Charizard Pokemon	Crypto Punk Alien NFT

On the left.

I have a photo of a shadowless Charizard card which sold for $399,750.

On the right.

I have an NFT called Crypto Punk 5822, which sold for 23 million dollars.

I’ve seen a lot of people try to defend NFT’s and the most common comparison I see is the art market.

Which isn’t a good example, because art has historically been an awful investment.

Most of the art industry is really just auction houses manipulating prices and the value is powered off of a massive tax credit scheme, where people buy, hold, get an auction house to value higher and donate to a museum for tax credits.

If the US wiped out that tax deduction loophole, the entire art market crashes.

Now, diving into NFT’s, I use the term “the cult of easy money” a lot and the best comparison I can make with NFT’s is Pokémon cards.

Biggest reason is a lot of the people pumping NFT’s online, are also the same people pushing these crazy “investments” like Pokémon cards.

Let’s just for a moment say we live in a world where collectability for vanity holds value and there is logic to an NFT or a shadowless charizard.

Let’s compare the NFT to the charizard card.

Pokémon is 25 year old franchise.
They have sold 100 billion in product.
34 billion cards sold
3.7 billion cards sold last year.
Over 50% of kids from 1995-2010 owned the cards.

That is a multi billion dollar industry with characters over a third of the US could recognize and has been consumed by millions.

This NFT in comparison.

Random computer generated image.
No franchise behind it.
No actual public knowledge or anything.

But it’s worth 57x as much money!

This is the issue with NFT’s.

There’s no fan base behind these items. At least with art or Pokémon cards, someone can point to it and say there’s some history of fans. This is just a random image that likely gained popularity with people selling them between each other to lie about investor value. It’s junk!

The worst part is with this constant comparison to NFT’s and art, I see people say things like “That’s like saying the Mona Lisa has no value!”.

Which A, there is a clear gap between a physical painting and an image I just downloaded on my phone.

B, the Mona Lisa is a 500 year old painting made by the greatest genius in history and is one of the most iconic images of all time.

There are people trying to justify 23 million on random computer images that have no protection on them and say this market isn’t a scam.