Future stuff and things

[john m]

 Years ago you went into the bokies you could bet on Horses,Dogs the odd football game usually not league football mostly world cup and the odd international .Gambling was mainly animal based sports .

  Look  how much Virtual sports and non Animal Sports the bookies now bet on .And how they have expanded betting on Football usually twenty different markets on every match from who will score ,What Score.Corners ,trowinns .

They are also betting on Virtual racing ,Virtual dogs ,Virtual Grand Prix ,Roulette ,Lotto Balls,Slots .Interesting what he was saying .Bookies are expecting over time that Horse Racing will come under attack from the Greens because of emissions ,Cruelty and the huge amount of land taken up for training establishments.Stud Farms and Racecourses that could be better utilized to grow food . After they Changed the Grand National Course and done away with what were thought to be the dangerous fences  the Gambling industry sat up and took notice . The reason that Irish Horses are doing better than British ones is that serious money is no longer going into bloodstock as having a top class Stallion is no longer a Guarantee of wealth Generation .Yesterdays first two home in the Irish Guinneas were both owned trained and bread by Jim bolger and most of the Aiden O Brien Horses are home breads as well as there is no longer a market for all the well bread horses as there is no return on investment . Horse racing will become a minority sport before 2035 with half of all British and Irish Racecourses Closing . The next big betting events will be Electronic Sports like remote control car or drone racing leagues . Bookies dont usually waste coin on developing weird and wonderful betting mediums but it sort of makes sense if the Global warming brigade decide that Horses are taking up to much land including the land required to grow their food then Gretta ,Eamo and the chinese Bird will soon be complaining about land wastage .They sort of have a point the Curragh only has 16 meetings a year and is closed for the rest of the time Aintree only has 3 meetings a year .

 Sort of puts things into perspective the Pope has an Electric Popemobile .We are coming under pressure to mind the environment and go Electric .How many more Jobs will disappear in the name of saving the environment .The real danger to the Environment is Pink or Black boney fat things using to many resources .If the China Cough or the Curry Cough dont thin us out we will have to go back to old fashioned War take out a Billion or two of us to save the Planet for the rest .Abortion ,Same sex Marriage ,Contraception ,China Plague dosent seem to have had the needed effect on Population Explosion .Sticking to the Horsey thems the four Jockeys ,War, Famine, Pestilence and Death.are under starters orders .Are the Greens our last chance ?

[Punter]

Dont choke on this John -----yesterdays FT
   
   https://www.ft.com/content/829fba6f-40f2-4a41-b622-651ea43b2769

   NFTs: the race is on to pick the winners
From artworks to digital racehorses, real money is being made
DAVID STEVENSON Add to myFT


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David Stevenson MAY 20 2021
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Whenever I start writing about crypto investments I have that sinking feeling. The last time I touched on the subject was back in April 2018, when cryptos were in the deep freeze and heading south. My purchase of some bitcoin trackers when the price was around $6,000 was almost perfectly timed — to lose money. 

Prices were coming off a high of about $16,000 and then proceeded to bottom out at around $3,000. As I write, bitcoin is coming off highs again — just after I dipped my toes back in the water.

A few weeks ago, I bought a very small number of shares in an Aquis-listed fund called NFT Investments, which listed at 5p a share, began falling immediately afterwards and is now trading at around 3.5p. 

That said, I’m not overly concerned about whether the launch was overhyped. I think what is much more interesting is what it says about the longer term story of “non-fungible tokens” (NFTs). 

This is likely to provoke much eye-rolling among FT readers and, of course, all the caveats apply: crypto markets are insanely volatile and NFTs are just a derivative of these. They also have their legal challenges over ownership and replicability. In the end, it might all amount to a row of beans — but I think not.

First, the basics. An NFT is a certificate of authenticity held on the blockchain, a digital ledger of transactions that cannot be hacked. These tokens may refer both to an actual item, such as an artwork, as well as its authentication. Cut through the jargon and they are just a piece of code with specific functionality and a unique identifier. An NFT is thus a kind of digital securitisation, an asset of a kind that cannot be exchanged for or replaced by another identical one (hence non-fungible).

