The true value of stuff - a few lessons learnt

When I moved back to the UK I came with serious budget constraints and was slightly anxious that I would not be able to get set up and get my wife and kids over to a furnished house. I did have help but another remarkable thing was that on looking around classified sites and with a van for one day I managed to get a sofa, a dining table and chairs, a fridge and a double divan bed in a day for less than £100 cash. This stuff was not rubbish, it was all good quality and would probably cost over £1000 new in total So why was it so cheap - in my view it is just oversupply of stuff.

Simple case is, in the UK people already have their main household items and don't really have much space so when they want new stuff they practically have to give old stuff away. Shiny new stuff marketed like crazy will always have value but also the way of moving stuff around has a lot of value too.

Getting a second hand car also very extremely cheap but I got stung badly on insurance (which is a legal requirement here) so I am in a bizarre situation of spending twice as much on insurance in 1 year as I did on the car. So the really value here is the provision of compliance.

Food can be really cheap, especially what you really need but as soon as you get to luxury or heavily branded food the price goods up a lot. Takeaways are even worse on price . Mostly we just pay for the marketing.

So, is it now the case that fundamental things can have tiny value and abstract things can have great value? Probably yes for the above but of course tangible things with limited supply like property in high demand places or big celebs time will always have great value. In contrast, abstract things rely on enough people agreeing on the value.

But what about all the cryptodollars out there - It seems like a growing number of people believe that this technology can allow for more transparent records, more provability of ownership and quicker/easier transfer of value. This all could have high abstract value and is the shiny new thing put out there by clever tech people hence the current situation. So, what is happening at the moment seems very dotcom bubbleish and that is a great lesson to learn from. Very few internet companies survived the crash but some of those that did have grown massively in value. At one stage Yahoo was the safest bet and Facebook did not even exist until a few years after the bubble burst. In these early days of what could be a blockchain revolution there will probably be a small group of long term winners but I expect most will fail badly. It is also probable that there will also be lots of opportunity to come.