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Comment by krustyburger | Hacker News Reader

But Action Comics number 2 is still tremendously valuable. In the Golden Age of comics, collecting comic books and preserving them was not the hobby it would become. So there are very few copies today, but not because anyone set out to make them scarce in any way. Quite the contrary, in fact. DC would surely have printed many more copies if they believed they would have sold.

How is this at all like NFTs again?

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Yeah, it was kids that bought them at a nickel or whatever they were, and were treated as such for a very long time. Same thing can be said of stamps, hot wheels, barbis, baseball cards, pre war Native American handicrafts, CRT monitors, electric guitars... whatever. Even the super high end side of things of art, cars or numismatics had relatively humble origins. Money always cost what the money was worth. Cars were used and tossed; on the luxury end of Duesenbergs or Bugattis being discarded cheaply in their time. The concept of a starving artist has been around for hundreds of years, and the original patrons were picking up impressionist art for cheap.

Collectibility needs a few things in the equation: rarity and here is the _big_ component, some shared nostalgia or cultural history. NFTs don't have that really any of these things.

I would argue too that the scarcity of a collectible needs to be organic for whatever specific reason.

Taking the example of fine art, there is a clear reason that an original piece is unique. When artists release numbered prints, the buyers are aware that the numbering could have continued but the print run was stopped at an arbitrary point. For this reason, they are rarely anywhere near as valuable.

These days “chase” sports cards are often given extremely low print runs of just a few or even one copy. But in my view they will never have the collector appeal of older cards that are rare in large part because few of them happened to survive.

Creating artificial scarcity is an obvious way to manipulate collectors, and NFTs are completely built around that practice.

Absolutely, there is a reason for the scarcity and people will put value on that. One carve out may be things like SUPREME, or some rare Air Force Ones, but that probably boils down the amazing marketing on their part, and may not stand up to the test of time. Clothing is kinda a weird one, as fashion is cyclical and the nature of collecting means you don't use it. The only things I think commanding huge prices are dead stock 1890's Levis or band tour shirts (which I would argue are not so much "fashion", as it more of the cultural relevance of the band). When adjusted for inflation, old high-end haute couture come out to be around what they cost back in the day and this can be said of pretty much all clothing, jeans being an exception.

Eh, it works with video games though. A few companies like Limited Run games release physical copies of digital games banking on artificial scarcity to drive sales, and that scarcity really drives up prices on the secondhand market. This is despite the fact that you can buy the game for $5 on a digital storefront. Something like Celeste for example.

There are other examples where you are right though. Comics in general with variant or the dreaded hologram colors were an attempt to do so, and it's kind of rare to see them valued today.

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