Tag: cryptocurrency

Train Of Consequences – The Sad Tale Of Megadeth Cryptocurrency

On By bigbadburchIn Controversy6 Comments

It’s a mini-saga of my own making that I’ve talked about a few times over the past year, and now it’s time to put it to bed once and for all. Here’s the final word on my misadventure in cryptocurrency “investing,” or the time I put $10 into the Megadeth crypto coin.

I talked about it originally in February after I made the purchase and I think I made a small update a bit later as the coin was on its way down but I haven’t got back to it since. As it stands today, my $10 of Megacoin is now equal to about 19 cents. The coin itself is valued at a whopping $0.008, not quite a tenth of a cent.

None of this is shocking – the crypto market was going on its freefall around the time I made the purchase. And, this was at best a boutique “currency” anyway. $Mega was not going to be the new Bitcoin, it was some crap for the fan club and not much more.

I was trying to get some other perspectives on this whole ordeal so I set out to find the place where Megadeth fans were discussing the currency. I “joined” the Cyber Army as a free member but got no access to any forum that would tell me anything. I found the band’s official Discord and there is a locked-away section for coin holders, of which I am, but the process to verify everything and join it was too much for me to bother with. I already blew my money on this trash endeavor, I wasn’t going to waste more of my time with it too.

Not getting into these forums kept me out of any discourse that people who actually hold this coin were having, but I can live without it. I also never figured out what the associated rewards were for having the coin – I’ll assume those are kept behind lock and key on the same forums that you need to have verified access for.

There hasn’t been any more publicity about the coin either, only the initial announcement and most everyone making fun of it. Megadeth did offer some NFT’s a while later and that was ridiculed into the ground, as the NFT was the source of a lot of scorn before the crypto crash.

And I figure this will be the final word on the fiasco of the Megadeth cryptocurrency. From 10 bucks to 19 cents is quite the freefall, and there’s only a bit of down to go. I can’t see any conceivable reason why the coin would suddenly shoot back up – even if crypto as a whole rebounds, there are a ton of silly currencies that were dead on arrival and I’m sure $Mega is one of those.

I am reminded of something I said in my initial post – it was something about “wiping my own ass with my money” or something like that. The sad truth is this – if I would have wiped my ass with the ten dollars I spent on Megadeth crypto? I’d still have the ten dollars.

Price Points

On By bigbadburchIn collecting7 Comments

I’ve done a few posts about money and prices of a few different things recently. I thought I’d do a few quick updates and also discuss the insane prices of a few records. But first, I’ll provide two quick recaps of prices I covered awhile back.

Megadeth cryptocurrency

As I wrote in the original post, I was a foolhardy individual and dropped $10 on Megadeth’s crypto launch awhile back. That was in December when $MEGA was first on offer. The price was tanking when I posted about it, my $10 had whittled down to $7.

Here we are a month and a half later. My $7 in 21 Megacoins is now a bit under $5. It appears that economic forces have further stifled any fortune I might have made off Megadeth and cryptocurrency. I really don’t know what to do with these Megacoins so I will probably just ride this rocket straight into the ground. I could have done any number of things with that ten spot but oh well, the meme was worth it.

Tool’s last album on vinyl

I did a post just after we all found out that Tool were selling “tour editions” of Fear Inoculum on record for $800 at their shows. The price point was insane, even for an autographed edition of an unwieldy, super deluxe 5 LP edition in ornate packaging.

As updates to my original post indicate, the band opened up the “normal” edition of the album for pre-orders to ship in the beginning of April. Those not-tour editions came with a much more reasonable price tag of $170. Though I probably have better things to spend money on I went ahead and pulled the trigger on a pre-order. It’s excessive and not at all necessary, but under $200 is a justifiable price point for the ultra deluxe package. A more budget-friendly 3 LP edition could be manufactured, but as I noted in the original post, Tool are in no rush to get their albums on vinyl so I didn’t want to be left out. These will be flipped very hard when they hit in April, no doubt about it.

Vinyl prices are nuts

I’ve been over it a few times, including just the other day – vinyl prices are crazy. The supply is constrained by outsized demand and undersized manufacturing. Things do not appear poised to get better any time soon, it seems people are hoping that capacity magically increases itself or something.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the secondary market is really getting out of hand. I don’t know enough about it to know if it’s coordinated flipper/gouging activity or if it’s simply supply and demand. Maybe it’s both, I don’t know.

Over the past 18 months or so I picked up most of the Alice In Chains discography on vinyl. Facelift got a new reissue in 2020 and I got it from the local record store on release. I bought Dirt, Unplugged and Jar Of Flies/Sap as well, all were older reissues that I paid normal retail prices for. I don’t have the self-titled release as it hasn’t been reissued and goes for big money, I also don’t have 2000’s albums as they spiked quite a bit right after release.

But going back to the Layne Stayley-era albums I did get – I bought these about a year ago, maybe late 2020. Again, I paid $30 or less for each of them, they were all on the store shelves and priced in the normal $25-30 range. Here are the present Discogs median values for each of these releases.

