Here is the Wiki's graph for Stale baguettes, possibly the most important investment item I've ever stumbled upon (I suggest you get a full view by clicking "all" on the zoom level).
Most people already realize that Stale baguettes take an unholy amount of time (on average) to obtain on any account, but few realize just how true that is. With at most a 1/256 chance from every Quiz random, who each have a 1/23 chance to appear each time a player gets a Random event, which happens roughly every 2-3h (they tend to spawn less often) of regular gameplay... we already get 14,720 hours (force spawning is not considered efficient, as even reducing grind time to the absolute minimum number of hours would still take >1,000 hours on average, making it unviable). Those are essentially considered ideal conditions: every Quiz reward selected is a Mystery box, every Quiz random is accepted and completed. The reality is much different... zones like the Grand Exchange and some banks, Godwars Dungeon and instances don't allow the spawning of random events. Even in the right areas, the vast majority of Quiz randoms are dismissed or ignored.
This lead me to ask myself a question: "Why the hell are they so cheap?" Either I made several mistakes in my calculations (seems unlikely, especially since I used the most conservative parameters possible), or the literally nobody has spotted this. Even using ridiculously conservative numbers... looking at active users as far back as the game's release... assuming people did their Quiz randoms... we're talking about 10,000 supply in game max, likely less than half of that with much of that supply held in accounts that are no longer active... So I started buying some baguettes and I made my first post about them.
Honestly, I didn't think the economics would work so damn well. It's crazy that they weren't spotted much, much earlier as one of the few items with potential to become a "semi-rare" (since it's purely based on the massive aggregate hours of the community and virtually impossible to farm solo). Any large-scale farm would have to create thousands of accounts to obtain reliably, which is fairly easily thwarted by Jagex and not worth the computing power in the first place. So, I wouldn't be surprised if they remained in the millions and kept appreciating for quite a while.
There are more of these semi-rares of course, namely 3rd age weapons and druidic, even lots of other clue uniques if you calculate the average time involvement for one is also in the tens of thousands of hours, but as we all know they've been in price discovery mode for much longer and thus have realized a lot more of their potential. Being semi-rares, unless the game legitimately dies they'll likely keep their value to some extent and appreciate over the long term. However, a big problem is that the vast majority of these clue uniques have much of their rarity 'dissolved' in that players tend to 'bundle' their perceived rarity together (in other words, specific Master or Elite clue uniques may be rare, but the tier itself is so wide and varied that getting a unique itself is not perceived as rare).
After you cross a certain threshold rarity and price alone confer a certain prestige by itself to some items (see 'Investor Psychology and Asset Pricing' by David Hirshleifer), so I think it'd be fair to say that we can treat semi-rares a little bit like a decentralized currency. After all, the time and effort it takes to complete Master clues, or get and do Quiz randoms, is very similar to Bitcoin's Proof of Work model in which separate nodes have a chance to prove their commitment and get a chance at a block reward in exchange. The underlying asset then relies on a natural demand for money that doesn't depreciate to essentially establish a shelter from inflation (in this case: an inflation of gold supply, coupled with a much larger inflation of gear supply).
With Stale baguettes, issue rate is always the same: it's roughly proportional to the active population, so a spike of new players who can now passively farm it would (we assume) also result in a similar increase in demand (as we've established a spike of accounts created to farm baguettes is not economically feasible). The only thing they're missing would be the ability to use a hammer on a Stale baguette to acquire 1,000 Stale breadcrumbs, in the spirit of becoming more accessible as a currency!
So, there it is. My goal was originally to make some money, but I think I'll hold my collection for eternity instead. I've only bought like 10 in the last several months and they've continued to explode. I may never own an actual BTC, but I'll be a baguette whale forever!
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