When Rarity Is NFT: Not Fiduciarily Trustworthy

OLI Snippets

(from my short posts on social media)

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Non-fungible tokens. Sounds like a disease riders could get from dirty subway tokens in NYC - back when those coin-like payment discs were used. But today's hipsters wouldn't know about subway tokens. They know all about NFT's, though. And rarity is what non-fungible tokens are all about. Except... a recent study suggests that rarity can actually reduce value. "Demand for rarity is self-defeating... the big question now is whether we can observe this effect in other categories, too.” - Jordan Suchow

Which, actually, shouldn’t be too surprising, right? Consider this principle when generally applied, for example, to most of the news stories our media creates. Much of what we commonly consider “news” is what we consider to be rare. Things that don’t happen every day, people who aren’t like other people, etc. What captures the imagination for a moment - that's what purveyors of news (from the mainstream media to extremist news outlets) are selling their consumers. Unfortunately, this push for the extreme may be building within the minds of consumers an ever-rising threshold of what is considered worthwhile. In the media’s case, this means they have a constantly evolving quest to find what their audience will consider to be rare or extraordinary. Which maybe helps explain one reason we have the unhappy, angry society we have today? Pushing the boundaries of the unusual ("rare") is bound to distort what we consider "normal", don't you think?

And yes... I thought I had a couple - and I do!  Original, genuine NYC MTA subway/bus tokens from around 1993.  Well, two are from '93; the one with the ribbon through its diamond-shaped hole was a commemorative token from 1979 in honor of the subway's 75th anniversary.