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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

The realities of this market have not hit the consumers. Even young people are still out there spending 5-6 figures on a rock and ascribing real value and aspirations towards eventually "upgrading" into said rocks from perhaps an existing synthetic alternative already set in the ring. Even if the supply side price argument is so perverted now, we still have a culture that wants to put a high value on this object for sentimental reasons. No one wants to hear that diamond rings are worthless. They want to spend money on it. Spending an appreciable amount of your savings on it is the entire significance of it, not really the value prospect.

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> No one wants to hear that diamond rings are worthless.

You might convince them that their diamonds are worthless, and that a better investment is cryptocurrency!

Someone should market a synthetic diamond that has a crypto address etched onto it. It just had to be big enough that the augmented reality glasses can automatically pick it up to render the account balance.

A good example of how marketing can produce cultural values

I am curious to know if there is precedent for goods losing their veblen status.

Pineapple and aluminium come to mind. Both were considered absolute luxuries in the 19th century.

Mechanical watches, perhaps.

Sugar was a Veblen good, now its superfluousness is the worst part about it.

When and where?

AFAIU by the time of British colonisation in the Carribean / West Indies, sugar was cheap and afforded plentiful calories (and caries) to the working class.

Along with (relatively) inexpensive tea, the practice of serving boiled water-sugar solution greatly improved health (given the lack of water treatment at the time), reduced alcohol consumption, and provided additional food energy. And that was by the mid-to-late 18th century so far as I'm aware.

I'm not aware of any time or place where sugar was considered a luxury item, at least not for any substantial duration (say, excepting famine, economic recession, or war).

Tulips!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

That lasted less than a year, I don't think it even registered as part of the culture or tradition.

>> They want to spend money on it.

no guy ever wants to shell out $$$ for a useless rock

It's not useless as such, although certainly its use is exceedingly niche. My headcanon is that Cecil Rhodes saw something back in the 1880s, something which drove him to create a corporate engine which would continue to bend the culture centuries after his own death. Now, a hundred and fifty years later, an appreciable fraction of the population carries with them at all times an object capable of scratching everything. What he saw, I cannot say, but one day in our hour of need the population will be equipped.

bitcoin is the 21 century's diamond. Same useless string of cryptographically signed bytes, but for some reason the humanity agrees to assign some value just because of scarcity mindset.

At least diamonds are shiny and you don’t have to pay miners literally forever

Bitcoin has its value due to anonymity and global footprint.

I can ransom hospitals with cyber attacks and get paid millions sitting on North Korea/rusia/Iran and dont have to stand up from my desk.

I can run distributed anonymized illicit drug distribution risk free and get paid a lot.

I can hire hitmen to gather intel and harm my adversaries and arrange kinetic campaigns.

A lot of good use cases.

Haven't you heard about goldbugs?

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