Original Super Mario Bros carts are rare, diamonds are not. Natural diamonds have an artificially reduced supply thanks to a cartel, if their market actually functioned they’d be very cheap.

The original Super Mario Bros sold ~40 million copies, excluding all the re-releases. It’s not a rare game at all. You can buy the cartridges on eBay for less than $10. Complete in box versions for a few hundred at most.

The only thing rare about this big sale is that it’s sealed in the box in perfect condition. All that extra money just for packaging material. Collectors are truly weird.

I saw an "unboxing" video for Nintendo amiibo's recently, by a collector who had amassed a large collection (all of them?) was unboxing them on video. The unboxing process obviously de-values each of the items, but the amazing thing about it was how shocked he was at the detail & manufacturing quality of the figures after removing the packaging: details he couldn't make out at all when they were packaged.

It's so strange. Buying boxed items with no intention to (ever?) unbox essentially amounts to just paying for the box itself, rather than the contents.

Natural diamonds are really cheap. You can go online right now and buy rough diamonds for $3.50/carat. Diamonds that you would want to put into a ring are much rarer and diamonds have all the qualities that jewelry enthusiasts want are rarer than that.

We need to start thinking about jewelry like hi-fi audio. If you just want to listen to good music then lord knows you don't need a $10k setup. You hit diminishing returns really fast and your untrained eye isn't gonna be able to tell the difference between a $500, $2,000, and $10,000 diamond -- they will all be pretty. But that doesn't mean that there aren't people who do notice and do care.

> But that doesn't mean that there aren't people who do notice and do care.

And even more people who only notice when they're told.

It's not exactly the same thing though, there's a difference there, you get the physical object.

I agree that some people value rarity and uniqueness, but it doesn't look to me like diamonds (natural or otherwise) provide that.

You can make or buy your own custom SNES cartridges with whatever ROM you like. They’re about $20 so clearly there’s more at work here.

OK, but then there's still a physical difference, purchasing the physical object, including original box, published by nintendo, or reprogramming your own generic which will contain different electronics.

But yes, as I said above, there is value to some people in the rarity and uniqueness of that original, even if you could pump out something that is to all intents and purposes identical.

But diamonds aren't all that rare, the market is managed to restrict supply, even with that everyone and their grandmother has one on their finger. And few people (other than geologists I guess) are really bothered about the back story here. They have an idea about what's "real", and what's not, but that can change.

(I also think where we're just talking about lumps of a material, it's slightly different to a manufactured object, perhaps)

They do. Actual diamonds have occlusions, slight color shifts, unique sparkle patterns, and other characteristics.

Grown diamonds are too perfect, and it’s trivially easy to tell the difference. You don’t need a loupe at all.

I don’t own any diamonds, but I like rocks and minerals. Hank from breaking bad would be proud.

> Actual diamonds have occlusions, slight color shifts, unique sparkle patterns

All of which can either be recreated in a lab now, or are likely to be possible before long. See for example synthetic star sapphires.

> I like rocks and minerals

Good for you, so does my step-dad (he's a geologist). The man was a nightmare to try and drag around the New York museum of natural history, I thought we'd never get out of the mineral section...

A large majority of people don't pay insane amounts for collection items. A large majority of people pay insane amounts for jewellery though.

> And people like being rare and unique.

It's amazing how powerful the marketing narrative must be for something extremely normie and prescribed to be viewed instead as "rare and unique".