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Comment by airhead969 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if NFTs are instead facilitating wealth concealment, money laundering, or rich people are throwing money at it for sport rather than deliberate speculation. Or, is there so much irrational speculation occurring as a foreshadowing harbinger of another full Great Depression (rather than the under-recognized pandemic economic pause).

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>foreshadowing harbinger of another full Great Depression

I genuinely can't get it out of my head right now. It seems like anything and everything collectable is worth more, because people are desperate for safe stores of value. I used to buy, restore, and flip old woodworking tools, and as a hobby, I collect nes, snes, and n64 games/systems. The prices are getting outrageous, genuinely just outrageous. An older lathe that would've been <$100 two years ago just sold for ~$500 at a local auction. Games, game accessories, and other nintendo collectibles have almost doubled in price near me. It's ridiculous.

I can't shake the feeling that we're headed for a doom and gloom situation with massive unemployment, hunger, and human suffering in the near future.

I wouldn't worry too much about those exact markets, that's cyclical.

I remember in the early 2000s when the internet really made finding collectibles easier, the old computer market got insane, like $1200 for a standard C64 on ebay, because more people were able to bid on it. Those prices eventually came back down to earth, $250-$300 for a nice one now.

Yes, yes it is a harbinger about underlying currency value issues.

There is a game economic theory guy on YouTube (German though) where he explains it: https://youtu.be/bokHl4zmbPg

Pretty cool!

I doubt people are treating an old $500 lathe as a store of value. We are still in a pandemic and people are still cooped up in homes. Which means hobbies have exploded over the last year. Many of my usual purchases at Michaels and Joann have been difficult to find over the last several months. There are just more people collecting and more people doing flipping like you

The best time to sell beanie babies was when my grandmother was buying & collecting beanie babies.

I learn a lot by this sentence and I say it to myself over an over in our new and improved social media fueled world.

NFTs are mostly manipulated markets. No that picture of a bitcoin symbol did not sell copies to 300 people for $1000 each, netting them $300,000. It sold to the same person who made the picture 299 times and 1 person who got scammed into thinking there is a market for $1000 images on the internet, netting the owner $1000.

You mean like regular art? Maybe not yet but let the how-to-NFT disseminate through their various assistants and reports :)

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