>>53083798Yeah, there's a market for graded cards. It existed before the recent wave of speculation and it'll exist after. A lot of collectors have extreme condition autism, and it follows that many of these people would want to appeal to an external and impartial "authority" for condition standards. There are a lot of autistic nerds out there who, irrespective of a card's actual value, just want to be able to say, "hey, I own this card in the mintiest condition possible," and grading services exist as much to satisfy that guy as they do some retard get-rich-quick "investor." I think that's a big distinction between these cards and NFTs. There's not really an organic market of sentimental NFT collectors. It's really all speculators. Whereas with these cards, people have genuine affection and nostalgia for them. That market of sentimentalfriends will exist even if all the speculators exit the hobby.
Whether or not current prices are inflated by a bunch of speculators and flippers is another question. I think that was undeniably the case even a year or so ago, but now, many cards are returning to the prices they'd be if we were just following the "natural" upward trends that started back in 2017-2019.
