Happy New Year Steemit! In 2018, I had a Steemit format in form of a magazine-blog mix, in 2020 I will reinvent it. This time in English. Small stories, messy, and most of it nerd-stuff. The more complex topics I´ll move to Medium and bridge them to Steemit.
Every year the same procedure: new years resolution. Being fit, becoming financially free, get a girlfriend/boyfriend for a happy relationship. Running is boring, gym costs money, relationships costs money...yeah great so playing lotto? Or maybe you already are rich but don´t know it. Do have a old stamp collection? coins? Pokemon cards? An old slice of Pizza?
From Collectors and Investors - Rarity and Scarcity
As a kid growing up in the Germany of the 90s and 2000s there were relatively many collecting hypes. Some comparable to the hypes in the 50s,60s,70s,80s. My grandma collected "Glanzbilder" (some form of glossy pre-sticker) which had their hype already in 1880-1910 in Germany and Austria, it was a long lasting phenomenon.
["Glanzbilder" Wikimedia CC0]
My grandpa collected stamps and coins, my parents...I´m not sure probably there where many collecting hypes in the 70s and 80s. Stamps came back a few times, coins did. But more and more often the collections were centered around brands. In the 90s it was Pokemon, Tamagochi, GoGos, mainly Trading Cards (MTG, Pokemon, YuGiOh) and girls-stuff I am not aware of (Ponies and such things).
And I am not aware, that neither my ancestors, nor me is left with anything of that collecting-stuff which is considered "valuable". Maybe some of the stamps can be sold for a few euro. So why, from an economic aspect collecting at all?
[when I look at my stamps they are old, but neither sorted, nor can I find very rare ones. Plus they don´t help with dates. Girls are not impressed...]
rare like this one...
[Von Joseph Osmond Barnard (1816—1865) - Taken by Petr Kalivoda, CC0]
Out of 500 exemplars printed in 1847, there are only 12 left from the blue and 15 left from the red Mauritius. Probably there are many things from which there are only 12 or 15 left, but since stamps have collector status they are valuable.
So does rarity mean anything?
many very rare Pokemon cards trade for 10-1000x higher than common cards, but the demand still makes 10x and more of a difference.
with very active communities there can be very high demand. Very rare magic cards trade even 10x higher than very rare Pokemon cards and achieve prices around 6000 USD. Of course there are also some outliers achieving much higher prices or probably not, this is ebay :D
Once there is a network effect, rarity makes a difference. Of course magic cards involve more people from different generations than Pokemon cards do. Stamps involve more people of older generations and are not as interactive as card games which are actively played.
But globalization shows that tulip-mania is everywhere.
Irrational Markets? YES!
Often it is enough to add a nice story to the item. In 2006 New York Times Magazine journalist Rob Walker started to sell items with an average initial cost of $ 1.25, simply by adding a story to the item he turned 197 Dollar worth of thrift into $8000 --> ~6300%! On significantobjects.com you can see each of those items.
Normal Pizza < Virgin Mary Face Pizza < Laszlos Pizza
If there was a piece of Laszlos Pizza left, Im sure that he could sell it on ebay for over 1Million USD. Simply because of the story. Not only the pizza is delicious but also the thread on Bitcoin-talk.org
The big Question of 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020...
Are the crypto-tokens we hold, related to any of this numismatic stuff? Is most of it just story telling? Or is there some material/intrinsic value? It still feels like I just started learning about all those things (technology, history of money, science of value). My mission right now is to challenge the "store-of-value" narrative, all the stock-to-flow models and 100k+ predicitions.
Step one: was understanding crypto. No not that mumbojumbo "Alice to Bob" shit, I mean really understanding it. Understanding the FLP-impossibility theorem (the fundamental problem Nakamoto "solved"). Understanding byzantine-fault tolerance. Understanding state machine replication and distributed and parallel computing, understanding consensus, understanding why Bitcoin is not classical consensus based, understanding why Proof-of-Work is not a consensus mechanism, understanding why SHA-256 is memoryless, understanding the bottlenecks, understanding why Bitcoin is subject to 2f +1 (51%-Attack) and why dPOS is subject to a 3f + 1 safety margin. Understanding Cryptoeconomics and all those basic shit.
your brain after studying crypto
[Rainer Zenz, CC BY-SA 3.0]
Step two: Was comparing the different systems and looking at fundamental hurdles. People often say "I believe cardano is a great project" or "Ethereum will never surpass Bitcoin"...I have great doubt on whether they really know what the hustle is all about or whether it is just a feeling based on some Youtube videos. You think Cardano is the only project taking a peer reviewed scientific approach? How many members of the developer and researcher team do you have investigated?...
Step three: estimating a fair base value...(still in progress)
currently I´m writing on a trilogy about the "digital-gold fallacy" and the flaws of stock-to-flow. No not because I don´t like Bitcoin. It is just better to attack narratives in order to proof them "right". When the last one is done, I will link it to Steemit
why do we have PoW? Most explanations don´t get the reason
why most assumptions about Bitcoin are false