6 ms·

Isn't that always the case? My friend was talking about a rare Magic The Gathering card being worth a silly amount of money... Except the card had only been sol

by simsla 4y ago

Isn't that always the case? My friend was talking about a rare Magic The Gathering card being worth a silly amount of money... Except the card had only been sold once or twice at that price. Unless you have enough comparable items (e.g. paintings by the Dutch masters) it's really difficult to determine the value of something that's rarely sold.

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
"value" is kind of a made-up thing, so I'd argue that by selling something for the first time you're setting its value, not determining it
- maxbond 4y ago
  It's important to note that price, the last traded price, and value are all distinct concepts. The last traded price is the only one of these we can measure ahead of time, so we often use it as a metanym for these other concepts. But we don't know the price of something until we make a binding offer on it and it is accepted; that doesn't necessarily mean the next transaction won't be very different, we just have heuristics about how the next price ought to look. But it's the process of negotiating a deal or bidding on an auction that defines the price, not the historical prices. If you go to a grocery store and see that milk costs $5.25, and you remember last week it costs $5.00, you don't say the price is wrong; you understand that this is the offer the store has made you, and that the price has gone up since your last visit. When the oil futures went negative, it wasn't the case that the value of oil was negative - this was about the structure of the market and the sorts of positions people were caught in when the pandemic hit. We continued to consume oil throughout the pandemic, and so I'd say we continued to value it. Another example would be, if a rancher has a lot of cow poop, they might pay a farmer to take it away. You could say that the cow poop has a negative price on it. But the farmer is going to make use of it as fertilizer; from the farmer's perspective, this is a commodity that has value. It's true though that there are a million theories of value and it's impossible to say what something's value is definitively, you can only make a decision about what is value is to you. But when wash trading is and to impact the perceived value, it does so fraudulently; it supplies information to traders - "there is a lot of interest in this security, and the (last traded) price is rising" - which is a lie. Some people will argue this too is a normal and healthy part of markets, but I don't think they've given enough thought to what sort of equilibrium that game will settle into.
notahacker 4y ago
There's a big difference between an illiquid market where wealthy collectors are so keen to hang onto things they only change hands at crazy possibly-not-to-be-repeated prices and a fake market where the illusion of deep-pocketed collectors is created by the auctioneer and owner colluding to pretend an item changed hands at a massive amount of money.
- samatman 4y ago
  The amount of wash trading in the fine art world is certainly not zero.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    True, but I don't thing wash trading is integral to convincing people that fine art is something people want...
    - DuskStar 4y ago
      There's perhaps a difference between an original DaVinci and whatever the latest paint splatter on canvas modern art is, though.
    - vkou 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure it's integral to convincing people that ~99% of the >$1,000,000 fine art is something people want enough to pay the 'going' price for.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  There is also a big difference between Russia having to shut down a gas pipe for maintenance and politically motivated energy blackmail. ...Or is there?
spearingthehead 4y ago
It does happen a lot in physical collectible markets. It is what happened with WATA Games and the lawsuit against their employees for market manipulation through auctions. Or the Nike scandal with a VP's son using her CC and employee discount buying massive amounts of hyped sneakers and reselling them, which just made everyone more aware.
_fat_santa 4y ago
> Except the card had only been sold once or twice at that price. You see this practice in art and collector car sales. It's rumored that if you see a painting go for an insane amount of money, often these sales are between "friendly" parties for the sole purpose of driving up the value of that art.
- cphoover 4y ago
  see Beeple's 60M NFT sale as a great example
- nly 4y ago
  The same can happen at low prices so that the owners can claim the paintings have lost value and can offset some other capital gains.
klodolph 4y ago
Funny you should mention MtG, since the first big crypto exchange collapse was MtGox. I always thought it was "Mt. Gox", like a mountain of sorts. Turns out it's Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange. Edit: MtG seems like it has some kind of evergreen popularity, and various format changes, changes in the list of banned cards, reprints, and changes in the metagame will mean that prices of individual cards can vary wildly over time. So if something was sold for a ridiculous price a couple times, it's possible that something changed (Targmogoyf used to be very expensive, for example). Wizards seems pretty good at catering to a variety of players, both collectors and non-collectors.
- wyldfire 4y ago
  It did pivot away from its ancestry and at that point it was indeed referred to as "Mount Gox".
  - mikepurvis 4y ago
    Indeed, and that's even the branding used in the Wikipedia article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  Not to be confused with the Berkeley Unix software company called "Mt Xinu". (The operating system's name is a recursive acronym, while the company's name is a backwards spelling.) "We know UNIX TM backwards and forwards." -Mt Xinu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtXinu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtXinu Famous for the great posters they handed out at Usenix: "4.2 > V" BSD -vs- System V, X-Wing / Death Star Poster https://www.ericconrad.com/2008/12/ https://www.ericconrad.com/2008/12/ I love all the old telephone equipment in the explosion!
- milesvp 4y ago
  The old magic the gathering game blog had a lot of good game design topics. One of the articles talked about the 3 or 4 player archtypes they tried to design for. Worth the potential rabbit hole. https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/timmy-johnny-and-spike-2013-12-03 https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/t...
ryukoposting 4y ago
Trading cards and NFTs have a lot in common. - Scarcity, artificial or otherwise. - Subjective value. Neither an NFT or a trading card provides substantial, measurable utility to its owner. But, we can agree they have "value" of some kind. - Lack of oversight. Governments doesn't have entire offices monitoring irregular sale prices for Obelisk the Tormentor or Mickey Mantle. - Low transaction volume. If you're the only market-maker, you can set your own price. These attributes lead me to believe that NFTs and trading cards would both very effective tools for someone trying to launder money. You can take away any one of those attributes, and the asset would become much more difficult to use for money laundering. For NFTs, oversight seems inevitable in the next couple of years. One can only hope.
- p1necone 4y ago
  > Subjective value. Neither an NFT or a trading card provides substantial, measurable utility to its owner. Trading cards kind of do - TCG card prices generally hinge on actual play utility as much as rarity. Outside of really old cards that are just valuable because of their extreme rarity lots of cards that are technically rare are still only worth pennies because they aren't actually any good in the game. While cards that are no rarer or older, but are much better in play are worth tens or hundreds of dollars. And even those cards that are mostly expensive because they're exceptionally old and hard to find, like from first print runs of games that weren't popular yet still differ in price quite heavily based on their utility in actual gameplay. Albeit mostly from the cachet that that gives them rather than from buyers desire to actually play them. e.g. Black Lotus is more valuable than other cards printed in the same quantity in the same set because it's also the most powerful card.
jwie 4y ago
The sealed product hoarders probably have the smartest business model. Buy a bunch of sealed product as a distributor, hold it in a warehouse for 5-10 years, sell for a tidy profit when there’s just not many sealed packs left. The sealed product command a gambler’s premium individual cards cannot, and the market has more liquidity as its way more fungible than a specific individual card. Where individual card prices are more or less an auction, sealed product actually trades like a commodity. But this commodity’s scarcity increases over time. Of course Wizards of the Coast could print the secondary market out of existence at any time, like Pokémon TCG has done recently. But they haven’t done so for 30 years and seem to prefer to conspicuously ignore the secondary market, while obviously being aware of it.

