this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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Technology
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If the price of rare stamps craters you can always just use the stamp to mail a letter to your friend. They are onysical items with actual scarcity and legit demand from collectors. Loads of people have collected stamps, coins, and baseball cards for decades and even centuries
This isn’t always true. People collect stamps with postmarks on them as well, that can’t be reused. Stamps without postmarks are generally worth more. But if a rare stamp only has examples with marks, it will still be worth a lot, but useless to post a letter with.
Still there is scarcity because these are physical objects, most of which are out of production. With NFTs you don't buy a thing, you buy a link to a digital representation of... something. If the creator of the NFT decides to stop hosting that link your NFT is not only worthless it is also gone.
Rare stamps collections include stamps from countries that no longer exist, are no longer valid, or are only commemorative and were never valid in the first place. Same thing for coins and banknotes, some you can only use to look at them.
They're items with scarcity... that is no always all that scarce, and there are a lot of scams going around. Some are fake, some are so good of a fake that are unique and valuable again... 🤷
(but... "use the stamp to mail a letter"? What century is this? 😉)
I send a check to my trash service because they want to charge a fee for me to pay online. That requires a stamp, and my mom sends me card a every few months despite us texting regularly.
Hey, I've had to use at least two stamps since I bought them around 3 years ago!