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Comment by phil248 | Hacker News Reader

Having purchased several cryptocurrencies recently, I can attest that I am certainly not acting rationally. But at least I'm having fun!

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I should start a business selling thin air. Thin air from France, thin air from Japan, thin air from Mexico, and so on, you can collect them all, it is super fun. Then I could introduce cold captured thin air, warm captured thin air, etc. Wet thin air, dry thin air for year 3. More fun every year.

Even better, I should sell just a paper (well, an electronic one) stating you own some thin air. Hey, geeks, how cool can this get?

I am sure I could find buyers in the same market as cryptocurrencies.

PS: This is not directed at you, but you expressed the level of pointlessness and... void that reigns in this 'market', so I picked your message to place my joke/rant.

As long as you record the transactions for air in a blockchain, you should be good.

this reminds me of, http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/08/world/fresh-air-britain-china-...

A few years ago, Cards Against Humanity ran a Black Friday campaign where you send them $5 and get absolutely nothing in return.

https://cardsagainsthumanity.com/blackfriday/

I wish they'd run this campaign again so I could buy a second.

Now, now; don't be greedy!

I'll sell you mine.

I wonder what that's worth now? Be interesting to see what you could fetch by putting up the 'nothing' you bought from CAH for sale.

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170515-the-entrepreneurs-...

Of course, this just shows how bad the air pollution is in China. Then again, water bottle brands like Nestlé's Poland Spring Water are just using "Poland Spring" as a gimmick and a ad-bait. So you definitely can sell thin air at different price based on "where the air was collected."

> Thin air from France, thin air from Japan

That reminds me of "Perri-Air" from the movie Spaceballs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzbIrb7LUJA

At times I feel a lot like Prince Valium when reading about all the crypto-currency hubbub.

Perri-Benzene

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/10/us/perrier-recalls-its-wat...

I'm not kidding when I say that you would be surprised at the size of the market for canned air. I made this same joke several years ago and then looked into it and was blown away.

Canned Air: It'll Blow You Away

There's value added to canned air at least.

That typically isn't air (80% Nitrogen 20% Oxygen) but a liquefied compressed gas such as 1,1,1,2-tetrafluoroethane. They're very handy for cleaning things, especially computer heat sinks. Much more portable and cheaper than an air compressor.

You're not paying for the air. You're paying for the pressure differential.

Named "Useless Ethereum Token", with the strapline "seriously, don't buy these tokens", raised $187k worth of ETH. https://uetoken.com/

A+ for transparency.

That also reminds me of Yves Klein's Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle::

In the performance piece, Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle (Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility) 1959–62, he offered empty spaces in the city in exchange for gold. He wanted his buyers to experience The Void by selling them empty space. In his view this experience could only be paid for in the purest material: gold. In exchange, he gave a certificate of ownership to the buyer. As the second part of the piece, performed on the Seine with an Art critic in attendance, if the buyer agreed to set fire to the certificate, Klein would throw half the gold into the river, in order to restore the "natural order" that he had unbalanced by selling the empty space (that was now not "empty" anymore). [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves_Klein

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_de_Sensibilit%C3%A9_Pictu...

http://www.airdemontcuq.fr/

It's already sold in France. "Air de Montcuq" -> air de mon cul ( air from my ass )

I'm going to fork your thin air, and create "Thick Air" with the only difference being the blocksize of the available air

It'll be able to handle 8x as much air transfer as yours and have a minority following that will always bite at your heels

> Even better, I should sell just a paper (well, an electronic one) stating you own some thin air. Hey, geeks, how cool can this get?

That idea has been around for hundreds of years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence

Even better, I should sell just a paper (well, an electronic one) stating you own some thin air.

That's basically what this is:

https://www.star-registration.com/

You joke but I'd be happy to invest if I think that I could sell that thin air after a month for twice what I bought it for. So make THAT happen for thin air and we are good.

But you can hold onto it for two months, and sell it for quadruple what you bought it for instead!

You just have to make sure not to be one of those idiotic idiots left holding the idiot bag like an idiot.

If you can make an app that has some variable change in the air investment every few minutes, hitting that dopamine high, you could be onto a winner.

This has been done! At least, as a joke. Back in the dot-com bubble the financial website IEX.nl announced an April first IPO for 'F/rite Air' (fried air).

They received a significant sum in offers…

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20050831124638/http://www.iex.nl...

> Even better, I should sell just a paper (well, an electronic one) stating you own some thin air.

http://www.airrightsny.com/

In concept, it's obviously not the joke you're making. In practicality, it's exactly the content of your joke.

Salt, sea shells and gold were used as currencies in the past, any limited limited ressources would do. Companies even trade CO2 emissions...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading

You joke, but they buy fresh air in canisters in China, shipped from non-polluted locations, like Australia, NZ & Canada. All things are not abundant in all places: http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170515-the-entrepreneurs-...

You couldn't get me to pay a cent for air now. But please let me know when the air futures exchange opens.

No offense taken, but how can I purchase some of your foreign air bonds? I hope cash is OK!

Maybe you can sell thin air from here in Himalayas. It will actually hold some value too for polluted places.

Agreed, for someone with a relatively small amount invested in the crypto market (<1k) I find myself impersonating Gordon Gecko an awful lot. The only thing I can compare it to is my brief obsession with football stats when I used to play fantasy football.

There's a crypto currency for fantasy sports as well: https://nolimitcoin.org/ Why not combine both? xD

Yup, that's all cryptocurrencies investments are right now, a game.

Have fun, but don't bet your life on it.

Mabye in the future it can be more than a speculation, but right now it's a game.

I'm rationally delaying my irrationality. Helped by platform registration bottlenecks

It's all fun and games until the switch is flipped and PetroBTC replaces the Petrodollar. /s?

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