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by tim333 1918 days ago
Well a different sort of sense. Price is not just about how nice something is - it's about things like supply and demand too. There is a limited supply of original Banksys and an infinite supply of copies.
1 comments

But why is the original special? Just because people choose to believe that it is.
Sure, there's a real sense in which that's absolutely true. What I think the article was eyebrow-raising at wasn't primarily the digital nature of this transaction as much as the extremely high price paid. An original by Picasso is going to be worth more -- orders of magnitude more -- than an original by, say, Joan Erbe, a painter who was very well known around the Baltimore area and is "notable" enough to have her own Wikipedia page. Erbe's originals seem to generally go for around $500–800.

I know people are saying "but Beeple is known!" -- and I'm sure he is! I hadn't heard of him, but the chances are you haven't heard of Joan Erbe. What I'm suggesting is that Beeple is, in the wider world, closer to Erbe than he is to Picasso. If this had been a $2-3M transaction rather than a $69M transaction, it would still be in the news and raising eyebrows because of the NFT nature, but it would seem a lot less... bubble-ish.

Oh yeah $69m is silly money, no doubt about it. Part bubble and part demonstrative crypto evangelism on the part of the bidders.
Well, because people think it is which comes down to psychology, culture etc.

It seems quite time honoured though. People probably thought an original cave painting was cooler than a copy of it.