My real education in market mechanics wasn't a textbook or my 5 years working for an options HFT shop. It was from participating in the Runescape "real world secondary markets" from 2003 to 2012. In this game, the "Partyhat" was a useless, discontinued cosmetic from 2001. It was released once and never again through the history of the game. I didn't just watch the Partyhat go from worthless to billions in-game. I watched it go from $0 to hundreds, and then tens of thousands of real-world US dollars. It eventually became the game's ultimate store of value not for its utility, but for two reasons: provable scarcity and a collective consensus that this scarcity was the value. In hindsight, it was a preview of the Bitcoin model. A market, free from regulation, spontaneously creating a "hard asset" from a "useless" digital artifact. While the Partyhat was mooning, I also watched the "CPI trap" play out. The money supply hyper-inflated as players and bots "farmed" (printed) billions of in-game currency. But the price of "utility" goods, the game's "CPI basket" of armor, raw fish, and logs was deflationary. Bots flooded the market, crashing prices. Runescape's "Central Bank" (Jagex) could have reported "-2% inflation" based on the basket of goods. This completely missed the real story. The real inflation was in the scarcity assets. The "Party Hat Index" wasn't up 5%, it was up 50,000%. This is our world. The CPI measures the "armor" (TVs, electronics). It misses the hyperinflation in the "Party Hats" (prime real estate, fine art, BTC). Life is a game, you are sitting on the hardest asset in existence.

Mid nov, post ~ nov 7 Huge chop until then