Is there really an analogy here to other market bubbles? If we take a couple of the most recent bubbles as an example, the tech bubble and the housing bubble, pump and dump schemes are pretty hard in the former case and basically impossible in the latter. What the three may have in common is that each was caused by an excess of easy money injected into the market.

We never saw CPI inflation in the run up to the housing bubble nor in the aftermath during the tech bubble. But we sure saw asset inflation. And obviously the NFT craze was probably a special edge case of asset inflation that was driven in part by free money that was put into crypto that in turn was parlayed into NFTs. But in a new, distributed, unregulated space like NFTs, pump and dump was not just unsurprising but probably inevitable.

Question is did anyone actually ever pay like a million dollars for an NFT or was it a million crypto-equivalent dollars that the buyer probably paid some relatively small amount for years earlier? Part of me thinks that there has never been a better case of a fool and his money being parted than a million dollar gif.