"At least you can eat tulip bulbs."

Pixy Misa at Ambient Irony brings us the following delicious bit of news from the NFT/cryptocurrency front. Daily News Stuff 18 August 2023: Parted Twice Edition

NFTs or Non-fungible Tokens, are a product of the cryptocurrency rage. That link will take you to a Forbes' article describing what they are, or at least what they were intended to be.

Way back in the dawn of cryptocurrency time (also known as 2021) Sotheby's , the famous auction house, had an auction they called "Ape In!" featuring "Bored Apes" NFTs. They sold $24.4 million worth of jpegs NFTs. That exceeded the pre-auction estimate by about 100%.

But back to Pixy Misa:

Fools and money: Purchasers of ugly monkey jpegs - which is to say, distributed database entries which are unique identifiers of digital images of ugly monkeys stored on someone's server somewhere - are suing auction house Sotheby's and ugly monkey jpeg purveyor Yuga Labs alleging that they, which is to say the buyers of said ugly monkey jpegs, are too stupid to be allowed out of the house without a leash. (Ars Technica)

You see the auction price per Bored Ape was about $241,000. Today they sell $50,000.

Or rather, don't sell at that price.

The quote that makes up the title to this post, which is from Pixy Misa, references the Dutch Tulip Mania, which started in 1633 or 1634 and then collapsed in 1637. I always recommend people new to investing read Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, or that they at least read the section on the Tulip Mania. The book is a study of mass psychology, and the insanity that often follows what "everyone is doing."

You could see it in the Dot Com bubble of the 1990s, where internet companies that had the revenue of your average dry cleaner had a market capitalization rivaling Ford Motor Co. It made no sense, but otherwise intelligent individuals would argue with me about why none of that mattered. I have seen it several times in my life. NFTs are only the latest iteration. It also played a part in the 2006 - 2008 "you can't lose money in Real Estate" insanity.

Someone needs to read the standard boilerplate that comes with every investment, that is not a bank account about how nothing a sure thing.