Two voted on everything without reading it. The other four were me and my alts. We voted to "acquire strategic parcels." The vote passed unanimously. I voted four times. My portfolio peaked at $1.2 million. I told everyone. I made a spreadsheet. I projected 40x returns by 2025. I made a pitch deck. The pitch deck had a slide that said "WE ARE BUILDING THE DIGITAL ECONOMY." The slide had a rocket emoji. That was my entire financial model. In 2023 I bought a Bored Ape for $189,000. It's worth $14,000 now. I don't talk about the Ape. I still use it as my profile picture. People ask me about it. I say "I'm long-term bullish." Long-term bullish means I can't sell it without crying in a Panera. My mom asked me what a Bored Ape was. I said "digital art on the blockchain." She asked why it cost more than her car. I said "you don't understand Web3." She said "I understand you live in a studio apartment." She's not in my Discord. Justin Bieber bought one for $1.3 million. It's worth about $90,000 now. I felt better about mine after I heard that. That's community. WAGMI. We're All Gonna Make It. We said that every day. In the group chat. While the floor dropped. While the volume dried up. While 95% of all NFT collections went to zero. We're all gonna make it. None of us made it. But we said it with conviction and a laser-eye profile picture. That counts for something. It doesn't. But we said it did. That's decentralized consensus. Meta spent $84 billion on the metaverse. I need to say that again. $84 billion. More than the GDP of Luxembourg. More than the GDP of Iceland, Luxembourg, and Malta combined. They spent it on a platform where the avatars had no legs, the graphics looked like a 2006 Wii game, and the peak user count was lower than the lunch rush at a Chipotle in Des Moines. They just pulled Horizon Worlds from VR headsets. It lives on as a mobile app. My beachfront villa is now a mobile app. Location, location, location. Zuckerberg renamed the entire company for this. Facebook became Meta. A $900 billion company changed its legal name because the CEO watched Ready Player One and said "I want that." Reality Labs lost $10 billion in 2021. $14 billion in 2022. $16 billion in 2023. $18 billion in 2024. $19 billion in 2025. That's not a strategy. That's a speedrun. They laid off 1,500 Reality Labs employees this year. Shut down three VR studios. Killed Supernatural. Put the entire VR social vision in a casket and said "we're pivoting to AI and wearables." The pivot took four years and $84 billion. I pivoted too. I'm an AI real estate investor now. I bought a virtual plot in an AI-generated world that doesn't exist yet. The founder said it was "the intersection of spatial computing and large language models." I don't know what that means. I gave him $40,000. He has a whitepaper. It's 47 pages. I read the title and the tokenomics section. The tokenomics section is a pie chart. I love pie charts. They make everything look like a plan. The project has a roadmap. Q1: "Build community." Q2: "Launch beta." Q3: "Scale ecosystem." Q4 is blank. Q4 is always blank. That's where the exit scam goes. My accountant asked me to value my metaverse portfolio for tax purposes. I said $1.2 million. He said "current market value." I said $6,400. He stared at me for eleven seconds. I know because I counted. He asked if I had any other investments. I showed him my NFTs. He stared for longer. I told him they were "cultural artifacts with long-term provenance." He asked if I'd considered a 401k. I told him a 401k was "legacy finance." He told me to leave his office. The metaverse is dead. I don't accept that. I am a digital land baron. I own eleven properties across four platforms. I have a beachfront villa in a mobile app, a plot next to an empty Gucci store, and a cartoon monkey that cost me more than my actual car. Location, location, location. The location is nowhere. But I'm early. I'm always early. That's the same as being wrong except you get to say it with confidence.


feels good to hit 1900 in blitz, not that anyone cares

We're excited to announce 'The Situation Room' by Polymarket is coming to Washington, D.C. The world's first bar dedicated to monitoring the situation. 🧵

GPT-5.4 mini is available today in ChatGPT, Codex, and the API. Optimized for coding, computer use, multimodal understanding, and subagents. And it’s 2x faster than GPT-5 mini. openai.com/index/introduc…


Poor fellow swapped $50m -> $35k on eth mainnet 😭😭😭 etherscan.io/tx/0x9fa9feab3…

BREAKING: Gold is the world’s oldest safe haven asset. Dubai is the world’s newest safe haven city. Right now, gold is stranded in Dubai and being sold at a thirty dollar discount to the London benchmark because the war that makes gold valuable is the same war that makes gold unmovable. Bloomberg reported on March 6 that traders in Dubai are offering physical gold at up to thirty dollars per ounce below the London price. The reason is mechanical. Dubai handles roughly 1,200 tonnes of physical gold annually. About twenty to twenty five percent of all gold traded on the planet passes through this city. It arrives by air from African mines and Swiss refineries. It leaves by air to Indian jewelers and Chinese vaults. The entire system runs on flights. The flights have stopped. Iranian drones have struck the UAE multiple times since February 28. Commercial aviation across the Gulf is at roughly twenty five percent of capacity. Private jet charters are selling at $350,000 per flight. The gold sitting in Dubai vaults has nowhere to go. And gold that cannot move cannot fulfill delivery contracts, cannot reach buyers, cannot participate in the global market at the price the global market says it is worth. So traders are dumping it at a discount to avoid indefinite storage and funding costs. The spot price in London says $5,200 an ounce. A trader in Dubai holding physical bars is selling them for $5,170. The difference is not quality or purity. It is a logistics premium in reverse. The gold is worth less in Dubai than in London because the mechanism that moves it has been severed by the same conflict that is supposed to make it more valuable. Dubai processes roughly 3.3 tonnes of gold per day. The war has grounded flights for over a week. Bloomberg reports some bullion moved mid-week but many shipments remain stranded. At the daily throughput rate, an estimated 50 to 100 tonnes of physical gold is sitting in Dubai vaults waiting for flights that may not resume for weeks. At current prices, that is somewhere between four and five billion dollars of metal that is priced in a market it cannot reach. This is the physical commodity version of the Hormuz insurance closure. The digital price of gold trades freely on screens in London, New York, Shanghai. The physical gold that the digital price is supposed to represent sits in a vault in a city where the airport is running at a quarter of capacity and the sky periodically contains Iranian ordnance. The screen says one price. The vault says another. The difference is thirty dollars and growing. Every gold investor on the planet is watching a number on a screen. The number does not know that fifty tonnes of metal cannot get on a plane. The screen price is fiction. The vault price is reality. And the war is widening the gap between them every day the flights do not resume. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…


In many defi sectors almost all revenue is captured by the top 2 market participants, basically most crypto verticals are turning into duopolies credit to @joeljohn (based on defillama data)

Creative rug. Whole dev team got drafted into the Iranian military. Account deleted shortly after. Bold strategy.





JUST IN: 🇮🇷 Iranians are buying Bitcoin and mass withdrawing it into self-custody amid the war. Bitcoin is the flight to safety 🙌









