It is sorta surprising, because there isn't really anything intrinsic to that baseball. It was a witness to history, but in a very passive way. A few moments earlier it was identical to every other baseball. Without its certificate of authenticity, it's still just another baseball.

That doesn't really answer the question here, except to note that this is kind of a a self-bootstrapping thing. The crypto money itself is only worth $X because people say it is -- without even a government fiat behind it. And in so doing it makes itself famous, which is why we're talking about it.

Once money becomes that far divorced from the base of the Maslowe pyramid, it all becomes pretty wonky. It really is the same as paying money for a "famous" baseball that has no real claim to fame, either.

beeple is for sure not unknown, I think you need to dig a bit more. Like my mental model is "does this sound ridiculous but many people go crazy for it for long periods of time? Maybe I should try to understand instead of only critisize". Do you think Sotheby's and Crhistie's are victims of a mania and are selling beanie babies? Did they sell beanie babies during that mania? Nope.

Beeple isn't completely unknown, but even now he has only a few hundred thousand followers on twitter. If you look on Google trends you can see the search interest in Beeple, prior to the NFT thing, was substantially less than for relatively unpopular things like pogs or zip drives.

Given that pogs are 2-3 times as popular as Beeple, would you expect that if the inventor of pogs started selling an image of the first slammer as an NFT that it would sell for at least 70 million too?

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2021-01-01%202...

No I don't think so because being first always pays more. Beeple was the first on Christie's and that's it. Some people were first in North Pole and the people after them were not as important. Basic stuff in my opinion. It just weird people out but again as I said, art is weird for the uninitiated (me included).

> beeple is for sure not unknown

If you were to ask 100 people on the street one month ago who Beeple was, do you think a single person would say yes? 1000 people? 10,000 people? The record breaking home run ball from Barry Bonds sold for 1/100th the most expensive Beeple NFT. Some of the very most famous and well loved paintings in the world sold for much less than the most expensive Beeple NFT.

fair enough. Do you happen to know the previous high price for any of beeple's works? I cannot seem to find any on the google.