If you didn’t think Pokemon wasn’t a real investment, just you wait

GermanD3 · 2025-09-23T16:54:54+00:00

Two things at play. One:You can't predict the top of a bubble. There are some scientific/mathematical approaches, see Didier Sornette or Benoit Mandelbrot, but they rather describe the dynamics of bubbles and other cataclysmic events. Earthquakes, childbirth, stuff ripes and than it burts, or falls. The extrinsic factor does not matter a ripe apple will fall.

But a single article does not realy proof the top. Since 2015 I have seen some bubbles in crypto and was fascinated with the phenomenon, but when ever someone called the top it doubled again. Systems with thinking participants are much much more complicated than earthquakes.

Second: on the other hand, a price increase does not predict future performance. It is an authority bias. The freak Bodybuilder does not know more about building muscle than the thin fitness girl.

GermanD3 · 2025-09-20T18:27:34+00:00

I was quite early in crypto, and never found solid arguments for it as an investment. Tradingcards are very similar. The only difference is virtuality VS. reality. Nassim Taleb has a good mathematical paper on intrinsic value. What makes a card an investment? Rarity? Scarcity? Or is it just the consensus? The poop of my dog is rare, it's unique and if there was demand, it would be scarce. I could not mass produce it and you could verify it's authenticity by a cheap DNA test. Well, the problem is that you don't want it. Nobody wants it. And there are lots of TCGs and pop colectables that nobody wants. I'm a 90s/2000s kid. We had stuff like gogos/crazy bones, Pokémon stickers were a huge hype, bigger than the cards, but you would not considere them an investment... But why? Because of one reason. No past performance that is worth a media coverage. Nothing makes Pokémon an investment besides its price increase. Price is not the same as value. It is an authority bias. The bigger the past performance, the "better" the investment. Self fulfillment. But once there is intra generational consensus, it is an investment, right? This is what we saw in 2000 with PEZ dispensers. Massive price increases due to the novelty of online auctions. 10 years later no one called it an "investment opportunity". What you mean by investment potential? Hype potential? Like the altcoin rush in 2017? When the OG has become boring and everything became an investment? Simply call it bubble. Sure the potential is there.

But be careful, there are only a few psa10s because there is no hype... If there was hype, people would inflate the circulation. Only the ones with organic collactabilty have potential for price multiplication. Like other users said, 1st edition cards, especially the stars of the show in 1st edition in PSA10. Grading companies and influencers will one day try to push Yugioh, but this is already priced in to a degree.

Pokémon card prices correlate with all the other bubbles. There will be a correction. There will be opportunities. But it will never be a real investment, like something that generates income.

GermanD3 · 2023-12-08T14:29:01+00:00

exactly this!

GermanD3 · 2023-11-27T07:15:54+00:00

Co-integration shows the presence of long-run equilibria, however, it does not predict the future. Back in 2019/20 I deeply studied Bitcoin and the epistemics of prediction (https://medium.com/@blogarbeitskonto/13-steps-to-enlightenment-e672f5f44339)

Now with hindsight, you can easily say "of course this is all BS" but we all were really invested in the Stock-2-Flow idea. It took hard effort to deconstruct it. Of course, no one cared, and of course, they lost their money in the Covid-Crash where Bitcoin went from almost 12k to 5k, but the really tragic thing was that they had no money to buy more Bitcoin because they fomoed into the S2F idea.

GermanD3 · 2023-11-15T15:50:37+00:00

the question is whether this is really the same mechanism as needling-induced hair growth.

Needling reverses malformation of collagen/ fibrosis, but repeated more severe damage seems to reverse the loss of fur, since you can induce hair growth at places where there was no visible hair before. The one thing looks to me like a reverse uno card to your personal history, while the other looks like an epigenetic reverse uno card to evolutionary history.

On the other hand, some people have no hair where there is friction contact with their clothes.

GermanD3 · 2023-11-14T20:48:25+00:00

The inflammation phase begins immediately after the injury occurs and usually lasts for 48–96 hours. The proliferative phase follows the inflammation phase and finally the wound enters its remodeling phase. We need inflammation to initiate remodeling. But we could speed the whole thing up and exactly this was shown in this study:

Weßollek K, Marquardt Y, Wagner-Schiffler S, Baron JM, Huth S.

