army1987 comments on Look for the Next Tech Gold Rush? - Less Wrong Discussion
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It may not be particularly efficient, although it's grown up a lot since the '90s. But being inefficient is not helpful for you, since you are not an expert on domain names and have no edge. As far as you are concerned, the domain name market is efficient. As I said: do you know how serious the offers are? Do you know why exactly weidai.com may be worth $100k? Do you know whether it's likely to continue increasing and what the limit is ($200k? $1m? $5m?) for it? Do you know whether additional TLDs would affect it (
wei.daiwould be a nice domain...) or whether the use for weidai.com would be affected by any increases in adoptions of Unicode or punycode domain names? If you don't know any of this, how on earth can you sit by and leave up to $100k of your money in such an asset? Such complacency baffles me.No, but my intuition (as a person with no sentimental attachment to the domain and not seeking excuses to not sell) is that the risk and opportunity cost are much larger than $10k. You have a bird in the hand, which you've never sold, don't know why it's valuable, and can easily replace. I would fling that away from myself like it was 2000 and I was holding $100k of Pets.com stock.
All those attributes make it a very volatile and risky asset to hold, so by regular portfolio theory, you should be holding very little of that asset and in particular, should be rebalancing away from it now that it's recently doubled.
I'm not sure what someone who wants to buy a domain name named after its current owner is thinking of doing with it, but I think there's a non-negligible chance it'd turn out to be something the namesake of the domain name wouldn't like at all.
I'd be somewhat worried about this if I were selling jefftk.com or something, but "wei" and "dai" without tones could mean many things. I don't remember much of my Chinese, but looking at a dictionary I see:
Now, not all of these combinations will mean what they look like they might mean, but there are a lot of reasonable things "wei dai" could mean aside from a person's name.
(It also looks like "wei dai" can mean "grave danger".)
To expand on this, there are several thousand commonly used Chinese characters, each with different meanings. These map onto about 400 possible syllables (ignoring tone). However not all combinations of two Chinese characters are valid Chinese words. My Chinese input software gives three possibilities when I type in "wei dai".
However new Chinese words are invented all the time, using combinations of existing Chinese characters. In this case I believe the highest bidders of my domain actually want to use it for 微贷, which means microloan.
'Wei Dai' is not that rare a name; there could easily be some Chinese businessmen or something who want the name for branding purposes.