「如果明天世界完了，第二天全球的货币就是宝可梦卡」：一个手握五十万张卡的投资人是认真的，而他说错的地方比说对的地方更有意思

This episode starts from a sentence that was treated as a joke, and ends on a question that is not small: what actually underwrites the value of money?

The original line first.

Last week, an investor said in an interview: I am absolutely convinced that if the world suffered a catastrophic event tomorrow, the day after, the global currency would be Pokémon cards.

It was widely shared on social media, and almost all of that sharing handled it as a gag.

I want to treat it as a proposition and test it, because it touches the most basic part of monetary theory.

First his background, because it bears on how much weight the sentence should carry.

He is a co-founder of a venture fund focused on the games sector, and a long-time card collector.

By his own statement he holds "well north of five hundred thousand" Pokémon cards.

That volume has passed beyond personal collecting and is closer to a market maker's inventory.

In the same interview he cited a figure: Pokémon card prices have outperformed the S&P 500 by three thousand percent.

There is a methodological problem with that number, which I will handle shortly.

First the argument itself, because it is more serious than it looks.

The standard framework for judging whether an asset can carry monetary functions has three properties.

First, scarcity: supply must be under a credible constraint, and the issuer must not be able to inflate it at will.

Second, portability and durability: easy to transfer, divisible, and not materially degraded over a reasonable period.

Third, consensus: a large enough population accepts it and expects others to accept it too.

The third is decisive; the first two are necessary rather than sufficient conditions for it.

Gold carried monetary functions for millennia precisely because all three held simultaneously.

Now test Pokémon cards against each.

Scarcity: holds.

The print run of a rare card is fixed at issue, no further printing follows, and the supply ceiling is a hard constraint.

Portability: holds strongly.

The weight difference between equivalent value in gold and in rare cards is several orders of magnitude.

Durability: just about holds.

Paper cards are sensitive to humidity, ultraviolet light and physical creasing, but in professional encapsulation they keep for decades.

Consensus: this is the core of his argument, and where he is relatively strong.

Holders and traders of Pokémon cards are distributed across Japan, North America, Europe, Southeast Asia and Latin America.

More importantly, mature third-party grading agencies exist, applying standardised condition grades to cards.

Grading lets long-distance trades settle without physical inspection, which cuts transaction friction enormously.

The result: a rare card at a given grade trades at the same order of magnitude in Tokyo as in Los Angeles.

In other words, it possesses a price consensus that crosses languages, jurisdictions and currency areas.

Among non-sovereign assets, the set that satisfies all three is quite limited.

Gold is one; some top-tier wines just about qualify; beyond that, not much.

Up to this point his argument holds.

What follows is two problems, the second of which is fatal.

The first is that three thousand percent.

The figure is drawn from the top of the sample — the handful of cards that have set auction records.

Include every card in circulation and the median value approaches zero.

Open a newly issued pack and most of its contents have no buyer on the secondary market.

Using top-sample returns to represent an entire asset class is textbook survivorship bias.

This problem is general to all collectible categories, not specific to Pokémon cards.

The second problem goes straight through the conclusion.

Collectible prices are underwritten by discretionary income.

Their value presupposes a population of sufficient size with a surplus beyond necessities, willing to allocate that surplus to non-functional assets.

And the premise "the world was destroyed" destroys exactly that population first.

In the scenario he describes, the medium of exchange reverts rapidly to things with direct use value: clean water, antibiotics, fuel, calories, ammunition.

A piece of card stock with a cartoon printed on it has a use value of zero in that scenario, and its consensus basis disappears at the same moment.

So as a prediction the sentence is wrong, and fairly comprehensively wrong.

But as a question, it is high quality.

Because it puts a default assumption we never inspect onto the table.

The value of fiat currency likewise does not come from the paper, nor from any consumable property.

It comes from a set of institutional arrangements, and from the collective expectation built on top of them.

Which is to say: banknotes and Pokémon cards belong to the same category in where their value comes from. The difference is the scale, stability and enforceability of the consensus.

What is special about gold is likewise not that it has "intrinsic value", but that its consensus has run the longest and reached the widest.

Two questions to leave you with.

The first is concrete: among the assets you currently hold, which one's value comes entirely from other people's consensus rather than from any use value?

The second is bigger: what conditions does a consensus need in order to survive when the institutions holding it up start to shake?