Startyde

Legitimately my favorite movie of all time. As a kid it was just cool. As an adult, there's a layered complexity, humanity and soul that rewards anyone who took the chance watching a movie called RoboCop. 

Massachusetts already passed a law three years ago for the same thing, $600 in sales and because of it, Paypal has been sending 1099's to the state and the state to the fed. As other have mentioned, it's infuriating to sell collectables now because I don't have records of what I paid for something 15 years ago, so there's no adequate deduction.

It's also hard t calculate certain items in general. Say I sold a graded card. Cost of grading is easy, costs taken from eBay and or Paypal fine, but the card itself was cracked from a box. How to you declare that, the cost of the box, the cost of the box divided by cards? The average raw price online? Any accountant would be like, this is stupid. And you're that accountant. On the flip side, it's a theraputic exercise in analyzing how much you spend, how much profit you actually make, and what is and is not worth your time to invest in, collectable wise.

TLDR: Whoever said start ion Jan, they're right.

This thread has aged adorably, people being so skeptical about games reaching 1 mil. It is still hyper sketch Wata being called on Pawn Stars to evaluate their own game they owned, haha.

We were all so innocent before Covid and the great stonk and crypto boom. 

Cant believe what an epic implosion this was, the hard push for us to make history with Goldin auctioning games, just for him to vanish into air, their ugly site not mentioning or having even a line about selling games or VHS. What happens to the poor fools who consigned to this cluster?

I feel to gen x he is most famous for his Ronco Rotisserie. Just "set it and forget it."

It's interesting seeing some of these 20 year old informercials now. So many things you would never say like "so easy, even my wife can do it." Yikes.

Def a great inventor. 

It's material shortages. They are getting their cases out of country and there are massive disruptions in supply chains. They need to invest into an internal facility or manufacturer, and even then, may be overrun (see VGA). I can almost assure the backup is not due to an overabundance of QA, haha.

On 7/24/2021 at 8:35 PM, tidaldreams said:

Yeah, I don't really understand the thinking behind these submissions. Sure CGC/Beckett/whatever may be cheaper than PSA (I'm not even sure if this is true anymore), but PSA will increase the value of your cards the most. Only exception would be BGS 10/black label, but no one should risk going for that by submitting raw instead of crossing a PSA 10.

I dont agree with this at all, not for MtG cards. PSA is probably fine for Pokemon, but MtG collectors want the subgrades. Also a lot of us are uncomfortable that PSA doesn't use sleeves inside their cases. 

CGC was attractive because they were cheaper, faster, established and had subs. The drawback was thir blue label looks like complete crap on the majority of MtG cards. But very many have been disappointed by the harsh grading and lower resale, so they stick with Beckett. 

On 7/17/2021 at 1:09 PM, tidaldreams said:

Yeah, this is a big reason why CGC may not succeed in graded games and everyone will just stick to WATA imo. CGC also grades overly harsh.

I know many of the MtG graders are pissed at how redic CGCs grading is. Orders of 140+ getting only 2 9.5 etc.

This sale is incredible and great because it moves the goal forward, past black box and other "blue chips" investors say will hold all the value and there's no point in grading "newer" games. Grails are generational. The kid having the time of their life on Fortnite as I type this has just as much a likelihood dropping a fortune on a first print Xbox 360 than an archaic NES or SNES, and thus lay the grandness that is this robust and diverse hobby. Condition absolutely had a role in this sale, and again works its favor towards newer games as well. 

OG Xbox is def a cool system to collect for, from one of the best gens in gaming, before everything was piecemeal microtransactions. PD Orta is a top 10 fav game to this day.

2 hours ago, JVOSS said:

@Startydeyou WATA employee?  the defense is at the leave of a CS selling someone an upgrade. 

I barely understood your sentence. No, I don't work for Wata. I wasn't suggesting an upgrade, I was suggesting what you need to do as of July 2021 to get fast, hassle free Wata grading.

37 minutes ago, DefaultGen said:

Damn it's just a biggish suburban house and Zillow's estimate is $2.5m. You guys who live in LA are baller as hell. I wouldn't buy separate real estate for my tape business either!

Now look up the corporate address on the main page. Wanna venture a guess why that addy is different and an office park?

