Author:@gothburz

Translation: Big Pliers | PANews Lobster

"Diamond hands," meaning: even if the investment drops by 94%, you will never sell. We packaged this financial paralysis as a personality trait.

My net worth peaked at 1.2 million dollars.

But that money, not a single cent exists in reality.

I'm not talking about some philosophical principle. What I mean is, it exists on some servers— and those servers have now been turned off.

I own eleven properties in the metaverse. Three are in Decentraland, four are in The Sandbox, two are in Voxels, and one is in Otherside. There's also a sea view villa in Horizon Worlds— I paid 214,000 dollars for it because Mark Zuckerberg personally said it was "the next frontier."

Last week, this "frontier" closed down.

It has now turned into a mobile app.

Last year, I sent the same message to 340 people: "You have no idea how early we got in."

Later, I stopped sending that message. Not because I admitted I was wrong, but because most of them had blocked me.

I entered the metaverse real estate in November 2021. At that time, everyone was buying. Someone spent 450,000 dollars just to become Snoop Dogg's neighbor in the game. In a video game. The virtual character in that game didn’t even have legs.

Yes, those virtual characters, have no legs.

But I thought that was a good sign.

"Legs will come eventually," I said in the Discord group, "Legs are on the product roadmap." Three hundred people immediately replied with rocket emojis.

I gave myself a title— "Digital Real Estate Tycoon."

I put it in my Twitter bio.

I added it to my LinkedIn job section.

I even appeared on a podcast to discuss this.That podcast had eleven listeners. Three were bots. The rest were my own alternate accounts.

The combined area of my virtual properties is larger than my actual apartment.

But my actual apartment has furniture.

Location, location, location.

My most valuable asset is a plot right next to a virtual Gucci store.

In 2023, Gucci pulled out.

That store is still there. No one goes in. Like a shopping mall in Ohio— but the visuals are worse, and there's not even a food court.

I didn’t sell.

Diamond hands.

That’s what we often say— "diamond hands." It means: even if the investment drops by 94%, you will never sell. We packaged this financial paralysis as a personality trait.

There’s someone in my Discord group who spent 2.4 million dollars to buy a 618 plot estate in Decentraland. Prime location. High foot traffic.

I asked him, in a platform with only 38 daily active users, what does the term "foot traffic" mean.

He said I don't understand the technology.

Indeed, I don’t understand.

But I continued to buy more.

We have a DAO— decentralized autonomous organization. It means everyone votes to make decisions.

There are nine of us in total. Three never show up. Two vote on everything but never read the proposals. The remaining four are me and my alternate accounts.

We voted to "acquire strategic plots."

Passed unanimously.

I voted four times myself.

My portfolio peaked at 1.2 million dollars. I told everyone. I made a spreadsheet. I predicted a 40x return by 2025. I made a business plan. One page of the PPT said:

"We are building a digital economy."

That page featured a rocket emoji.

That's my entire financial model.

In 2023, I spent 189,000 dollars on a bored ape NFT.

Now it's worth 14,000 dollars.

I don’t talk about that ape.

But I still use it as my profile picture. When someone asks me, I say, "I have a long-term bullish outlook."

"Long-term bullish" means: if I sold it, I would cry in a Panera.

My mom asked me what a bored ape is.

I said: "Digital art on the blockchain."

She asked why it costs more than her car.

I said: "You don’t understand Web3."

She said: "I only know you live in a studio apartment."

She's not in my Discord group.

Justin Bieber spent 1.3 million dollars on one.

Now it's probably worth 90,000 dollars.

After hearing this news, I felt much better.

This is the power of the community.

WAGMI. We're All Gonna Make It— we will all succeed.

We say this every day. In group chats. When the floor price is plummeting. When the trading volume is drying up. When 95% of NFT projects go to zero.

We will all succeed.

But no one succeeded.

Yet we said it with absolute certainty, and even adorned it with laser eyes avatars. That counts for something, right?

Not really.

But we say it counts. This is called decentralized consensus.

Meta has spent 84 billion dollars on the metaverse.

I need to say this again.

84 billion dollars.

More than the GDP of Luxembourg. More than the combined GDP of Iceland, Luxembourg, and Malta. They dumped money into a platform where a virtual character has no legs, the visuals look like a 2006 Wii game, and the number of simultaneous users is lower than the lunch peak at a Chipotle in Des Moines.

They just took Horizon Worlds down from VR headsets.

It continues to exist as a mobile app.

My sea view villa is now a mobile app.

Location, location, location.

Zuckerberg changed the whole company for this. Facebook became Meta. A company valued at 900 billion dollars changed its legal name just because the CEO saw "Ready Player One" and said, "I want that."

Reality Labs department: losing 10 billion in 2021, losing 14 billion in 2022, losing 16 billion in 2023, losing 18 billion in 2024, losing 19 billion in 2025.

That's not called strategy, that's called a fast pass.

This year, they laid off 1,500 employees from Reality Labs. Closed down three VR studios. Cut Supernatural. Put the entire VR social vision in a coffin, then announced: "We’re pivoting to AI and wearable devices."

This pivot took four years and burned 84 billion dollars.

I pivoted too.

I am now an AI real estate investor.

I bought a piece of land in a non-existent virtual world generated by AI. The founder said this is the "intersection of spatial computing and large language models."

I don’t know what that means.

I gave him 40,000 dollars.

He has a white paper, 47 pages. I read the title and the section on token economics. That section was a pie chart. I love pie charts. They make everything look like it’s planned.

This project has a roadmap. Q1: build the community. Q2: launch a beta. Q3: expand the ecosystem. Q4: blank.

Q4 is always blank.

That’s left for the escape route.

My accountant asked me to value the metaverse investment portfolio for tax purposes.

I said: 1.2 million dollars.

He said: current market value.

I said: 6,400 dollars.

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 even longer.

I said, these are "cultural collectibles with long-term provenance."

He asked if I had considered buying a 401(k) retirement account.

I said a 401(k) is a "legacy of conventional finance."

He told me to leave his office.

The metaverse is dead.

I don’t accept that narrative.

I am a digital real estate tycoon. I own eleven properties on four platforms. I have a sea view villa in a mobile app, a plot right next to a vacant Gucci store, and a cartoon monkey— it cost more than my actual car.

Location, location, location.

This location is nothingness.

But I got in early.

I always get in early.

This is the same thing as making mistakes— only that you can articulate it with more confidence.

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