I have been thinking/deconstructing the relationship between supply and demand.

A couple of years ago, when the street vendor economy was booming, my friend told me that the reason why hand-brewed lemon tea was popular was because many cars only had a dozen or so volts of electricity, making it difficult to do anything too complicated. Hand-brewed lemon tea has low costs, and everyone can do it.

When playing with NFTs, OpenSea first solved the trading market problem, then competitors like LooksRare proposed listing incentive strategies. I was wondering, why incentivize listing rather than incentivize “buying”? Does LooksRare think that “supply” is more important than “demand”?

When playing games like Fantasy/Three Kingdoms, many items/equipment can be freely traded, and prices fluctuate. But I observed a phenomenon in this market: in the short term, prices are not necessarily determined by supply and demand. Some people buy something for 10,000 yuan, and when it drops in value, they don’t want to sell. Others haggle, and they curse. Only when the market crashes will they admit that the price has truly fallen. This means that short-term prices can be influenced by subjective opinions of certain individuals, including the prices of some “one-of-a-kind” items, which are often set by the seller’s pricing power.

The Austrian School (Hayek) says that markets are “discovery processes,” not equilibrium machines, and new understandings emerge from time to time.

In the AI/Web3 era, how will supply and demand change again?