NFTs could be easily applied to a real-world physical item such as a stamp or a work of art. But they are most commonly used with digital art and collectibles. The best-known example was a work sold in March by digital artist Mike Winkelmann (aka Beeple) at auction for $69.3m. 

Artists can create or “mint” a new work and then pair it with an NFT which acts as the ownership right. They can also choose to retain some control over the digital rights of their work by encoding this within the NFT. 

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But NFTs aren’t just about art. The NBA’s Top Shot collectibles programme has also already brought in more than $400m in sales of NFTs related to specific video moments in NBA history. Then there is the barely believable world of digital horseracing.

Platforms such as Zed Run sell digitally created horses with unique algorithms. Owners pay an entry fee to race their steeds against others for a prize pool. You can even “breed” the NFT horses in Zed Run’s “stud farm”. One player recently sold a stable of digital racehorses for $252,000, according to the New York Times. Another made $125,000 for a single racehorse.

This is a volatile set of markets. According to Nonfungible.com, which tracks NFT marketplaces, the average price for NFTs went from $142 in October 2020 to $4,000 in February 2021, before falling back to $1,400 in March. If you thought this was all a bit — how can I put it? — bonkers, consider the fact that in the first quarter, the market value of 38 NFTs tracked by CoinMarketCap surged more than eightfold to $22.5bn.

There are many blockchain entrepreneurs and investors out there who prize digital creations and have a great deal of money to spend. Early investors in crypto have also benefited from the move by some institutions to buy into the concept of crypto as an asset class — one that is worth an allocation of, say, 1 per cent of their portfolio. 

I would also argue that NFTs represent a broad form of accessible, easy to trade securitisation which can be applied to virtually anything digital and physical. That helps explain why NFT Investments’ first transaction was to buy into Aeon International, a developer of supply chain technology for the luxury fashion industry. This sort of development can help combat luxury counterfeiting and strengthen product authentication.

Another Aquis-listed vehicle is Dispersion Holdings, where I have also bought a very small number of shares. It goes beyond NFTs to focus on decentralised finance — or “DeFi” in the jargon — which uses blockchain and cryptocurrencies to bypass intermediaries in financial services transactions. It also owns some shares in NFT Investments. 

In a similar segment there is another fund called KR1, which acts as a venture capitalist in blockchain-related businesses (I also own some shares in that). It’s worth dwelling a bit on KR1. Its shares were trading at between 15p and 20p when I first bought but peaked at over 200p in February. 

As I see it, its business model is to back new digital asset platforms; KR1 receives tokens as an element of its investment deal. This is nicely encapsulated by its latest move to back a money market platform called Equilibrium. In return, KR1 has received just under 600,000 tokens in Equilibrium. 

Another to look at is ETF issuer Van Eck, which recently brought out the VanEck Vectors Digital Assets Equity UCITS ETF (ticker DAGB). This pure-play ETF invests in companies focused on blockchain-based applications — those that generate “at least 50 per cent of their revenue in the digital assets industry”. It is early days for this easily tradeable ETF. It’s worth noting, though, that its second biggest holding is Galaxy Digital (8.5 per cent of the fund) which is a Canadian listed digital assets business that is in effect a crypto investment bank.

This trio are good examples of how token-based digital platforms are working in areas far removed from the art world NFTs that originally brought the trend to the world’s attention. Real money has already been made — KR1’s share price has gone up more than tenfold in over six months — and quite how this sector will mature I have no idea. But it isn’t going away and it isn’t a joke — though those thoroughbred digital horses certainly induce a smile.

David Stevenson is an active private investor and has interests in securities where mentioned. Email: adventurous@ft.com. Twitter: @advinvestor

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[john m]

Punter Share Market ie somewhere to sell shares .The amount of people trying to create shares for sale ,Uber ,Tesla ,Snapchat ,any amount of them just created to be sold but no real intrinsic value .I always look at Share dealing the same as poker playing you can win a few hands see your pot go up or down but the amount of money in the school is all the money there is so if you win somebody else has to lose .Crypto is valued on no real dynamic other than how much the next fella will pay you for it and how much he can sell it on for .