121–130 of 135 posts
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Pyramid schemes are defined by the price and structure. A business that sells knives is a fine business. A business that sells overpriced knives by promising that you can then find someone else to sell more knives for you at an even higher price is a pyramid scheme. Selling tulips is a fine business. Selling tulips at an insanely high price by promising that the market for tulips will keep on expanding and increasing…
Cutco?
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I could be wrong but Id expect eth and nfts to have similar fluctuations, so this wouldn’t be surprising at all. What about compared to USD or another investment like spy
It does fluctuate, but the floor price is still miraculously $16k
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~Most of rural AZ and probably rural AK is like this. There are some 'cities' that never incorporated and have street grids without any sort of government administering them nor any organized system of maintenance.
Interesting. I wonder how large a population that could support? Similar to socialism, which works just fine in a family, or hunter gatherer tribe, but starts running into problems at large scale.
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I wonder if there are more recent examples?
Labubu was last year: https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/21/us/labubu-doll-plushie-pop-ma... https://nypost.com/2025/08/02/us-news/this-is-the-most-expen... It burnt out much faster than Beanie Babies did.
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It does fluctuate, but the floor price is still miraculously $16k
Interesting. Prices, as they say, are set at the margins - so given that, what kind of liquidity is there? How many are transacting? If the price hasn't shifted from $16k, it could mean that everyone thinks they are worth $16k, OR it could mean that no one has bought one in years and the last transaction was $16k. Those are big differences.
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The "government" didn't do much at all, there was no real oversight or guarantee like there is today. The whole concept was novel at the time so there was no law and there were no real procedures. The Dutch Republic may not have had an official king, it also sure wasn't a democracy with real, independent institutions or anything like that. The country was led by a democracy-lite system of nobility/rich people that fe…
Mania has meant madness since ancient times. Its an Ionian Greek word.
The Greek word may have referred to a specific mental state, but the meaning has shifted over the thousands of years. The Greek word itself is derived from a Proto-Indo-European word for just thinking if Wiktionary is to be believed, cognate with an old-fashioned word for "remembering".
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> The problem with the NFTs is that you don't actually own the art they represent and have zero copyright claim to them. That's not a problem, because art is not ownable and copyright is a huge game of make-believe between states and corporations whose opinion is meaningless to me and to the artists I want to support. > if you squint hard enough, you could see them as roughly equivalent to the signature of the origin…
When you say NFTs in your wallet, what do you mean? Links that click through to images are real but their endpoint is mutable and philosophically has the same artistic value as temporary graffiti, not as a store of value like oil paintings. How did you think about the links themselves vs the destination? That is the rub I feel like. Of course the destination is a real site, hosted somewhere, but the journey there is…
I think NFTs are best understood as having minimal utility, and a connection to a work of art specified only as a social side channel. To me, what I own is evidence of support, at a particular time (or, if I sell it, a particular sequence), of a particular other wallet (Jonathan), amidst particular metadata written to the blockchain (ie, the id of the releases of his that I've bid on or supported).
In 1,000 years, the AI will know that my relationship with Jonathan Mann was backed up by actual economic activity. I think that's meaningful.
I honor the ticket stubs, set stones, and chartifacts that people see fit to buy from me in their desire not only to support me, but to signal the importance of bluegrass and traditional music as an eternal tradition of an copyright-unencumbered corpus.
Many of my shows are free to enter, yet people will still buy a ticket stub because they want to record their support in a public place. That seems real to me in a way that copyright isn't.
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Interesting. Prices, as they say, are set at the margins - so given that, what kind of liquidity is there? How many are transacting? If the price hasn't shifted from $16k, it could mean that everyone thinks they are worth $16k, OR it could mean that no one has bought one in years and the last transaction was $16k. Those are big differences.
No, people are still trading them for some reason, and there's pretty good liquidity. The highest offer right now is $15.2k, which someone can dump any of the 10k apes for that. And there were 16 sales (totaling $271K) in the last 24 hours.
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So many of these articles get it completely wrong. Economically. People weren't going crazy for tulips just because, the government had incentivized investment in tulips. The government at the time basically told people that they could not lose money on investing tulips. It should be a story about governments misallocating resources. That's it, but people quit. Keep twisting it into a story of psychology and mania wh…
Does it make sense to talk about "the government" in this age? It probably misguides us more than informs us. I've always felt the perception of government at the time is closer to our perception of the captain of the local football team - at best distant and upholding the honor of the village, at worst a thief with a title - rather than how we view it today. Authority of information lay with the church. Maybe replac…
Governments back then were remarkably interventionist and even kind of semi state capitalist even by modern standards.