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They may have found (most of) the Apple 1 Prototype Board

Very true but havent many made money on all bubbles throughout history?

I find myself leaning towards more conservative thinking as far as investments go as I get older. Rash attempts at money making are easier when you are young enough to recover from them.

Land/property again seem a great investment. After spending some time in New Brunswick I have been looking for some land there and the price seems good in many areas.
 
I can't think of anything outside of the insane home video game collector space where things are
six figures or up.

I've seen some prototypes in the arcade community sell and at best was I believe a Centipede prototype cabinet that went for $18K.
What on earth in the console world is hitting six figures? Even the devkits only sell for a few thousand when complete.
 
Very true but havent many made money on all bubbles throughout history?

I find myself leaning towards more conservative thinking as far as investments go as I get older. Rash attempts at money making are easier when you are young enough to recover from them.

Land/property again seem a great investment. After spending some time in New Brunswick I have been looking for some land there and the price seems good in many areas.
Oh for sure. My parents did very well for themselves just buying and selling our homes at the right time.

I thought crypto was a scheme.. I was encouraged to get into Bitcoin just as it was starting up and was dirt cheap. Had I done so I might be bidding on that A1 right now. :p The amount of money you would have needed to buy in with back then wouldn't have been anything you'd miss.

But I just thought it was silly any paid it no mind.
 
“Legit” is a strange term to use there. Of course pyramid scams are great if you’re at the top, but it’s not an objectively… good, way to make money.
I'm just being facetious. I've also picked up some my kids' lingo. I say bruh a lot more than I want to. :)

I don't think bitcoin was *intended* to be a scam... at least not by its creators. I think it just ended up being pyramidish because it never was able to become a reliable store of value, and was hostage to idealism/wishful thinking. Nonetheless, plenty of people have made money with it. I wouldn't mind getting in on the ground floor of something that's going up.. Hopefully something actually based on reality.
 
What on earth in the console world is hitting six figures? Even the devkits only sell for a few thousand when complete

Plain old NRFB retail boxed video game cartridges are cracking a million bucks.

That said, prices like this are in large part because the vintage video game market has for the last few years been undergoing a hostile takeover by the same scumbags that have been manipulating the sports memorabilia and collector card markets for decades. This is big business, and it’s being heavily artificially manipulated by shady investment firms that use strategies like setting up “independent“ appraisal companies that they position as authoritative sources for what items are worth… which then go on to conveniently spike the valuations of whatever the “whales” in the field have managed to quietly buy up controlling shares of.

Search “art market scam” on YouTube and watch a couple of the hits. (Wendover Production’s video is pretty good.) It’s shockingly easy to manipulate markets like this where the items in question have no intrinsic value.

Edit: it’s no coincidence that some of the bigger public boosters of garbage like NFTs (IE, douchenozzles like Gary V.) cut their scammy teeth in the sports card racket before getting into crypto.

 
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I thought the grading and selling market fell apart at the beginning of the year after a flood of complaints varying from repackaging to over-grading?
 
Who would pay that for super mario bros? They released at least 5 different cartridge releases in the US alone and made millions of them!!
 
I thought the grading and selling market fell apart at the beginning of the year after a flood of complaints varying from repackaging to over-grading?

There are news stories and lawsuits flying around, but this cancer is by no means dead, and as noted, the scammers just move on to new areas whenever a light gets shone on them.

Not to throw too much shade, but in light of this sort of thing it’s… interesting, that the whole Apple-1 market seems to rely pretty much on one guy for “grading” all these auctions…
 
I don't know much about the gaming market; are there people positioned as experts there who professionally evaluate games? And they failed or lied?
 
I don't know much about the gaming market; are there people positioned as experts there who professionally evaluate games? And they failed or lied?

Yes. Basically, you know the sort of grading systems you have for evaluating the condition and rarity of junk like comic books, baseball or Pokémon cards, whatever? The play is to set up a company that assigns grades to items *and also* conveniently assigns a ”fair market value” based on some secretive but totally for reals and not completely malleable secret formula. Then the trick is to build this enterprise into being the ‘industry standard’ for the field that “Pro Investors” rely on, ideally becoming the sole monopoly on valuation. Once you’ve hit that jackpot you’re free to manipulate the market all you want. It’s not going to be free, to be convincing you’re going to have to arrange a bit of shady auction behavior to make the case the valuations are ”real”, but once you’ve built enough hype the fleecing can begin in ernest.

Again, seriously, this kind of stuff is happening everywhere. All it takes is a circle of connected insiders willing to do some public circular trading amongst themselves to prime the pump. Then it’s just a matter of how many rich ignorant suckers you can leave holding the bag.

(This, BTW, describes the entirety of the NFT market. It was never real; all the seed money for the grift came from bitcoin whales building a pump and dump scheme out of their phony cryptobucks that they’d been holding instead of changing for real currency because actually doing the latter would have popped the bitcoin balloon.)
 
