I'd like to offer you the chance to buy one of my personal rock collection for $15m. As my rock collection contains only 5 rocks, this offer represents 1/5 of the total number available worldwide. This is a chance to get in on the ground floor of something big!
If you had spent a small amount of time and energy propping up the general sentiment that your rock collection was the next big thing, yet had bountiful positive results in the the rock hype cycle, and the rock hype cycle regularly paid out considerable profits on such investments, I would indeed consider buying one of your rocks had I the $15m.
People regularly spend millions on sculptures which are indeed just special rocks. The Guennol Lioness comes to mind.
Then, if you made the rock cost a negligible amount of money given the regular payouts on such ventures, I would really start considering it. Don't be a boob.
Because it sold out in 4 hours from their mailing-list-only announcement. So from a purely supply and demand perspective, it seems they could have gone higher.
Or maybe just a little higher. Their mailing list is comprised of the people most likely to buy this sort of thing. Selling to the general public might not result in many more sales than the mailing list alone, especially considering that the purpose/use of Urbit is so opaque.
Quite possible. Personally my decision to buy was based on a desire to finance the development of an interesting new operating system and p2p network -- so I paid cash to a company that is doing that -- so the purpose was clear from that angle.
Is there a verifiable record of which real-world entities bought in? It would be nice to have a way to rule out the possibility that they sold it to themselves to create the perception of demand.
In new schemes, you sell 10%, but claim you sold 100% in 4 hours so that you can start a new sale due to the "high demand" and try to really sell with fakely boosted "interested" abusing the greedy human nature.