Unless you have enough comparable items (e.g. paintings by the Dutch masters) it's really difficult to determine the value of something that's rarely sold.
I always thought it was "Mt. Gox", like a mountain of sorts. Turns out it's Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange.
Edit: MtG seems like it has some kind of evergreen popularity, and various format changes, changes in the list of banned cards, reprints, and changes in the metagame will mean that prices of individual cards can vary wildly over time. So if something was sold for a ridiculous price a couple times, it's possible that something changed (Targmogoyf used to be very expensive, for example).
Wizards seems pretty good at catering to a variety of players, both collectors and non-collectors.
"We know UNIX TM backwards and forwards." -Mt Xinu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtXinu
Famous for the great posters they handed out at Usenix:
"4.2 > V" BSD -vs- System V, X-Wing / Death Star Poster
https://www.ericconrad.com/2008/12/
I love all the old telephone equipment in the explosion!
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/t...
When it launched as a Bitcoin exchange in 2010, the unused domain was "Mt. Gox" from the beginning.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox#Founding_(2006%E2%80...
- Scarcity, artificial or otherwise.
- Subjective value. Neither an NFT or a trading card provides substantial, measurable utility to its owner. But, we can agree they have "value" of some kind.
- Lack of oversight. Governments doesn't have entire offices monitoring irregular sale prices for Obelisk the Tormentor or Mickey Mantle.
- Low transaction volume. If you're the only market-maker, you can set your own price.
These attributes lead me to believe that NFTs and trading cards would both very effective tools for someone trying to launder money.
You can take away any one of those attributes, and the asset would become much more difficult to use for money laundering. For NFTs, oversight seems inevitable in the next couple of years. One can only hope.
Trading cards kind of do - TCG card prices generally hinge on actual play utility as much as rarity.
Outside of really old cards that are just valuable because of their extreme rarity lots of cards that are technically rare are still only worth pennies because they aren't actually any good in the game. While cards that are no rarer or older, but are much better in play are worth tens or hundreds of dollars.
And even those cards that are mostly expensive because they're exceptionally old and hard to find, like from first print runs of games that weren't popular yet still differ in price quite heavily based on their utility in actual gameplay. Albeit mostly from the cachet that that gives them rather than from buyers desire to actually play them. e.g. Black Lotus is more valuable than other cards printed in the same quantity in the same set because it's also the most powerful card.
You see this practice in art and collector car sales. It's rumored that if you see a painting go for an insane amount of money, often these sales are between "friendly" parties for the sole purpose of driving up the value of that art.
...Or is there?
The sealed product command a gambler’s premium individual cards cannot, and the market has more liquidity as its way more fungible than a specific individual card. Where individual card prices are more or less an auction, sealed product actually trades like a commodity. But this commodity’s scarcity increases over time.
Of course Wizards of the Coast could print the secondary market out of existence at any time, like Pokémon TCG has done recently. But they haven’t done so for 30 years and seem to prefer to conspicuously ignore the secondary market, while obviously being aware of it.
When the oil futures went negative, it wasn't the case that the value of oil was negative - this was about the structure of the market and the sorts of positions people were caught in when the pandemic hit. We continued to consume oil throughout the pandemic, and so I'd say we continued to value it.
Another example would be, if a rancher has a lot of cow poop, they might pay a farmer to take it away. You could say that the cow poop has a negative price on it. But the farmer is going to make use of it as fertilizer; from the farmer's perspective, this is a commodity that has value.
It's true though that there are a million theories of value and it's impossible to say what something's value is definitively, you can only make a decision about what is value is to you.
But when wash trading is and to impact the perceived value, it does so fraudulently; it supplies information to traders - "there is a lot of interest in this security, and the (last traded) price is rising" - which is a lie. Some people will argue this too is a normal and healthy part of markets, but I don't think they've given enough thought to what sort of equilibrium that game will settle into.