Surely some questions begin to form, questions IGS blocks you from asking. 

Why I dont collect graded hardware despite loving so many consoles, they are destined to degrade without use. 

Case in point, I decided to setup a 3D gaming setup in my finished attic for PS3. Had the console, games, bought the official Sony PS 3D Display, all I needed were the 3D glasses, and there was the kick in the ball. Sony used Active 3D shutter glasses, and all official Sony 3D glasses have built in batteries that cannot be replaced and balloon and destroy them selves if not charged for years. These came out in 2011 btw. So I went through 6 pairs at $40.00 a pop until I found a pair that actually still charged and worked. Either they were designed with planned obsolescence in mind or it was another classic example of Sony being the smartest dumb people in the room.

...what were we talking about again?

Teaming with IGS just made Goldin Auctions a joke for game and collectables. It wreaks of desperation to get a piece of the pie and having no idea what you're doing. 

Look at the submittal form...it advises you to send your items to some dude's house. Theyve blocked many people online for asking any questions about this.

Noone is swapping games. Business are business, and there are much easier ways to make legitimate money than committing crimes.

The answer is always the simplest, aka, Occam's Razor.

1. The damage happened in transit, on accident. 

2. The damage happened at Wata, on accident.

Wata's QA has been all over the map since being inundated, it would be highly advised to use the Warp Zone tier if you absolutely MUST grade now, otherwise just wait for them to stabilize a bit and avoid these questions. 

1 hour ago, Gloves said:

The shame here honestly is that people would tear apart a collection to grade these separately. I know they're not particularly rare as-is but like, if grading is preservation then this is the opposite of that. It's CLEARLY a money grab on the part of the people doing this, and that saddens me greatly from a preservations standpoint. Really puts into perspective what some people care about in this regard.

This is an interesting perspective. AFA and UKG have started to change how they grade figures because people were taking carded sealed figures with wear, and cracking then open to grade the figure by itself as loose for a higher grade, thus accelerating the destruction of rare carded figures.

While reprints are not "rare" per se, with the grading of CIB, I could see people start to open games with scuffy wrap or a damaged box to try and get mint components to Frankenstein a higher CIB grade for resale. Something to consider when talking about preservation. 

2 hours ago, Code Monkey said:

They all do different things, it's whatever you think will be a popular service in the long run.

Bitcoin is an actual digital currency, none of the others are. The point of this coin is to decentralize currency from the big banks and decouple it from financial institutions.

Ethereum is completely different, it's a smart contract blockchain that allows you to build your own tokens. These can be NFT, a smart contract or a currency, whatever you want to make. Then you can add it to the blockchain by paying to have it added. This payment is called gas and is in the form of Ether (ETH). People buy ETH in order to deploy their tokens on the block chain and other people like you and I buy it just to invest. So yes, there's actually a real world reason for this unique currency to exist.

Ripple is a payment processing software that runs on the blockchain. In order to process a payment transaction on its chain, you need gas in the form of XRP, Ripple's native coin.

TRON is software that allows software developers like me to deploy my own decentralized application (DApp) onto their blockchain and their gas is called TRX.

Cardano uses ADA for its gas and works just like Ethereum except Cardano uses proof of stake instead of proof of work which is why I think it will surpass Bitcoin and Ethereum eventually. More on this at the end.

So you just need to invest in the native coin for whichever software you think will be popular. Personally I think Ethereum is good but TRON is way better in terms of how many transactions it can handle per second and the fact it's proof of stake instead of proof of work. I highly advise anyone to pull all ETH coins right now and put them into TRX or some other proof of stake chain.

What's proof of work? The blockchain counts on us, the community, to validate each next block on the chain. If a transaction takes place where I sell 2 coins to you, that gets added to the chain and some random person in the world validates it. To prevent me from validating a bogus transaction of 100 coins to myself, I need to prove I'm worthy of validating. Bitcoin and Ethereum both work on proof of work which forces you to find the solution to a very complicated computational problem with your computer and once you've expended all that time and cost in electricity, it allows you to validate. Because you are so deep in doing all this work to get to this point, it's unlikely you would throw that away and approve a bogus transaction.

