Hacker News Reader

Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

> What did they sell?

1.6% of their address space. For $200k. And they sold it all. That puts an implicit current valuation on the entire Urbit address space of $17M.

View on HN

No it doesn't. The marginal price that people are willing to pay diminishes as the supply goes up. There may not be enough buyers in the world to saturate demand for the entire address space.

"Implicit valuation" is not the same as the "actual value", it's just a calculation that is customary to make in situations like this whether or not the result has any bearing on reality. In fact, that was kind of my point: somehow, Curtis was able to get 500 people to buy a pig in a poke for $205. That in and of itself is an impressive accomplishment.

if the address space is fixed, though, then the marginal price that people are willing to pay increases as the suppli is eaten through.

An explicit floor for the valuation, rather.

They sold at a (huge?) discount supposedly.

I believe they did indeed sell at a huge discount. Valuing all of Urbit at only 12m seems like a low ball.

Why? All they did was create a speculative market, not anything of any real value (i.e. I can't run compute workloads on it today).

Because it sold out in 4 hours from their mailing-list-only announcement. So from a purely supply and demand perspective, it seems they could have gone higher.

Or maybe just a little higher. Their mailing list is comprised of the people most likely to buy this sort of thing. Selling to the general public might not result in many more sales than the mailing list alone, especially considering that the purpose/use of Urbit is so opaque.

Quite possible. Personally my decision to buy was based on a desire to finance the development of an interesting new operating system and p2p network -- so I paid cash to a company that is doing that -- so the purpose was clear from that angle.

Is there a verifiable record of which real-world entities bought in? It would be nice to have a way to rule out the possibility that they sold it to themselves to create the perception of demand.

In new schemes, you sell 10%, but claim you sold 100% in 4 hours so that you can start a new sale due to the "high demand" and try to really sell with fakely boosted "interested" abusing the greedy human nature.

Based on the paucity of information I gather was collected in the purchase process, I doubt Tlön itself could produce such a record.

I'd like to offer you the chance to buy one of my personal rock collection for $15m. As my rock collection contains only 5 rocks, this offer represents 1/5 of the total number available worldwide. This is a chance to get in on the ground floor of something big!

If you had spent a small amount of time and energy propping up the general sentiment that your rock collection was the next big thing, yet had bountiful positive results in the the rock hype cycle, and the rock hype cycle regularly paid out considerable profits on such investments, I would indeed consider buying one of your rocks had I the $15m.

People regularly spend millions on sculptures which are indeed just special rocks. The Guennol Lioness comes to mind.

Then, if you made the rock cost a negligible amount of money given the regular payouts on such ventures, I would really start considering it. Don't be a boob.

But you won't be able to resell at a profile based on their website. :D

It's not that either. It could be $0 tomorrow.

For a stupid example, say someone makes electricity stop working. But there's lots of things that could make it less valuable in the future than the value implied by the recent sale.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com