by simsla 4y ago

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago

"value" is kind of a made-up thing, so I'd argue that by selling something for the first time you're setting its value, not determining it

maxbond 4y ago
It's important to note that price, the last traded price, and value are all distinct concepts. The last traded price is the only one of these we can measure ahead of time, so we often use it as a metanym for these other concepts. But we don't know the price of something until we make a binding offer on it and it is accepted; that doesn't necessarily mean the next transaction won't be very different, we just have heuristics about how the next price ought to look. But it's the process of negotiating a deal or bidding on an auction that defines the price, not the historical prices. If you go to a grocery store and see that milk costs $5.25, and you remember last week it costs $5.00, you don't say the price is wrong; you understand that this is the offer the store has made you, and that the price has gone up since your last visit. When the oil futures went negative, it wasn't the case that the value of oil was negative - this was about the structure of the market and the sorts of positions people were caught in when the pandemic hit. We continued to consume oil throughout the pandemic, and so I'd say we continued to value it. Another example would be, if a rancher has a lot of cow poop, they might pay a farmer to take it away. You could say that the cow poop has a negative price on it. But the farmer is going to make use of it as fertilizer; from the farmer's perspective, this is a commodity that has value. It's true though that there are a million theories of value and it's impossible to say what something's value is definitively, you can only make a decision about what is value is to you. But when wash trading is and to impact the perceived value, it does so fraudulently; it supplies information to traders - "there is a lot of interest in this security, and the (last traded) price is rising" - which is a lie. Some people will argue this too is a normal and healthy part of markets, but I don't think they've given enough thought to what sort of equilibrium that game will settle into.

notahacker 4y ago

There's a big difference between an illiquid market where wealthy collectors are so keen to hang onto things they only change hands at crazy possibly-not-to-be-repeated prices and a fake market where the illusion of deep-pocketed collectors is created by the auctioneer and owner colluding to pretend an item changed hands at a massive amount of money.

samatman 4y ago
The amount of wash trading in the fine art world is certainly not zero.
- notahacker 4y ago
  True, but I don't thing wash trading is integral to convincing people that fine art is something people want...
  - DuskStar 4y ago
    There's perhaps a difference between an original DaVinci and whatever the latest paint splatter on canvas modern art is, though.
  - vkou 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure it's integral to convincing people that ~99% of the >$1,000,000 fine art is something people want enough to pay the 'going' price for.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
There is also a big difference between Russia having to shut down a gas pipe for maintenance and politically motivated energy blackmail. ...Or is there?

spearingthehead 4y ago

It does happen a lot in physical collectible markets. It is what happened with WATA Games and the lawsuit against their employees for market manipulation through auctions. Or the Nike scandal with a VP's son using her CC and employee discount buying massive amounts of hyped sneakers and reselling them, which just made everyone more aware.

