Here's an analogy specifically crafted for the ageing brain, hehehe...
Why, thanks!
And here is a parabolic fable for you:
In 1903 the Wright brothers flew their first aeroplane, the Wright Flyer I, and Scientific American published a paper about it. Some young mechanics nerds became excited by the invention, built some replicas of the plane and started playing with them. They predicted that the Flyer would radically change the way people moved and lived, e.g. by flying through coffee shops and picking up their drinks with special hooks, or flying through their friends' windows at Christmas instead of sending them postcards.
Then some libertarians realized that a Flyer would be handy to carry away their "dirty" cash when the police came knocking, and so they all started buying Flyers from the nerds. Drug dealers then thought that the machine could be used to smuggle drugs across the Rio Grande, and started buying them by the hundreds too.
Then several Wright Flyer dealerships opened in China, and the Chinese started buying them like crazy.
Each of these surges in demand drove the price up by 10x. Seeing that, other people realized that they could become filthy rich by investing in Flyers. They calculated that if, in the future, only 10% of the people who then traveled by horse would use a Flyer instead, each plane (which they could still buy for a few thousand dollars) would be worth millions. This thought drove many people crazy, and they invested all their worth, and then some more, in those machines.
The 1000% per year growth of Wright Flyer price then attracted troves of finance businessmen and venture capitalists. Soon they were offering hundreds of financial instruments and services based on it -- such as bonds backed by fleets of Wright Flyers that their owners wanted to get rid of, and services that would exchange Flyers for horses, for Flyer owners who needed to go where planes could not land (which, at that time, was pretty much everywhere).
There were some setbacks, for sure; like when the feds seized a huge fleet of Flyers from a drug cartel, when the Chinese government prohibited any use of Flyers that involved flying, and when thousands of investors lost half a billion dollars buying non-existent Flyers from a Japanese dealer. Those and other mishaps caused the plane's price to drop somewhat; but, by that time, thousands of enthusiasts had become firmly convinced that the Wright Flyer I was the means of transportation of the future, and continued to believe in its longterm appreciation. (They actualy welcomed the temporary price drop, since it allowed them to buy more Flyers with their strained paychecks.)
Meanwhile, many inventors (including, some suspect, the Wright brothers themselves) had been busy developing bigger, better, safer, faster aeroplanes. But Wright Flyer I enthusiasts scorned them. They pointed out that those competing designs were just minor variations of the basic idea, and did not have the extensive network of repair shops and part suppliers of their original model, nor the public confidence that it had accrued in those four years since it was invented, nor the mllions that had been invested in ventures and services based on it. They were certain that, in a few months, those alternative designs would fail and would be forgotten, while the Wright Flyers that they had piled up in their backyards would continue to grow in value, 10x every year.
And they laughed at some pessimists who predicted that governments might one day regulate aircraft and air travel ("Ha! How can they enforce regulations on machines that can fly away from them?"), ban the Wright Flyer I from the skies, or even use aircraft to expand their power, e.g. by using them to chase drug smugglers and spy into people's private land.
I do not know what happened next, but surely time must have vindicated those Wright Flyer I enthusiasts.
Poll
