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A shirt whose price increases by 1 euro with every purchase (driesdepoorter.be)
63 points by tomsonj 467 days ago
9 comments

Currently at #183. Regarding my asking price of €190 for my mint-condition shirt #4, some people say I need to have more faith and HODL. Others say I’m contributing to a worse society by trying to find the next greater fool.
Respectfully, I fear the latter. Trying to generate value through specious/arbitrary scarcity, and hoping that demand (willingness to pay) will rise because of that arbitrary constraint on supply. Maybe this is the future, when it seems increasingly easy and cheap to create "things" (t-shirts, widgets, design, prose text, code, music ...), and in large number. The original hope for mechanization/automation is that people's free time and creativity could be devoted to creating new, better, or just more personally satisfying things. I definitely do like the t-shirt as a satirical statement on Bitcoin and NFTs though, if that is what is it. Good luck!
Great comment. I have decided to insure my mint-condition #4 for €185. Even though the shirt is its own receipt, €185 is the replacement cost.

I notice 100 shirt owners like me have taken out the same policy. So, average replacement cost for a tragic dry-cleaning mistake in which all 100 insured shirts are lost is actually €235.

Obviously, any insurance company recognizes me as a sophisticated customer, so they offer me a choice: they could preventatively buy and store shirt #185 today, if I should ever need it, for an extra €10, or add a policy rider to insure the €50 difference between the replacement price and €235, for an extra 5.

What stops a Chinese factory to print a 1000 shirts with 0004 embroidered and shipped all over the world? This is just a NFT esque grift.
Usually there are ways to tell counterfeit from a real item.
Only if the cost of making a better counterfeit exceeds the cost of the legitimate item. It's a t-shirt, it doesn't have a chain of attestation.
It doesn't cost much for me to write my signature, but people can still detect forgeries.

Unless the counterfeit shirts were manufactured in the same factory, with the same process, I don't think they'll be identical. Dries Depoorter might be adding the numbers herself by hand, so unless the counterfeiter has the same tools as he does, there will likely be differences.

It is actually a reasonable use case for a NFT
Not sure why you are downvoted. This is indeed the exact use case for which NFTs were invented.
Because the NFT isn't the t-shirt. You can own the NFT and the physical t-shirt, and sell the NFT to someone else but give them a fake t-shirt. They don't suddenly have a real t-shirt just because they have the NFT.
> You can own the NFT and the physical t-shirt, and sell the NFT to someone else but give them a fake t-shirt

That's a very smart way to achieve nothing. You now have created an actual copy on a shirt, at your cost, and proceeded to still own a shirt that has no market value now that you don't have it's authenticity proof. Seems like a very smart thing to do.

But it does require buying one real shirt/NFT for each fake a scammer sells.
I know it's completely different, but somehow feels similar to the Million Dollar Homepage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage

Yep, thought the same. Both are social games with very simple rules. Always wondered what makes social games like these, and by extension also social networks interesting or not.
Went ahead and headed over to the MDH and clicked on 20 links. Only two worked. Wondermark.com (apparently a comic strip) and... SendShit.co.uk. lol.
If this is at 183 euros, it means that the artist made 16,653 euros so far. Very impressive.
Are they an artist or one of the greatest marketers
Right. Paraphrasing, any sufficiently popular art piece is indistinguishable from marketing.
This reminds me of that early internet web page where you could buy a pixel for $1.

It seems novelty pricing can be quite successful!

Here's how you calculate the total spent on the shirt so far: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_progression#Sum

16,836€ (183 sold)

Weren't 182 t-shirts sold? That would put the total amount made to 16,653.

But yes, that's the way to calculate it.

I think you're right. A price of 183 means that the seller is offering it to potential buyers at 183, not that it has sold at 183. So your calculation is correct.
Yeah my bad, 183 t-shirts were sold but your total is still correct because the first one was sold for 0.

EDIT: Someone bought another one, so my initial total is now correct lol

Did it start at 1€?
At €0 according to that page. He kept that one himself (so 183 shirts have been distributed, of which 182 were bought). Shirt 0183 is the 184th shirt.
> First shirt was embroidered on 25 February 2024 with the price of 0 euro for Dries.
Pinboard pricing model escapes containment.
I wonder what happened to that?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8751170

Interesting. Reminds me of TeeFury, which only sells a T-shirt design for 24 hours.
What's the incentive to buy? Get a shirt with a low number for the prestige?
…or a high number to brag!
Missed the chance to call them NFTshirts.