Item — HN Reader

What’s confusing? Bubbles abound.

20 year old pickup trucks with six figures on the odometer are selling for $20k. Pokémon cards are going for millions. Houses are being bought above asking price, sight unseen. P/E ratios on the stock market have gone to plaid. An NFT collection of animated gifs sold for Picasso prices. And a satirical, dog meme currency has a $25b market cap.

It’s unsustainable, but you won’t find me making big bets one way or the other, because, as John Maynard Keynes said, “the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

4 comments

“the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

Interesting Nit: Recently learned that this wonderful quote is from the 80s, and not from Keynes:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/09/remain-solvent/

Physical goods are only going to get more rare as our digital economy grows, so the spend per article will increase on non-bit items.

Hehe, "physical goods" :) So in the case of Mario64 that would be the PCB and the plastic cartridge and the shrink wrap?

> Physical goods are only going to get more rare as our digital economy grows

What is the reasoning to back this up?

Part of it may be that many cultural things do not have a physical representation (or they're greatly curtailed).

Every copy of World of Warcraft was sold in a box - but many copies of the latest expansion were sold digitally, no box to preserve at all.

The scarcity of an item like a 25 year old Nintendo game will only increase with time, I think was the authors intention

And why would that be scarce if we had, say, a way to perfectly clone such items?

It's actually quite trivial to do, only copyright is stopping that. The original has no intrinsic value over a perfect physical copy. (As opposed to a reproduction.)

>It's actually quite trivial to do, only copyright is stopping that.

That's not true at all. I sell games as a business and have to check them for authenticity. Things like print patterns and tactile properties of the gloss are both incredibly consistent across the genuine product and nearly impossible to reproduce perfectly.

There are plenty of $1000+ games that have been around for decades, and not once has there even been a repro made that could pass as genuine to even an amateur.

As far as copyright goes, outright pirate carts have been a thing since the atari days.

Value is subjective. People value original artwork even though we can do per pixel exact copies beyond the resolution limit of human vision :)

Problem is you don't have the choice of not choosing, you can only choose a cash position :(

Cash ius even worse a choice than usual. High inflation and low rates make cash the worst investment possible. Currently losing 1% every month

The counter is if you hold cash when other assets crash your cash will likely retain its worth (currency depending). That said right now cash is not a great asset to be holding - with inflation on the rise.

Is it a bubble? Or is it devaluation of the dollar?