[tsunamifury]

That is all economies, since the beginning of time.

HN readers seem to be under the naive delusion that all of commerce is non stop innovation when the reality is most of it is marketing and logistics. It always has been. Innovation is hard and rare. Most likely what you are working on is not innovation but logistics of some sort repackaging or delivering the same old thing.

[mLuby]

> That is all economies, since the beginning of time.

Doesn't pass the sniff test.

Even knowing how to make an item, was a big factor in what goods were available in the ancient world, see guilds. The Internet especially has changed that.

And until at least the age of sail, getting something from far away was a huge undertaking. Even today, supply chain logistics are hardly a solved problem.

Selling/marketing has always been part of trade, but it's hardly the whole story.

[tsunamifury]

You can make a solid argument that in the last 100 years we became capable of producing more products than we need, causing the pinch point in our economy to move to competitively marketing and delivering them vs original building of them.

However hucksters have existed since the beginning of time to sell without producing. It’s why the Roman guilds and a bunch of other systems of verifying labor exist.

[thfuran]

Sure, but modern technology makes it far easier to scale such approaches. If you're running a scam (or just really terrible deal) that only one in ten thousand people would fall for, the internet makes it actually practical to find enough marks and do so from a place where they have no legal recourse.

[midislack]

Don’t you know about the guild system? From Rome until the 19th century guilds were in charge of most functions in the European economy and strictly regulated to prevent hucksters. Maybe people don’t learn about this in school any more but when I was a child it was part of standard middle school curriculum.