I got my first bit of Bitcoin and got into Cryptos by selling skins from a game called "Counter Strike" on a site called OPSKINS.
Understanding that selling pixels for real money is actually a profitable industry helped me wrap my head around the concept of owning and using a cryptocurrency.
In counter strike, a skin is a different visual appearance to a gun you use in the game...yes, people pay real money to be able to change what their gun looks like in a game.
Furthermore, you can currently trade the "skins" between other users or sell the "skin" for fiat currency, Bitcoin and now Ethereum, you can also gamble on professional Counter-Strike matches with your skins or on coin-flip style and other online gambling games.
Last year alone, skins were a 50 BILLION DOLLAR industry, cs:go(Counter-Strike Global offensive) alone did 5 billion not to mention the other games with skins.(PUBG, H1Z1, Dota...)
The most trusted and popular site where you can buy and sell skins is OPSkins (correctly pronounced O.P. Skins, O.P. means over-powered in video game slang)
OPskins is in the top 5 largest e-commerce sites that accept Bitcoin and the founders have been in cryptocurrency since 2010 and 2012 and the founders of OPskins are the ones behind WAX.
OP skins is currently centralized but it is becoming decentralized through the WAX blockchain.
One of the founders of OPSkins invented and implemented the first online virtual items and later invented skins that could be unique virtual items.
Many of the games that have skins on OPskins are played on the online gaming platform called Steam (not to be confused with Steem)
Steam is a private company owned by Gabe Newel who was instrumental in creating Microsoft Windows and along will bill gates is one of the "Microsoft Millionaires" (now billionaires).
WAX is an ERC20 token that will be utilized to buy skins on OPskins but also will allow you to create smart contracts using OPskins where you could "rent out" your virtual items or even create your own decentralized exchange.
You will be able to stake the tokens in a "WAX wallet"
There will be nodes that will be managed by Guilds (see the whitepaper for description of how this works)
There will be a total of 185 million WAX tokens.
To get into the presale you had to send 167 ETH, about $50,000 usd worth and it got snapped up in the first day.
There is BIG money interested in this one.
If you have an existing OPskins account you can get into the "gamer exclusive" presale with no minimum and later the main sale will have no minimum.
In my experience of playing these games, there are plenty of kids and young adults who don't know what a bitcoin is but will spend money opening cases or directly buying skins and tons of time on the Steam marketplace (which operates much like a crypto exchange complete with fluctuating values based on supply and organic market value ,charts, bids, asks ect...)and in the Steam chat rooms trying to trade up to that awesome knife skin or Arctic Warfare sniper rifle or whatever and many people actually have successfully used skins as an investment vehicle. :)
The WAX team includes an Ethereum founder, Call of Duty creator,a former CEO at World of Warcraft and several other pioneers in modern gaming and cryptocurrency.
These people already are rich A.F. so you can bet this is a legit one to be in, not the kind of people that are going to shut it down and run off.
I realize that the vulnerability in parity that was discovered may adversely impact this venture but I believe in Ethereum and that this will be fixed before the Worldwide Asset Exchange is implemented.
Here is the whitepaper, https://www.waxtoken.com/wp-content/uploads/WAX_White_Paper.pdf?1107
Check it out.
I am not advising anyone to get into this, I had told myself I was done with ICO but Counter-Strike is a game that has been my guilty pleasure since 2002 and when they added the skins it fascinated me that people would pay money for them and I eventually got involved in cryptos in the first place because of it so for me I almost can't pass this up.
I had to get a small piece of this if only just to be a part of it.
If you are comfortable with high risk and you fancy yourself a nimble crypto investor, I encourage you to check out the whitepaper on this one and watch some of the videos that are out, I would love to hear opinions on this one from anyone that has one.
I've been looking into this token and planning to post about it for a while now but I have been busy having gone back to work for a couple months to get myself set for winter and to not have to cash out any cryptos.
I am not making sound investments, I am HEAVILY invested in this risky space that is Cryptocurrency and I am not afraid to lose it all and I don't believe I will because I have been standing on the shoulders of giants with the great info from this community and a few others and many of the great people that share ideas and advice about economics and investing, I have learned so much and applied a lot of it fairly successfully and I don't want to name names because there are too many and I will forget some but thank you to this community and I hope to contribute some actual value here and online in the near future to help out the new people that will surely be coming.
To sum up, my reasons for liking this token and the WAX platform are,
-HUGE interest from big investors.
-targets an already existing multi-billion dollar market
-the team are all renowned experts in their fields.
-this ico has not been slapped together, the founders of OPskins have been working towards this for years.
-ability to stake or enter into a variety of interesting smart contracts.
- the team is AMAZING
Thank you for reading and I hope you all do well in your endeavors!
DON'T CHASE RAINBOWS, MAKE RAINBOWS!
Stay up! -RADDOG
