From Less Wrong, May 17:
This is cross-posted from my blog.
When I was a kid, I used to want to not take my action figures out of the packaging because I knew it would mess up the collector’s value of it. After all, it might be worth a lot in the future! Beanie Babies, football cards, Pokemon cards - these were precious commodities to childhood John and to plenty of adults in the 90s.
How wrong I was. This is obviously not worth doing. You’d get more utility from just playing with them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF2zPfwMF3c
First, there’s the cost of storing the damn things for years taking up space in a tub in your attic. Second, it’s very unlikely they’ll be worth any real money in the future. For every one that’s worth hundreds of dollars, there are thousands that are only worth $5. You’ve likely paid hundreds of dollars for them in the first place. Now you have to do the work of listing and selling them, and you’ve made at best triple your money. The returns just aren’t worth it. If you just cared about making money, there are way better opportunities elsewhere (currently cryptocurrency).
If you wanted to store something that would be worth the most value in 100 years, what would you store?
Let’s say you had a budget of $50,000, or $100,000, or $1,000,000.
The most straightforward thing to do is to store $100 bills. But will we use physical currency in a hundred years? Will we even use currency in a hundred years? Even if we still used USD, inflation would just depreciate its value. I doubt any of the cryptos today will be the main one used. Maybe they would be a collectible, though?
Gold, gems, and other precious metals are the most lindy but I don’t know how valuable they’ll still be besides their use in manufacturing.
If I had to pick a precious metal to store, I’d probably pick rhodium which is going for a cool $16,650 to gold’s $1,907.10 and platinum’s $1,059.00. Funnily enough, in looking this up, I just learned platinum is currently worth less than gold. I always thought platinum was worth more than gold but apparently its price fluctuates more. It’s often worth more but not always.
You could store rare comic books or trading cards. Famous paintings. But if the world moves towards VR and such, then maybe people will care much less unless physical copies are still status items.
You could buy Action Comics #1 and hope the superhero franchises keep chugging along into the 22nd century, artistic merit be damned.
Or the T206 Honus Wagner and hope that the rise of blockchain esports cards don’t devalue it.
Certain types of art like famous paintings seem to store their value well but a lot of that might be due to money laundering and other nefarious purposes.
Unless you had a stupidly large budget, the famous expensive paintings are out of reach. You could buy a piece of art for under $1,000,000 but any art priced that low is unlikely to retain its value the way a super famous piece does.
It’s also important to consider actual rarity vs artificial rarity. Heroin is so expensive because it is currently illegal, not because it’s hard to manufacture. It’s smart to pick things that are intrinsically rare.
You’d also want things that are the least reliant on their value being dependent on trends. It's hard to predict trends, though.
It would have been hard to predict that elements critical to making computers would become important, or what would become a technology-critical element in the future. The past hundred years were harder to predict than the hundred before that and so on and so forth. Maybe one could have predicted something like LCDs would exist and they would need something like indium, but seems like a stretch to me.
You could pick the rarest stable elements that are likely to be useful, but the scarcity and cost could drop significantly if and when asteroid mining takes off. Actinium is one of the rarest stable elements but doesn’t have much current use....
....MUCH MORE
For more on the interplay of asteroid supply and price see also:
"The Price of Gold in the Year 2160"
And "We Are About to Start Mining Hydrothermal Vents on the Ocean Floor" (now with added alchemist's fallacy"
The thing is, such an enormous increase in supply would crash the
market, something the ancient alchemists didn't mention when they were
pitching their lead-into-gold private placements to their version of
accredited investors, the princely class, back in the day.
It is for this reason that the astro-miners have changed their
approach and are now talking about looking for oxygen, water, nitrogen
and
other elements that can be used to take us farther into the universe.
Presumably to sell to Elon Musk to speed him on his way....
I first heard the concept from Yale's Professor Nordhaus in 2005's "Schumpeterian Profits and the Alchemist Fallacy"
Here's some exposition from FT Magazine in 2015: "Another Post On Glass, This Time With "The Alchemist's Fallacy" (And Professor Nordhaus)".
