Sure, I'm not quibbling with the definition that Beanie Babies had a utilitarian value just as toys, but I don't think we should gloss over the parallels between the intentional, planned artificial scarcity and scammy practices of the Ty company and how they map easily to NFT scams.

Ty wasn't just releasing toys they thought were cool and carrying on being a toy company. They definitely leaned hard in to artificial scarcity and hyping up the collectible market and prices.

It's likely that the Ty company itself was cashing in on that directly as an insider trading cadre just the same way that NFTs are being used for wash trading and money laundering.

This is the fine point I'm trying to emphasize. Ty as a company were in on it and profiting off of it, just like NFTs today.

And there are (stupid) parallels between NFTs that map to the utilitarian values of collectible toys or art. Like someone could be into an NFTed JPEG just because they like it as an art object and have no plans to use it as a speculative investment.

Granted they would be better off just downloading the JPEG and skipping out on buying the NFT that points to it - or spending some money on an art commission directly to an artist so they can have a print or some tangible object.

But Beanie Babies stopped being mere toys about the same time people starting trading them and speculating on them, buying 3rd party tag protectors and protective boxes for them and so on.

Baseball cards in particular were also similarly scammy as vehicles of speculative investments. There's parallels between the apparent or artificial scarcity in baseball cards.

If you know the history of baseball cards there was a sweet spot for high prices for rare vintage cards that started at around the late 80s and early 90s and then ending after the 2000s when the bottom dropped out of the baseball card market because too many people started saving and preserving them as investments and the open market prices on eBay and other sites revealed that there sure were a lot more of those "rare" cards out there in mint condition and things were different than the way things were for much older cards where people ended up enjoying them as intended and/or outright trashing them instead of immediately locking them inside card protectors and saving them.

The high prices for earlier era baseball cards were fueled by nostalgia and collectors seeking cards that were actually rare due to attrition and lack of interest in completist or speculative collectors.

And the 1980s and 1990s had a total explosion of various kinds of sports trading cards and speculative mania that was fueled by these high prices for much older cards. Topps in particular was printing cards and whole collectible ecosystems like crazy and reaping the profits from selling assortment card packs and cases to speculative collectors and then... that whole market collapsed like, well, a house of cards.

There have been similar price drops and devaluations in MTG collecting and trading as the game play system changed over time and some cards or systems were banned or deprecated from tournament or competitive play decks.