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1. Inharmonious Chatroom (mono@shitposter.club)'s status on Tuesday, 13-Nov-2018 06:39:44 UTC Inharmonious Chatroom
   https://www.alicemaz.com/writing/minecraft.html
   
   markets, scarcity, monetary policy, complex systems, economics in minecraft
   
   >Really good, in fact. Even with the 50% increase, she sheared sheep for hours and could barely stay in stock of any color, despite the received wisdom that colored wool sold erratically. That's because another player, Jill, was buying out her entire inventory and reselling it across the street for 0.2M. And Jill didn't do too bad for herself either. Pretty soon wool went from a backchannel convo topic to the hottest game in town.
   
   >On the heels of Jill's success, Frank opened his own wool store. Not only did he sell for 0.35M, he bought via the same doublechest at 0.2M. Lily raised her price to compensate. Zel got in on the action with their own buy/sell doublechests, and everyone said business was booming. Prices kept climbing, and at the height of it, Zel was buying at 0.5M a block and selling for even more, while all the normals who just wanted a bit of wool here and there complained about the "crazy" market. Sorry guys, they were told, that's what wool is actually worth nowadays.
   
   >Except not quite. No one who wanted wool for consumption was actually paying those prices, it was all wool merchants buying each other out. I knew better than to get involved--it felt a lot like a bubble, so any investment at all carried unacceptable risk. Unless, of course, there was a way to get instant money with zero risk.
   
   >Jill used his wool to refill her chests. She did decent business. I took everything I bought, however, and immediately dumped it into Zel's buy chests. Quintuple what I paid, not a bad deal at all. As I started to fill their chests up, I sold anything else to Frank and a few other small-time buyers, the objective always being to unload what I bought within the hour. After awhile, "haha where are you getting all this wool from :P" turned to "no seriously alice where are you getting all this wool from." The bottom fell out of the market as the speculators shifted from "turn a profit" to "cut my losses" to "sell sell sell." Colored wool corrected to the nice sensible price of 0.12M and all was right with the world. https://shitposter.club/attachment/2644057
   • 御園はくい repeated this.
   • 御園はくい (hakui@freezepeach.xyz)'s status on Tuesday, 13-Nov-2018 09:42:18 UTC 御園はくい

     in reply to
     @mono this is how you become a merchant