What's proof of stake? Everyone talks about how much power the Bitcoin blockchain consumes with proof of work and all these computers running computations (mining). Other companies like Cardano and TRON have come up with proof of stake which asks the validator to put up a number of their personal coins before processing a transaction. The "stake" is generally more valuable than the value of the transaction being validated so it's unlikely I would risk my 5 coins to validate a transaction for 3 coins. Once the next block is added to the chain and my validation is validated, I get my stake back plus a little extra for my service (gas).

All proof of work is going to die and Ethereum is actually working on switching to proof of stake. That's why I think Bitcoin will die a horrible death while the next digital currency coming along will replace it.

New Balance actually released NFT (non-fungible tokens) on the Cardano blockchain (ADA) last year and they use them to validate their sneakers. You can go to the website, enter some information and it will validate whether or not your sneakers are authentic. Uses like this will certainly grow in the future and I'm surprised Wata isn't using it with their matrices.

Extra fun.........what's a NFT? For certain blockchains like Ethereum, you can add whatever you want if you're willing to pay the gas fee. I can add a picture of my face or a recording of my voice, anything I want. That information is added to the blockchain as a token and can be added as one of a few different kinds. If it's created as a ERC20 token, then it's fungible. This means you can replace one with another and there's no difference. If I swapped my Bitcoin for your Bitcoin, there's no difference, those are fungible. If it's created as a ERC 721 token, these are non-fungible so each one is unique. These non-fungible tokens are NFT and can be anything you want to sell as a unique item........like original digital art or a numbered baseball card.

I've been doing a lot of research on this lately and actually started creating my own NFT to deploy last night. I'm going to try and build some sort of NFT application where it can be linked to a physical object for validation. *cough*WATACALLME*cough*

Incredible writeup. 

This succinctly explains it.

Also worth noting there was no debate here, it was just snuck in like the assholes our reps are.

For their part, eBay is trying to fight this. They don't want to be in the game of suddenly being responsible for sending millions of 1099s a year.

https://youtu.be/weYWF_eIiaM

3 minutes ago, Startyde said:

Duplicate Post

PS3 will undoubtedly go up greatly in prices. It was a generation of some really bonkers titles and there some great IPs that started here like Uncharted.

I also don't believe it will be the last collectable era. We're speedily moving towards an all digital future with subscription streaming outside of niche physical releases. All media disks will have a quaint collectability one day, with premiums for rare or significant titles.

Whether this is within our lifetime is another issue entirely, but even with prices being where they are, speculators will begin to move into any cheap, fertile areas looking to strike first on the next big thing.

For the sake of full disclosure, I sold two graded PS3 games for 5K just two weeks ago, non CEs. When you have money and grow up with these games, that's all it takes.

1 hour ago, Caliboy24 said:

I don't know how I feel about that.  I also collect sports cards and comic books and both PSA and CGC have their own census numbers out.  I don't think it hurts the market, but it would bring into perspective whether that particular item in said grade is considered rare or common.  I'm also interested in knowing the highest graded copy too and if there are multiples in that high grade from a collector standpoint.  

Yeah, the census numbers can somewhat be manipulated due to the crack and re-sub approach, but with CGC for example, if you submit the cracked label back to them, they deduct it from their census numbers.  

That's because you use common sense. Their rationale has never made sense. All grading companies have always released census data, even their rival game graded VGA (until very recently). It's not Watas job to police and influence the free market, and they are also being underhanded about it because the census data IS shared with certain contacts who can inside trade and profit on the information. None of this is pro collector.

1 minute ago, Caliboy24 said:

Does anyone know if WATA has census numbers on the grades given for a particular game? Or is there a website that shows this info?

They're withholding all census data because they don't want to "lead consumers astray".

So instead they let sellers make up how rare something is, which is infinitely safer I guess. 

Gorgeous cover. 

I rarely block a bidder but the situation that triggers me is if I have something listed as X BIN and they offer something less than half that. You know what fine, I appreciate the Hussle so I counter with something I feel is fair for the item. Then they counter back with $5 more than their first offer. 

It's at this point I'll usually block because everything about them screams that they'll be trouble dealing with. No regrets.

"After careful consideration"

Would love to know exactly what that consideration entailed. Do we wanna make more or less money? Hmmmm.