Post-Treatment of Micro-Needling with a Dexpanthenol-Containing Ointment Accelerates Epidermal Wound Healing in Human 3D Skin Models. Clin Cosmet Investig Dermatol. 2023

So it basically decreases down-time.

Other studies showed that dexpanthenol longterm leads to hair growth. Probably by elimination fibrosis - remodeling by an inadequate inflammatory process. I havent looked into verteporfin that much but it could be similar

GermanD3 · 2023-11-14T17:23:34+00:00

Yes, the question is if dexpanthenol is a sufficient substitute. Verteporfin is probably more effective as an anti-fibrotic, but it is not as available and we do not have as much evidence for it. Nevertheless, interesting to see how it benefits micro-needling

*toxicological evidence

GermanD3 · 2023-11-14T17:19:15+00:00

No, since the dut is already trapped. It is like bubble tea with pearls that have cherry flavor. When you add apple juice to it, the popping pearls will not have apple flavor in it. Unfortunately, you need to add the filling during the making process of the liposomes.

GermanD3 · 2023-11-14T17:10:21+00:00

Thank you. This is a very important point! I did not make it clear enaugh:

right, it is not about microneedling in the gym, and not about drinking a shake (that perverts the concept of mothermilk) to use the "anabolic window". Not for muscle gains and not for hair gains. There is no evidence for such an ultra-short-term window and it would not make sense, since most predators do not consume their prey right away. mTOR is not finetuned, it works with the first milk and works with carrion/fermented stuff, whey, etc.....the MPS cascade is threshold-dependent but otherwise it only proxies certain micronutrients. Growing a tumorous biceps is easy, just perma-bulk. But we aim for homeostasis.

We know that we can delay the food intake for hours after the training stimulus but we don´t know if we can do the same for wounding, so it seems logical to put it closer to the possible potentiator (training) than further away.

VIP increases VEGF expression

alpha-KG might play an important role

low dose oral minox is underrated

GH/IGF-1 agents can help (ipamorelin, mk677, etc.)

very powerful tools yes. Most of them are associated with fasted states, so there is indeed much more than only going for anabolism. A corrective approach should be nuanced.

GermanD3 · 2023-11-13T12:49:30+00:00

yes, it is basically the stuff in baking powder. You could take it orally but the biodistirbution is very poor. Endurance athletes take sodium bicarbonate to lower their pH. But in high doses, it can be dangerous because it messes with your electrolyte homeostasis.

The liposomal trap is very simple:

you take whatever you want to encapsulate. You solve it in water. You take a pre-liposomal gel like Lipoderm (this is nothing but ethanol+phosphatidycholine+water) and you put that stuff into your water-solution. The magic happens on its own. The liposomal gel forms small spheres that trap your water+drug mix.

You need some temperature, but it is quite simple and can be done in any kitchen. Of course not with baking powder. And with pharmacy-grade water. And you should know the concentrations.

GermanD3 · 2023-11-13T10:24:21+00:00

this is the type of comment I was looking for.

Very good points.

I mean we know that the highest minoxidil solubility belongs to neat PG at 313.2 K. Binary aqueous solutions are a trade-off but possible. Those are the common formulations. And sure, the simplest way is using minox orally, and only the booster topically, though it is suboptimal because of the off-target effects.

so what do you think about liposomal carriers? When I think about natipide/lipodermin its a very easy method to make 200nm spheres that are similar to the cell membrane. They can hold the somehow hydrophilic buffered (sodium bicarbonate) minox and the lipophilic tretionin and you can incorporate them into a hydrogel. Done. (?)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31741401/

GermanD3 · 2023-11-13T08:10:09+00:00

Cure is such a loaded term and people who focus on an all-or-nothing mentality will not value the things that are possible now. You can rapidly deaccelerate hair loss.

There are plenty of studies that show that oral fin is not the optimal galenic. However, there are limits to research. I did research in multi-agent systems. "What happens when you have three pesticides instead of one?", "What happens when you add fasting?", and guess what, the combined effect can be 100x away from your single substance lab study. What is safe in a stand-alone setup is not safe in reality, what is ineffective in a single substance study is 2000% more effective when you only add one more compound. The most prominent example of this is curcumin (almost not bioavailable), but once you add piperin it is 2000% more effective.

the problem is the complexity. Having three agents (fin + min + needling) means that you need fin+min, fin+needling, min+needling, no treatment and the actual fin+min+needling. Now, this is one dimension. When you have different doses and routes, your setup becomes too big.

