If you choose to blow your finances on digital skins, or make it your trade and primary job, and you lose everything, then I have one word for you: "ha-ha".

May seem harsh, but we shouldn't encourage digital speculation nor the companies that seek to invent (more of) these markets wholecloth.

Intellectually, i should agree with the author here (minus a last point [0]).

And yet emotionally, i just can't care. They made their bed, they lie in it is my honest gut feeling. I know it's unjust, i just can't stop myself.

[0] That kind of "only available by gambling" skins were getting regulated out of existence soon, Valve just took a step before getting called out publicly. Anybody in the CSGO legendary skin market should have seen it coming. It was talked about in Brussels in 2019, and when Riot game made the Arcane skin only available by gambling but "if you gamble enough (500€ i think), you automatically get this skin" was a pretty clear warning shot.

And that's just the USA: dollar depeggeing, recent lager scale immigration, and laws around gold ownership

Whew, as it should be. This is a game, and I'm happy that some cohort trying to make money off of it can't bully the creators into changing it.

IMO if you make something, and the terms are clear up-front when people pay for it, and they aren't forced to use it, you should retain full control over your work without some kind of legal regulation. This seems so obvious to me that I was surprised when Tim Sweeney prevailed against Apple and I'm not sure how I feel about that case (great respect to Tim Sweeney as an individual, but I am not sure I buy his arguments).

Sometimes some people are incredibly stupid.

Small lip service at the end that acts like it's a grey area. No it's not - these are so far away from being securities it's purely superficial to even make the comparison