You say it like you’re expecting them to be treasury bonds or something. If we’re viewing them solely as investments, then collectibles are a risky alternative asset class, so of course they don’t steadily appreciate in value. I could easily ask the same question about Netflix though which could possibly go into the red over five years any day now.
The thing about an Action Comics #1 or T206 Wagner is that the demand has held up over a much longer time period so I’m more confident that those will hold value than brand new things with no history like Beanie Babies and NFTs. However, I never see people say stuff like “NFTs are the next retro video games or 1999 Pokemon cards” except for @beetlejuice. It’s always Beanie Babies, the one collectible that famously crashed to zero despite plenty of other popular things from the 90s soaring in value:
*Some 90s sports cards are worth hundreds of thousands. A Jeter rookie sold for $690k. The 97 PMG Jordans are probably worth $300k? I don’t really follow it closely but @anon29622970 would know.
*Pokemon 1st edition are obviously worth a fortune, but also other editions are getting clamped and certain MtG, Yu-Gi-Oh are worth tons. Those were all new inventions / IPs.
*Video games from that period are highly collectible now, which is odd because people were dumping them for pennies on the dollar at GameStop (!) at the time. Loose copies of Aero Fighers (1993) for SNES are selling for $1,200 on ebay. Super Mario 64 (1996), which is by no means rare at 12M copies, fetches considerably more than it’s inflation-adjusted price in collector grade and potentially way more if sealed/graded ($1.56M top sale).
However, I’m not sure how this is relevant to NFTs. There aren’t too many people here buying NFTs to HODL for 5 years. I think we’ve been consistently clear about that. Maybe a few people here have that kind of conviction about a small subset of NFTs. I certainly don’t, but I could easily be wrong. It’s mostly about estimating transient demand on a much smaller time scale which is an entirely different “game” than figuring out what’s gonna blow up years or decades from now.
I’m not expecting anything, I’m literally asking what the price of collectibles does over time. Does it steadily appreciate over time or stay flat? Seems to be a lot of debate in the collecting communities over how these pan out as investments.
The Beanie Baby analogy wasn’t mine, FWIW. I’m happy to switch it to comics or baseball cards or other collectible items. Or if we think digital collectibles will behave differently from physical collectibles, why is that?
Steadily appreciate? No. But sports cards as a class of collectibles have appreciated over time. The up and down swings can be wild though.
It also depends what you’re investing/collecting. If you’re buying brand new product and spending on the next hyped rookie, it will probably only appreciate if that player lives up to and probably exceeds expectations. High grade vintage stuff of goat level athletes has a much better track record, but even that can go wrong if you buy at an absolute peak.
There isn’t some definitive answer like “all collectibles behave like X.” However, I’m fairly certain that some universal properties drive their value which can be identified as consistent predictors. It’s just that there will be some unique variables to that specific market / collectible that lead to different behavior. Also, some of these factors are exogenous shocks on demand (maybe supply too) that aren’t really predictable in advance which is why you can’t know for sure what comic books or NFTs might look like 20 years from now. I’ll write more later because I’m currently trying to buy DC Comic Funko Pop NFTs and am losing to bots.
Yeah, anything decent from early yugioh is now 4-5 figures, same with MTG.
Main problem with MTG/YGO is more people actually played the game so some cards are in real rough shape.
Genuinely been surprised how high McDavid stuff is considering hockey is way less popular than nba/nfl. His stuff is just way higher than any newer modern athlete.
The value of these and Pokemon probably killed card games ever actually getting played again in any meaningful capacity with physical cardboard, and yet I’d argue the playing of the games was necessary for those insane values to ever happen. It’s comical to me watching people rip packs for CCGs only to immediately encase them in multiple layers of protective plastic to ship off to the grader who will hermetically seal it into an even thicker and larger piece of plastic.
We lost to bots on DC Comics x Funko drop today. About 50,000 packs and @anon3530961 got the minimum on one of his 40 browser tabs that snuck through. The rest of us got zero. Immediately profitable and the top seller instantly unloaded hundreds of packs for $14,000.
I’m not in PR but that last factoid seems like one you wouldn’t exactly want to volunteer to the public discord who is trying to buy your product and can’t due to bots.
Based on the first 2.5 paragraphs, it’s an introduction to BAYC and those crazy nonfuginable token thingies out there in the cyberspaces. Real finger-on-the-pulse stuff.
Having now listened to the Citations Needed podcast i linked to, I would like to talk about one specific point.
The claim was made that DeFi enables unregulated credit default swaps and other financial arrangements that have been blamed for the 2008 financial crisis. The finance stuff is outside my ken. Is this a fair or unfair assessment of one possible risk of a crypto world?
It’s accurate. Any financial instrument can be done with crypto and if it is decentralized it can’t be regulated. That’s kind of the whole point.
Nobody has ever said this stuff is stable or low risk. The optimistic view is that stability will develop with maturity, just like other markets have. The nihilist view might be that high risk and volatility are a feature, not a bug. Chaos is a ladder and all that.
