Nick Szabo  🔑

Money and collectibles, and Veblen goods generally, are a perpetual contest between people trying to make unforgeably scarce goods and people trying to knock them off. When costliness becomes forgeable, collectibles become inflated and degraded.

Technology can cheapen a form of collectible or money by spoofing indicia of scarcity, the sensory and cognitive means by which members of a culture judge the scarcity of their collectibles, or simple via increasing the production of otherwise genuine articles, causing inflation.

Shininess (which occurs for example from the wear of long-worn shell beads) and other visual or tactile indicia were often, in pre-Columbian indigenous environments, secure and reliable indicators of the costly history of an object, and thus its constrained supply.

Another category of indicia of scarcity was (and still is, in the art world) indicia of artistic skill and effort -- the improbability of the artistic skill involved and time needed for that rare skill to produce a work of art or craft.

Cultures that imported European collectibles or money eventually adapted their indicia, their methodologies for assessing and judging scarcity, to the new materials and techniques, but not before usually radical disruption to and inflation of their native system of collectibles.