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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if most people buying sneakers as "art collectibles" realize that the shoes suffer inevitable disintegration and crumbling called polyurethane hydrolysis[0][1].

I just learned of this phenomenon last month. I had some brand new unworn shoes that I had meant to donate to a children's home but I forgot about them in a closet for 5 years. When I finally dug them out, the soles were disintegrated. A complete waste of $150.

Unless you store the shoes in a special climate controlled jar, it really seems the only use for buying is to actually wear them before the ticking time bomb makes them worthless.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=shoes+polyurethane+hydrolysi...

[1] some Nike Air Jordan examples (open in new tab to not break the Back button): https://solecollector.com/news/2016/10/worst-sneaker-blow-ou...

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To prevent hydrolysis (literally breaking apart with water) you just need to keep the environment humidity-free.

An airtight plastic box and a bed of salt should do the trick.

No need for a bed of salt, just use a dessicant packet.

Same thing.

But a kg of table salt, some time in the oven for extra dryness and a free Tyvek envelope makes a massive $1 dessicant packet.

Modest research suggests that Epsom salts (MgSO4) or some forms of ice-melter (CaCl2) would be better options.

In my cursory research, desiccant pack may not actually be a foolproof solution. E.g. in the link[0] of opinions from shoe collectors, do a Ctrl+F search for "silica" and note that the last 2 people say it can harm the shoes.

(I'm not saying they're right because it's not easy to tell who is making scientifically valid claims.)

[0] open in new tab to avoid breaking the Back button: https://solecollector.com/news/2015/05/how-to-store-sneakers

Maybe Satoshi should have built in such a feature into bitcoin (you don’t use it you lose it). That would have been a much more interesting dynamic (maybe) insofar as the original concept of P2P cash which morphed into digital gold/store of value (ie no incentive to spend, create a market/economy).

Because bitcoin is inherently anonymous, it'd be very difficult (impossible?) to prevent someone from making a new address and just bouncing the coins around. It's an interesting idea, though.

I thought about that, and it’s just spit balling something off the cuff, but address to address self-spending may have positive impacts on the network vis-a-vis additional transaction fees for miners.

I think that's fine, because then you know that at least the wallets still exist. I wonder how many bitcoins are forever gone from the early days when they were literally cheaper than dirt. I know I had some and failed to backup the wallet properly.

There's several million £s worth in a landfill site in England somewhere

The built in mechanism for this incentive is inflation, but bitcoin is deflationary as you observe.

This is the demurrage dynamic in freicoin (now tradecraft - https://github.com/tradecraftio/tradecraft) from bitcoin core developers Mark Friedenbach and Jorge Timon.

It would be interesting to see a histogram of the number of days since each bitcoin was last transacted.

Should be easy enough for someone who has all the data, but I don't want to download hundreds of gigabytes just to plot a chart...

Wow. I buy shoes but I've never seen this (I buy to wear). Why is it that a shoe which I wear and have had for multiple years doesn't look anything like that? Is it only certain shoes, based on material?

yeah id say the vast majority of sneakerheads are very aware.

ive seen hundreds of crumbled sole jordan pics over the years on forums, facebook groups, etc.

Its a perfect feature. It reduces supply and creates incredible rarity amongst ones that were treated poorly. Its why a ton of war time artists are worth so much more than their peers who were prolific slightly after. Shit gets destroyed, those that dont become things of legend.

It's also a large reason baseball cards from the 50s and 60s are MUCH more valuable than the following gens.

meh, i think the timescale doesn't work out for this to be the case for sneakers.

the only sorts of sneakers i can think of that are sought after where a huge portion of them have disintegrating soles are like 1985 original Jordan 1s and to a much lesser extent some of the original pairs of the next few models (2s, 3s, 4s)

there is definitely big importance placed on condition in the collector community, but for the vast majority of it comes down to whether the shoe was worn at all, not whether it's literally crumbling into pieces from age.

now that the market for this stuff is so huge, maybe another 10-15 years down the line you'll be spot on though.

Ah so that's why my old cheap 'snow' shoes (cheapy foam gives better grip than rubber in snow and ice) disintegrated going to the shop and back last winter.

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