I have no problem believing this. Nonetheless, I'd like to see a good hypothetical example to really understand how it would work. Would the seller have to be in on the deal? Probably, or not?
One hypothetical where the seller _is_ in on the deal:
Let's say I want to send you money for something illegal. You, however, don't want the government getting suspicious about how you're spending $large_amount on $small_salary.
I could gift you the money, but if we don't have an existing relationship or reason to do so that looks mighty suspicious, and additionally gift tax can end up being more than income tax.
The next option is for me to "buy" something from you. This needs to be something you can obtain for a low price but sell for a high price. You could sell me a loaf of bread for $1million, but that's going to look equally (if not more) suspicious than the gift.
Enter art: Art can be produced for extremely low cost, but sold at massive markups (and often is so). The value of art is almost entirely subjective (i.e. "what is someone willing to pay for this"), so unlike with a piece of bread it's not obvious that I'm paying for something I consider near worthless. Each piece of original artwork is unique, so there's no market to prove that nobody else would be willing to pay such a sum for your art.
Therefore, with art you can receive the money, pay taxes on it, and claim to the government it's totally legit. NFTs have similar properties to art: they're unique, can be minted at very low cost, people are willing to pay large sums for them, and nobody really has any way of determining their "true" value.
And there is almost certainly a large real world contingent salivating at the thought that they can soon launder huge amounts of money, based on infinite products, that are impossible to value and trivial to create.
And as usual there will be a handful of technology people afterwards standing around shocked, saying they had no idea they enabled the 21st century's money laundering platform, and
Just like the cliche "I just wanted to make an anarchist digital currency, I didn't think it would impact society in negative ways we can't control!"
Let's say I want to send you money for something illegal. You, however, don't want the government getting suspicious about how you're spending $large_amount on $small_salary.
I could gift you the money, but if we don't have an existing relationship or reason to do so that looks mighty suspicious, and additionally gift tax can end up being more than income tax.
The next option is for me to "buy" something from you. This needs to be something you can obtain for a low price but sell for a high price. You could sell me a loaf of bread for $1million, but that's going to look equally (if not more) suspicious than the gift.
Enter art: Art can be produced for extremely low cost, but sold at massive markups (and often is so). The value of art is almost entirely subjective (i.e. "what is someone willing to pay for this"), so unlike with a piece of bread it's not obvious that I'm paying for something I consider near worthless. Each piece of original artwork is unique, so there's no market to prove that nobody else would be willing to pay such a sum for your art.
Therefore, with art you can receive the money, pay taxes on it, and claim to the government it's totally legit. NFTs have similar properties to art: they're unique, can be minted at very low cost, people are willing to pay large sums for them, and nobody really has any way of determining their "true" value.