People aren't buying Pokémon cards to "complete their collection": they are buying them because they think someone else will pay more for them later, presumably because they want to "complete their collection", but that makes just as little sense... they too will be buying it from the first person in order to sell it to a third person. There is supposedly a game attached to Pokémon cards, but that excuse to establish "utility" is pretty flimsy: even the 10 year old I know who is obsessed with these cards is only in it as an amateur investor and it isn't clear to me he even knows the results; he's simply fallen for the marketing efforts of this company shilling their shitcards on an unsuspecting populace, many of whom will lose thousands of dollars by the time this particular collectible bubble is over.

> There is supposedly a game attached to Pokémon cards, but that excuse to establish "utility" is pretty flimsy

Playing the game is a game. (There are dozens of major tournaments, including national and world championships, of people playing the game.) Collecting the cards is also, in a different way, a game. They have made a product that people do things with. You are essentially trying to define all products with resale value as securities.

I am just drawing an analogy to the same BS arguments that the SEC--and the anti-crypto crowd on this forum--like to make against projects like Filecoin.

Why do you then believe that cryptocurrencies are somehow different? How about Axie Infinity, which is specifically a game similar to Pokémon cards?

Why is it somehow sufficient for Pokémon cards to say "a game is a game" but you say that for crypto and you are "shilling your shitcoin"?

Do you believe this to be different for baseball cards, which do not have a game, or for competing collectible card games which never got popular?

(After all, if you are willing to say that just wanting to collect and trade cards for purposes of making money is itself a game that establishes utility, what are you even trying to regulate in the first place? Aren't you then just making all securities into products?)

>Why do you then believe that cryptocurrencies are somehow different? How about Axie Infinity, which is specifically a game similar to Pokémon cards?

The first two words in NFT are "Non-Fungible." Those are certainly not securities.

Level-1 coins (and most L2) are fungible by design. He's not in trouble for dealing in NFTs.

If that's not a meaningful difference, then I'm curious for what your explanation is for why NFTs exist.

> After all, if you are willing to say that just wanting to collect and trade cards for purposes of making money is itself a game

Making money is not the reason that people collect and trade Pokemon cards, and if you think it is then your brain has been pretty badly poisoned by activities where making money is the only objective.