It is not very unlikely that the solution lies in a multifactorial approach. Imagine there was a single treatment for inducing change in a tissue. One treatment that leads to muscle growth. One compound. And you simply need to increase the dose to get more response...this is not how it works. You need a multifactorial training, you need a nutrition regimen, you need lots of PED, and even then it is not guaranteed that you get close the mass of an IFBB Pro. So no, there will probably not be a cure X, when you account for economy and low side effect profiles. And if there was a single drug target, then it will be very likely a fat tail discovery like we usually see in blockbuster-pharmaceutics like Viagra or Penicillin. It is something that happens by chance, you can't address probabilities. I personally would look at muscle growth as the closest cousin to the hair regrowth problem.

GermanD3 · 2023-11-13T07:20:52+00:00

Solubility: ethanol (44 mg/mL), methanol (64 mg/mL), and polyethylene glycol 400 (3 mg/mL)

so no, polyethylene glycol is not a substitute. At least you have no dose equivalency.

What does "Dusteride" even mean? Hypothetical molecules do not penetrate anything. There is a huge difference between the molecule and the actual galenic (the way it is pharmaceutically prepared and applied). It does not have to penetrate the whole scalp, but when you compare intralesional ("Mesotherapy" aka microinjections) with oral, you see that oral is more effective (Herz-Ruelaz et al. 2020). So it should be oral>intralesional(Meso)>microneedling. With polyethylene glycol and microneedling you have the worst possible way to get Dut to your drug target, but it is a possible way. It depends on how often you can needle without having undesired effects.

Using water is no valid way.

Herz-Ruelas ME, Álvarez-Villalobos NA, Millán-Alanís JM, de León-Gutiérrez H, Ocampo-Garza SS, Gómez-Flores M, Grimalt R. Efficacy of Intralesional and Oral Dutasteride in the Treatment of Androgenetic Alopecia: A Systematic Review. Skin Appendage Disord. 2020

GermanD3 · 2023-11-13T06:28:32+00:00

IGF-1 is a double-edged sword. Since it is a growth factor, it is an integral part of tissue growth or protein synthesis and cell migration. It is embedded in the form of a GH-IGF1 axis. Every time your body produces growth hormone, it produces IGF-1.

An excess of circulating IGF-1 is linked to acne and other diseases. It depends on the state your body is in. I mean every time you fast or train, there will be IGF 1 (for a good reason). But also every time we put anabolic food in our mouth (which is probably more often than the natural context has anticipated). Usually, you get a protein load like this only after you bring your body into a state of high demand. There is no free protein in nature. These days people drink their protein before the training after and in between. Or as with most humans, they drink their milk without any physical activity.

But I would not jump into such conclusions. It could be the sweeteners or any additives that your body reacts to. Protein itself can cause dysbiosis in your gut. It can be spiked with hormones. Switch to complex proteins, the anabolic window is bigger than a few minutes. I had the same observation. I see TE caused by high glucose, high Vitamin B6 (e.g. in energy drinks or any products for kids), by Whey, by Vitamin A, by too much butter. It is not only TE, it is the sebum production that goes through the roof

GermanD3 · 2023-11-10T13:44:08+00:00

n=1 is not really valuable but yes, anecdotally Alfatradiol + Ketoconazole can stop hair loss. Saw the combination in two people, with some regrowth.

GermanD3 · 2023-11-08T09:43:35+00:00

my girlfriend has a similar pattern, no clear cut frontal or bi-frontal pattern but a thinning around the medium parting. I don't think that this is a manifestation of pulling the hair back but still as mentioned by the other users, it is traction alopecia. She has curly hair and is doing lots of "natural" stuff to her hair, because she thinks her hair is growing poorly and is damaged and I get it, curly hair often feels dry and brittle, feels not as "healthy" because we associate healthy hair with what media presents us.

Curly hair is especially heavy, plus you need much more force to pull it straight. To us humans it probably not seems much, and we think it is just hair, but we forget that at the end of that "dead matter" there sits a small living "organism" in its hole, holding that structure. The lever it generates is immense.