_fat_santa 4y ago

> Except the card had only been sold once or twice at that price. You see this practice in art and collector car sales. It's rumored that if you see a painting go for an insane amount of money, often these sales are between "friendly" parties for the sole purpose of driving up the value of that art.

cphoover 4y ago
see Beeple's 60M NFT sale as a great example
nly 4y ago
The same can happen at low prices so that the owners can claim the paintings have lost value and can offset some other capital gains.

klodolph 4y ago

Funny you should mention MtG, since the first big crypto exchange collapse was MtGox. I always thought it was "Mt. Gox", like a mountain of sorts. Turns out it's Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange. Edit: MtG seems like it has some kind of evergreen popularity, and various format changes, changes in the list of banned cards, reprints, and changes in the metagame will mean that prices of individual cards can vary wildly over time. So if something was sold for a ridiculous price a couple times, it's possible that something changed (Targmogoyf used to be very expensive, for example). Wizards seems pretty good at catering to a variety of players, both collectors and non-collectors.

wyldfire 4y ago
It did pivot away from its ancestry and at that point it was indeed referred to as "Mount Gox".
- mikepurvis 4y ago
  Indeed, and that's even the branding used in the Wikipedia article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
DonHopkins 4y ago
Not to be confused with the Berkeley Unix software company called "Mt Xinu". (The operating system's name is a recursive acronym, while the company's name is a backwards spelling.) "We know UNIX TM backwards and forwards." -Mt Xinu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtXinu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtXinu Famous for the great posters they handed out at Usenix: "4.2 > V" BSD -vs- System V, X-Wing / Death Star Poster https://www.ericconrad.com/2008/12/ https://www.ericconrad.com/2008/12/ I love all the old telephone equipment in the explosion!
milesvp 4y ago
The old magic the gathering game blog had a lot of good game design topics. One of the articles talked about the 3 or 4 player archtypes they tried to design for. Worth the potential rabbit hole. https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/timmy-johnny-and-spike-2013-12-03 https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/t...

ryukoposting 4y ago

Trading cards and NFTs have a lot in common. - Scarcity, artificial or otherwise. - Subjective value. Neither an NFT or a trading card provides substantial, measurable utility to its owner. But, we can agree they have "value" of some kind. - Lack of oversight. Governments doesn't have entire offices monitoring irregular sale prices for Obelisk the Tormentor or Mickey Mantle. - Low transaction volume. If you're the only market-maker, you can set your own price. These attributes lead me to believe that NFTs and trading cards would both very effective tools for someone trying to launder money. You can take away any one of those attributes, and the asset would become much more difficult to use for money laundering. For NFTs, oversight seems inevitable in the next couple of years. One can only hope.

p1necone 4y ago
> Subjective value. Neither an NFT or a trading card provides substantial, measurable utility to its owner. Trading cards kind of do - TCG card prices generally hinge on actual play utility as much as rarity. Outside of really old cards that are just valuable because of their extreme rarity lots of cards that are technically rare are still only worth pennies because they aren't actually any good in the game. While cards that are no rarer or older, but are much better in play are worth tens or hundreds of dollars. And even those cards that are mostly expensive because they're exceptionally old and hard to find, like from first print runs of games that weren't popular yet still differ in price quite heavily based on their utility in actual gameplay. Albeit mostly from the cachet that that gives them rather than from buyers desire to actually play them. e.g. Black Lotus is more valuable than other cards printed in the same quantity in the same set because it's also the most powerful card.

jwie 4y ago

The sealed product hoarders probably have the smartest business model. Buy a bunch of sealed product as a distributor, hold it in a warehouse for 5-10 years, sell for a tidy profit when there’s just not many sealed packs left. The sealed product command a gambler’s premium individual cards cannot, and the market has more liquidity as its way more fungible than a specific individual card. Where individual card prices are more or less an auction, sealed product actually trades like a commodity. But this commodity’s scarcity increases over time. Of course Wizards of the Coast could print the secondary market out of existence at any time, like Pokémon TCG has done recently. But they haven’t done so for 30 years and seem to prefer to conspicuously ignore the secondary market, while obviously being aware of it.