This argument is valid word for word for art, domain names, houses... So I guess you should be willing to follow your logic to the same conclusion in those cases too.
Houses have price history, but usually the identity of the owners is a matter of record and if I sold my house to myself, you could see that. I could try to obfuscate this by creating a shell company to buy my own house but that is about 1,000x more work than creating another ETH wallet and still not very anonymous.
More importantly, even if I manage to create the appearance that my house has a price history of eight million dollars, somebody looking at the physical property will note that it is in a crappy neighborhood, the vinyl siding is cracked, the deck is rotting, and the construction is generally cheap '80s on a quarter acre. There are other ways to estimate the value of the property besides looking at what it last sold for. So we rarely ever see this attempted in real estate.
This is true of domain names too. I am not going to trick anybody into thinking 643626bcaqw.org is worth as much as tesla.com for obvious reasons, no matter what wash trades I perform. Pointing to "well it last sold between two anonymous owners for millions!" fools nobody. The price history of a domain name is not even normally shown when you try to purchase one, just the current asking price.
Art is closer, which makes sense as NFTs are supposed to be a digital equivalent to art. I am not in the market for high priced art and certainly wouldn't recommend it as an investment. Unlike a house, I can't inspect a piece of art and judge how much money it might be worth. Like an NFT, I imagine when a piece of art is sold at auction it's typical for the auctioneer to mention it last sold to so-and-so at such-and-such price. The difference is that "so-and-so" might be, say, Jeff Bezos or the Metropolitan Museum of Art or something. No auctioneer is going to say "well, this piece is highly valuable because it last sold from D6EB90 to CBB0FE at 24.190 WETH"[1]. Nobody would care about a purported sale between two anonymous parties.
The NFT world is the only space I can think of where that data is assumed to be meaningful. Notice how the prominent the price history graph is on OpenSea -- it's almost as big as the image itself. Probably because there is no other way to guess at a valuation for a Bored Ape, so even though this anonymous price history is highly dubious, it's all a prospective buyer has to go on.
More importantly, even if I manage to create the appearance that my house has a price history of eight million dollars, somebody looking at the physical property will note that it is in a crappy neighborhood, the vinyl siding is cracked, the deck is rotting, and the construction is generally cheap '80s on a quarter acre. There are other ways to estimate the value of the property besides looking at what it last sold for. So we rarely ever see this attempted in real estate.
This is true of domain names too. I am not going to trick anybody into thinking 643626bcaqw.org is worth as much as tesla.com for obvious reasons, no matter what wash trades I perform. Pointing to "well it last sold between two anonymous owners for millions!" fools nobody. The price history of a domain name is not even normally shown when you try to purchase one, just the current asking price.
Art is closer, which makes sense as NFTs are supposed to be a digital equivalent to art. I am not in the market for high priced art and certainly wouldn't recommend it as an investment. Unlike a house, I can't inspect a piece of art and judge how much money it might be worth. Like an NFT, I imagine when a piece of art is sold at auction it's typical for the auctioneer to mention it last sold to so-and-so at such-and-such price. The difference is that "so-and-so" might be, say, Jeff Bezos or the Metropolitan Museum of Art or something. No auctioneer is going to say "well, this piece is highly valuable because it last sold from D6EB90 to CBB0FE at 24.190 WETH"[1]. Nobody would care about a purported sale between two anonymous parties.
The NFT world is the only space I can think of where that data is assumed to be meaningful. Notice how the prominent the price history graph is on OpenSea -- it's almost as big as the image itself. Probably because there is no other way to guess at a valuation for a Bored Ape, so even though this anonymous price history is highly dubious, it's all a prospective buyer has to go on.
[1]https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061...