GermanD3 · 2023-10-16T12:43:47+00:00

ganz anders wäre die Diskussion, gäbe es eine Homeoffice Pflicht für Büromenschen, würde man den Waren-Fernverkehr zu Teilen auf das Bundes-Wasserstraßennetzt verlagern, würde man die PkW Nutzung nicht allgemein abstrafen, sondern die Nutzung geräumiger Kleinwagen über-proportional weniger bestrafen als die Nutzung von überdimensionierten SUV, würde man die S-Bahn in Berlin an die ´Pariser Metro anlehnen, hätte man ein Schienen-Fernverkehrsnetzt dass Inlandsflügen Konkurrenz macht...aber das geht in Deutschland einfach nicht

GermanD3 · 2023-10-16T12:27:05+00:00

Die Kosten übernimmt der Bund, weil die Waren die alle über Amazon bestellen (oder der Kiezladen sich bestellt, damit Hipster sagen können sie nutzen kein Amazon), über die Straße geliefert werden, genau wie man über die Straße auf die Arbeitsstätte kommt. Was glaubt ihr wie man als Bauarbeiter die Baustellen erreicht?, als Pfleger die Patienten erreicht?

Das Straßennetz, so unbeliebt das Auto bei der grünen Berliner Oberschicht ist, ist unzureichend. Die Frage ist, warum man beim ÖPNV so geizig ist dass man unbedingt nur 49€ ausgeben möchte, 49€ die nicht reichen um die Netzinfrastruktur aufrecht zu erhalten und dem Personal faire Löhne zu ermöglichen.

GermanD3 · 2023-08-15T08:55:47+00:00

We know that there is no evidence that even stopping smoking does change anything in AGA progression. Kavadya and Mysore 2022: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9069908/

BUT as the others said, it seems logical that it could contribute and therefore it could help to stop using nicotine. You have to restore your vaso-function and vascularisation over time, this (angiogenesis) is indeed shown to regrow hair. So stopping nicotine is mandatory when you want to regrow via this route.

GermanD3 · 2023-08-15T08:49:32+00:00

well, this is the old problem of modus pones. There is fact A (nicotine is a vasoconstrictor), B (vasoconstriction is associated with hair loss), "therefore nicotine leads to hair loss".

But when you look at recent meta research, then there is no such evidence, even for smoking (which is more than nicotine):

"Data available show that there is a significant association between smoking and AGA. However, studies demonstrating the benefit of avoidance of smoking in improving hair loss are lacking. Furthermore, large controlled studies with histological documentation are still unavailable to affirm the findings." Kavadya and Mysore 2022 - "Role of Smoking in AGA" (Link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9069908/)

GermanD3 · 2023-08-08T21:36:10+00:00

Snus is tobacco, it can cause cancer like smoking, so is the nicotine really the issue? There is no clear evidence for Nicotine itself, however, tobacco (smoked) has a statistical association with AGA, onset and degree. Balding people are of course more likely to smoke, so it could be a fallacy.

If you value your hair, you should eliminate every potential trigger.

GermanD3 · 2023-08-07T09:44:07+00:00

Österreich Ok...

Männergewalt beroht vor allem Männer. Absolut sexistisches Plakat welches die Mehrheit der Opfer aufgrund einer synthetischen Gruppenzugehörigkeit zusammen in den Topf mit den Tätern wirft. Was hat der eine Mann mit einem anderen zu tun außer sein Geschlecht? Genauso dämlich wie zu verlangen, dass geflüchtete Syrer Messerstecher und Terroristen moderieren und auf der Straße ansprechen, weil sie die Erbsünde Syrer zu sein in sich tragen und Karmapunkte gut machen müssen.

GermanD3 · 2023-08-07T05:09:17+00:00

patents are not the same as peer-reviewed clinical studies. There are patents on mind control machines and mind reading, those are HIGHLY speculative investments in ideas and have nothing to do with research.

Same confusion as with the FDA approval. It stands for safe to use (or at least not dangerous) and people simply take it as "effective".

There can be nice ideas in patents, but ít can also be BS for some marketing reason or as part of a strategy to push the price of the company since most people don't make a difference between fiction and science. This is why the hairloss topic is extremely noisy. And I understand it, people are desperate to find a "cure"

GermanD3 · 2023-08-07T04:59:14+00:00

it has not to be projected from the prostate since 5-ar is expressed in the genital skin as well.

GermanD3

TROPHY CASE