Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>I soon discovered that all the books leaned on the same central argument: value is an inherent consequence of scarcity. My rebuttal to that was simple: it’s an exception, not a rule. My kids’ doodles are scarce, but in a gallery, they wouldn’t fetch much

Well, how about "value is an inherent consequence of scarcity with respect to demand"?

View on HN

Or to generalise, where supply and demand meet is called value.

The intersect of supply and demand is necessarily the price equilibrium. Value is only equal to price if the buyer and seller both have equal information and neither is operating under any sort of constraints that force certain market behavior.

Your generality may often be true in certain contexts, but increasingly, one should operate under the assumption that the seller has a significant informational advantage over the buyer, and this advantage will be used to capture additional value.

Author seems to understand supply and demand — they are making the point that the NFT perspective doesn’t include a rationale for demand.

Demand doesn't need to have a rationale (in the sense of "real needs" or "utility value" or something of the like) to work in raising value. It just needs to exist!

Yes, but if the demand doesn’t establish itself in some other context that serves a narrative (whether cultural, material, tax shelter, or other) the dynamics of the underlying market tend to be in the realm of tulips and postage stamps.

Or maybe “scarcity is a multiplier of value.”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com