Time Creates the Greatest Scarcity

Older vintage items naturally deserve a premium relative to artificially scarce modern collectibles.

One of my biggest criticisms of NFTs was that they were digital assets whose scarcity was intentionally manufactured. The same applies to modern collectibles marketed as “1 of 1” or limited-edition cards that include a piece of a jersey from 2025 and immediately claim to be worth thousands of dollars.

That is fundamentally different from scarcity created by time itself.

Time is one of the most powerful creators of scarcity. Just as it is with fine wine, age alone does not make something valuable, but survival over decades is meaningful. Every year, items are lost, damaged, discarded, or destroyed. What remains becomes naturally rarer.

When I began building a serious collection in the 1990s, I already understood why collectibles from the 1960s commanded a premium. I also understood that collectors in the 1990s recognized this dynamic and generally took better care of their collections. Even so, many of those items still failed to survive in high-grade condition.

That is why, decades later, I am seeing many of these 1990s collectibles trading for 10 to 30 times their original retail price. Their scarcity was not engineered—it emerged naturally through the passage of time and the simple fact that relatively few examples remained well preserved.