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Comic books arent junk! I still have all mine boxed and sleeved in the closet.. i Know they are not worth anything and i am sure noone will want them when im gone.. but i still likem... So take it back. Comics have never been junk.
 
Comics have never been junk

I was using the term “junk” as a slangy synonym for ”stuff”, no offense intended…

But that said, if you lived through the ridiculous speculation-driven ”collectable comics” boom of the 1990’s and witnessed the damage that did to the industry and the fans, creatively and financially respectively, you know there definitely have been times where the comic book industry has churned out some… less than stellar products.

(This article is a useful read because among other things it mentions how the macroeconomic conditions of the last decade have contributed to this insane asset bubble affecting… almost everything that can remotely be considered or packaged as an “investment“. And how history makes it clear that all this craziness could evaporate at any time. It’s a lesson that could even apply to half million dollar Apple-1s should the faith be lost.)
 
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As far as 'personal computers' go (here we go again :) ), I believe it's like so:

Apple-1 - $300-900k
Apple Lisa - $50-55k
Kenbak 1 - $36k
Twiggy Mac Prototype - $33k
Apple II Ventless - $24k
C64DX Prototype - $15-22k
Mark-8 - $12-$15k

Pretty steep drop off from there. There have been the occasional corporate-aimed machines that have been in between there (Alto, DEC etc) but they come up too infrequently and are kind of special birds, I'm not sure the prices are consistent.
Indeed, once you get out of personal computers things get weird. I can't imagine a mere million or two would convince the CHM to hand over their IBM 1401 or PDP-1.
A really clean PDP-8 (straight eight) might make the above list.
 
Comic books arent junk! I still have all mine boxed and sleeved in the closet.. i Know they are not worth anything and i am sure noone will want them when im gone.. but i still likem... So take it back. Comics have never been junk.
That is a matter of taste and opinion of course.
 
From my understanding original comics from the early 20th century in good condition are still worth money. A Honus Wagner baseball card just sold for $7.25M.

Any time a hobby gets mainstream, and vender start making collectable editions for it they tend to end up worthless.

Look at stamp collecting. Anything made pre 1930's have slight value, anything 1800's is collectable, anything after the 30's sell for less than face value unused. I have seen sellers use plate blocks from the 1950s for postage purposes.
The reason stamps are worthless is because instead of just issuing a small number of stamps for the purpose of postage the post office figured out how to make them collectable and began mass producing sets every year and hoping people purchased them to stick in a drawer instead of use for postage. The people who collected stamps when they were first issued in the middle 1800's were few and probably died before they were worth much.
 
I inhereted my mothers stamp collection and coins. I knew the stamps were worthless. I have them in a container, I never look at them. I doubt they are worth what she paid.
Her coins are mostly the same with a few exceptions. She would buy those card stock "collections" I.e. Titanic coin set, which shows a sinking titantic and just has an american random set of coins from 1912 unrelated entirely to whats on the card stock. I am sure the makers of that "fine product" pulled out any actual coins of value.

She also collected Precious moments and hummel figurines paying hundreds for some of them. And beer steins.. So many beer steins.. All of these worthless. I do wish I kept the M.A.S.H commemorative plate with Hawkeye on it.. Who knows where that ended up...... Alan Alda wouldnt mind me eating dinner from his plate im sure.

A sucker is born every minute.
 
Hummels started being worthless when the old farts collecting them died off (supply and demand).

I collected stamps and don't regret the hobby because it was fun and cheap. When I was in jr high/highschool I collected baseball cards and stamps. A friend and I would take the bus to the Coin and Stamp shop by the mall on the weekends to look around. They had a huge box of loose old stamps you could look over and buy for pennies plus the higher end stuff under glass. Old farts used to come in and sell their coin collections or buy some rare stamps for their retirement (were talking mid 1980's stamp boom here). The shop also put up a sign for baseball cards since that hobby was exploding at the time and there were baseball card shows every weekend somewhere in the US. I remember selling complete sets of cards from Donruss for $100+ that were not even that old since I was ditching the hobby.

Anyway, it was fun to go there and look around since the owners (father and two sons) were cool about it and would answer questions. They had their whole inventory of notable items on a C64 computer in the back. I also discovered the bad side of the industry when the mail order giants of the coin and stamp world would show up in suits with briefcases of cash offering the store owner 10% catalog to buy them out on the spot. During the 90's I used to visit that coin dealer who now worked alone after his sons had to get other jobs since baseball cards had become hard to sell and the stamp market had tanked. I was there to buy gold and silver bullion coins and the owner would tell me how he had kept all the scrap gold he purchased in 1980 for retirement (gold had hit $700+ an ounce back then and he had over a million dollars in it) and the market tanked and nobody wanted it. I ditched most of my hoard in 2009 and made a nice profit. Even dealers who should know better get sucked into the hype and get burned.
 
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