Dirt – $111

Facelift – $37 (nothing listed for sale under $50 though)

Jar Of Flies/Sap – $109

Unplugged – $189

Those prices are crazy. Facelift is still holding serve as a newer reissue but the intent of sellers to mark it up is clear. The others have flown up in value and are approaching crazy territory. And, as usual, the copies listed for sale are well over the median prices.

Alice In Chains is a very popular act and their vinyl will remain in high demand. Everything could be reissued again to keep prices at retail for buyers who don’t want to sell a kidney for the records, but of course the supply constraints of vinyl manufacturing come into play. How long would it take to press new runs of these albums? Would the major label take priority at a record plant and shut out smaller labels already far behind on album releases, or will the label just let the high secondary market continue and do a reissue later on? It isn’t like record labels really care about secondary prices, other than to gauge perceived demand for a back catalog repress.

I’ve had thoughts about selling off my AIC records with these insane prices going on. I don’t want to mess with the online marketplace though and I don’t know what I’d get from a record store for them, so I probably won’t. But these prices are tempting to sell into.

Crypto Sells, But Who’s Buying?

On By bigbadburchIn Controversy7 Comments

This is barely even about music, it’s mostly just about one of those dumb things I did on purpose not too long ago. At least I did this one on purpose.

So in this day and age cryptocurrency is a big deal. Some people have made millions off of it, plenty of people have money in it, and many others are extremely skeptical of it. I don’t, like, really have money in any form so crypto isn’t a huge issue to me one way or the other.

One band made a few headlines and a lot of jokes back in December when they decided to wade into the crypto waters. Megadeth, the veteran thrash outfit who have at times been forward-thinking about how to use the Internet, launched their $MEGA cryptocurrency on the Rally platform.

Megadeth have offered NFTs before, those being the vilified current trend in crypto. But going in one’s own currency is a whole other matter. Major currency like Bitcoin has a lot of money behind it, and silly stuff like Dogecoin has essentially memed its way into swings that have made people a few bucks. There are a lot of others around that have done, well, whatever. I don’t follow the stuff closely at all.

The Rally platform seems to be a layer between a content creator and cryptocurrency. I don’t know the inner workings of it but it seems to hinge on a central currency known as Rally coin. Each artist has their own crypto that offers perks, much like a Patreon subscription or a fan club. There are several forthcoming perks outlined for the Megadeth currency but to date none seem to have come about.

When I saw the $MEGA thing being pounded into dust in the court of public opinion on Twitter I decided to take a different approach. I opened my mind and my wallet to the idea and bought a princely sum of the cryptocurrency representing one of my favorite bands. I put down an astonishing $10 on $MEGA.

My $10 investment yielded me 21 Mega-coins back in early December. Today as I type this post, my 21 Mega-coins are worth $5.14. I’ve lost my ass, clearly. Even after factoring in a small amount of Rally coin given as a weekly reward for investing on the site, I’m at $7 total of two currencies that are worth about 25 cents per coin.

I have not had any communication as yet about any perks for being a $MEGA coin holder. I don’t know if I’m supposed to join the fan club to see these perks or not. I’m not personally interested in joining, but I would think that if there were going to be perks available to all coin holders, that the site hosting the coin operation would be the forum to communicate that as opposed to the optional fan club. Again I don’t know anything at this point so this isn’t an outright criticism, it could be the band is waiting until their upcoming album release to offer perks, I don’t know.

It could also be that this Megadeth cryptocurrency is tanking and landed like a wet fart in church. It got laughed off of Twitter and there is almost no serious discussion of it. It is, and should be treated as, a fan perk as opposed to some way to get rich quick or whatever, but it’s still cryptocurrency. There is a LOT of resistance to crypto in all walks of life right now and I didn’t see any favorable interpretations of Megadeth’s offering. Talk is dead at this point beyond me typing about it and taking up blog space with it now.

I know several people who read my blog are in my general age range. That is, we all remember what it was like to buy albums before the Internet was around. I’m sure all of us made blind purchases based on the cover or just some random blurb we heard or read. We bought the album and played it, the immense disappointment coming when we realized we were better off wiping our asses with the money we spent on the record.

That’s kind of like what this $MEGA crap is like, except that I wasn’t making a blind purchase. I knew going in that I would have been better off using a $10 bill as toilet paper. It’s been funny watching my investment crater. I mean, losing a ten spot won’t put me in the poor house but I didn’t really gain much from this experience other than this kind of pointless post.

In the end I learned my lesson about wasting money on intangible things like cryptocurrency tied to metal musicians, though I knew that before I dropped the money. That’s money I could have wasted on Iron Maiden action figures or who knows what else. This doesn’t diminish my view of Megadeth any – this was just a dumb thing and hopefully their new album kicks ass. Maybe I’ll get a discount on it for being a proud $MEGA coin holder, but I won’t hold my breath.