Og brings up a point being discussed in another thread as well, where the question is, should you buy a rare coin loaded with .01 when it costs a total of .02, or just buy .02 of pure bitcoin?
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/are-physical-bitcoins-over-50-worth-it-5353289.
I think the answer that is most financially prudent would be to just buy BTC and Hodl. But for collectors, there is still a lot in our favor for buying & owning some cool collectibles.
The pressure right now to winning financially is that the premiums on coins, as much as we want to think purely in BTC, are being valued in fiat. So, imagine 1 BTC is $40,000 USD and .01 is $400. You buy the .02 coin = $800 USD. When BTC goes to $80,000, hypothetically, and at that moment, you sell the coin for the same exact premium of $400, the math comes out to you receiving back .015. This is a bad deal. The premium has to double in fiat value in order to just keep up and return .02 BTC to you, let alone make gains in BTC. On the other hand, the $800 you spent is now worth $1200. This is the conundrum. $1200 looks like a gain.
Right now 3 factors for keeping pace are in our favor.
1. This collectibles market is still very niche and has a lot of room to grow. How many semi-serious collectors are there right now? 500? 1000? The community could easily grow by 10x and keep premiums rising.
2. Inflation is on a bull run, so maybe the debasement of fiat keeps up with the growth of BTC, although BTC adoption seems to be blowing past just inflation.
3. Arbitrage. Right now most coins being created are popping up here in the forum; we all have a first opportunity to buy them. If you look at Ebay, Sarce.City, etc. you can see that arbitrage happening. The CI Doge coin is one extreme example of crazy increases in value on the premium. Most people new to this collectibles market just do not know where to go to find them. My early strategy was to buy 2 coins I wanted and sell one of them for double to pay for my collection. So far that has worked pretty well and some coins have sold for much more.
I've determined that you should buy coins in fiat when BTC is rising, and sell coins in BTC when there are dips.