> NFT was just all fake volume... Sell an NFT to yourself for $1m, boom, you now own a $1m asset.

aka "wash trading" (which predates NFT and crypto):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wash_trade

How does that work for larger collections? If there’s a market, won’t the market find a price?

Eventually. The problem is the volume of non-wash trades on a lot of crypto is so embarrassingly low as to not do any real price discovery.

How do you sell yourself a NFT to yourself if you don't already have $1,000,000? Something is clearly missing from your line of thinking here.

The normal method is to generate a collection of a 10k NFTs and sell back and forth between your own accounts for $100 each.

The hope is that some sucker will buy them for $10, thinking that it's a bargain.

There seem to be a lot of people out there with paper cryptocurrency gains who are happy to use them for absolutely anything that will make more money.

Bitcoin loans? You just need it long enough to make a wash trade.

> How do you sell yourself a NFT to yourself if you don't already have $1,000,000?

Installment plan.

Many people with a million dollars would like to have a million dollars and another hundred thousand dollars.

You use a flashloan.

Some people do have a million dollars.

This is how the free market works, however. You can sell yourself a pencil for 1mil and it will be technically valued at 1mil in the public market, but good luck selling that to someone else. Same applies to NFTs, just a bit more marketing (edit: and dumb hype i should add) is involved.

No, because your $1 million pencil was never on the market; your hypothetical self-sale was a fake transaction. With NFTs it was often deceptively represented that someone paid $1 million, disguising the fact that these were bogus self-sales.

In real life, it doesn't work that way.