[md_]

Hmm, I don't fully buy the metaphor (since BTC are fungible), but I do think it exhibits collector economics.

I'm in many ways an art fan, but art pricing is totally irrational:

1. Prints cost substantially less than paintings since they're less limited

2. Prints price based on lots of intangibles (how limited the series is, what series it was, what the artist's role was in it, etc)

3. Fundamentally, I don't think buyers get that much more pleasure from an original than from a print or authorized reproduction

4. Many buyers loan their purchases to a museum (which has tax advantages) or keep them in free ports or similar, where they can't visit them in person

The really high end market (i.e. million dollar+ art market) is really clearly speculative a lot of the time. Or the pleasure is "I like owning this", not "I like looking at this', which is itself hard to sever from the speculative value.

[Valgrim]

I'd like to rebuke #3: like most people, art buyers are vain. They feel pride in owning things of value, especially if that value is recognized by their peers.

[MerelyMortal]

FYI, BTC is not fungible. Otherwise companies like Coinbase wouldn't be able to ban people's accounts if they transfered in BTC with a tainted history.

[danaris]

That's more or less like saying dollars aren't fungible because you can check the serial number on a bill to see if it matches one that was reported stolen.

[MerelyMortal]

You're correct about being able to match serial numbers, but they are still nowhere near being in the same league.

A stranger across the world can't track your physical currency in real time. Whenever serial numbers are checked (if it ever is), the tracker just knows that bill was at that spot at that time, they don't know how many times it was exchanged or where it was since it was last tracked.

With BTC, anyone can track it in real time, anywhere. The same cannot be said about physical currency.

I suppose it's not a stretch to imagine banks have a machine that scans serial numbers (eg to catch DB Cooper's cash), but I've never heard of any evidence of such machines.

[md_]

My point re: fungibility was rather that BTC's value does not come from the specific block assignment, whereas art's generally does (though I guess limited-series prints and similar might be a case where "any one of the series" has the same value).