The truth about false markets

In March last year, the artist Mike Winkelmann, better known as “Beeple”, sold a digital artwork called Everydays: The First 5000 Days in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT) for $69m at an auction. The buyer merely bought bragging rights, since you or I can keep a copy of the picture on our PC or print one. The buyer was Vignesh Sundaresan, a Singapore-based programmer, who paid in the ether cryptocurrency. Sundaresan also owned a huge digital art collection, often acquired for pennies and has other crypto interests. The result of his record bid was a surge of interest in NFTs: gamblers disguised as investors poured into them. Since then prices have mostly declined. The B20 crypto token, with which Sundaresan was involved and which revolved around fractional ownership of 20 other NFTs by Beeple, has fallen 95%.

The never-knowingly-under-hyped art world called the Beeple sale “a defining moment”. To me, it is just another false market. To an extent all markets are false for a variety of reasons. The most obvious is