Bitcoin is scarce. Right? That was the driving force behind another collectible that I recall.

TNABC Refuses Bitcoin

Let’s compare the scarcity of Bitcoins to the scarcity of Beanie Babies.

First, please note that it costs so much and takes so long to process bitcoin transactions, that The North American Bitcoin Conference Stops Accepting Bitcoin for payment.

Bitcoin settlement times and the fee market associated with transactions have become a hot topic these days as on-chain fees have risen to $30-60 per transaction. These issues have made it extremely difficult for businesses to operate, and many merchants have stopped accepting bitcoin for services and goods altogether. Just recently the tech giant Microsoft announced temporarily removing the “redeem bitcoin” button from the account services payment option. Now this week, due to the same related issues with the Bitcoin network, TNABC organizers have ceased accepting bitcoin payments for tickets.

“Due to network congestion and manual processing, we have closed ticket payments using Cryptocurrencies — Hopefully, next year there will be more unity in the community about scaling and global adoption becomes reality,” explains the TNABC ticketing page.

Artificial Scarcity

One of the often heard reasons for owning bitcoin is that it is a scarce resource.

Bitcoin is scarce in precisely the same way Beanie Babies were scarce.

In the late 1990s, Ty Warner, creator of the wildly popular Beanie Babies series of plush toys, had a 370,000-square-foot warehouse filled with his beloved collectible animals for kids. All told, the merchandise there represented “more than $100 million worth of product.”

Part of the reason for the incredible success of the Beanie Babies — which had sales of $1.4 billion in 1998, making Warner a billionaire in the process — is that Warner would retire specific animals at whim, creating scarcity in the market and inspiring collectors to pay up to $5,000 for a plush toy that originally retailed for $5.

People neglected other areas of their lives to spend all day trading, and some even invested their children’s college funds in toys that they believed would bring an astronomical return on investment.

It worked for a few. The rest were left with beans.