I personally don't value nfts highly but I'm in a circle with lots of rich crypto early adopters - they absolutely would pay $100k for a bored ape and would consider it a bargain. It's a real status symbol, just in a niche you don't understand.

I feel the same way about $100k Patel Phillipe watches but I don't hear everyone talking about how those are only wash trades

The platforms where these nfts are sold usually charge 1-2% commission which is expensive for a wash trade

The main difference here is that those paying for a pointer to the bored ape, are paying just that. Nothing more. Anyone can copy that bored ape image, and use it as they want.

If you pay $100k for a Patek, that's your watch. It's a physical item - the only way someone's going to steal it, is by physically stealing it from you.

Of course, one can argue up and down whether or why a Patek is worth $100k. But IMO it's easier for the layman to argue its worth - it's an item which probably took 12 months to make, using the best materials, world-class craftmanship. The bored ape was generated in microseconds.

If I had $100k to spend on whatever, I wouldn't spend it on either of those. But if I was to guess what item will hold its value 5,10,15 years down the line...I'd go for the Patek, 100% of the time. The bored apes are digital beanie babies for rich people.

> If I had $100k

Precisely. For a starters you already told us you don't have type of "first comers crypto gains" like OP wrote about. I know a person that has over 10,000 bitcoins from early days, and he treat those as "fuck off coins". At this level you don't look at it as "gee, whos gonna pay $100k for some easy to copy pixels!", you look at it like "oh shit Eminem just dropped $400k on some pixels, let me use some of my fuck off coins to get on board - who knows this thing can quadruple in 10 years. Or go to zero. In both scenarios, whatever". Hardly people at this level care about whether they lose money or not. The point is to be a part of the "movement", to be part of the deal that's going. Its adrenaline rush.

The point is, if it goes down to 0 they couldn't care less. Its a fuck off coins to start with.

> The main difference here is that those paying for a pointer to the bored ape, are paying just that. Nothing more. Anyone can copy that bored ape image, and use it as they want.

I hate NFTs, but this is actually not true in the case of BAYC and a small handful of others. They assign full rights to the token holder.

> The platforms where these nfts are sold usually charge 1-2% commission which is expensive for a wash trade

This is a misconception; on Polygon for example OpenSea is built on top of 0x v3 (an open protocol for marketplaces); one could wash trade an NFT back and forth on 0x v3 directly and only pay the protocol fee (pennies in comparison) and OpenSea would still show those sales in its UI.

You can buy social capital by wash trading the price of the NFTs up to where they are interesting, then giving some to folks with social capital.

Only you don’t give them an actual NFT, you give them a sponsor fee that they use to buy one of your NFTs (thereby further validating the interesting price).

So basically if you are rich you become richer. Same old same old.

For A), some of the wash trading has been done with flash loans. There are some well-documented cases. You don't need much capital at all for that.