Well one major difference is that a person could ruin their cards or bend them. There is also the grading system and you can't really make the card go up in gr

Well one major difference is that a person could ruin their cards or bend them. There is also the grading system and you can't really make the card go up in grade, just down. The whole boom in the 80s really started because boomers came into their prime earning years. When they were kids baseball cards were mostly to put in their bike spokes to make a clicking noise or thrown around so cards in great shape were in short supply. Most importantly though they were not coins or stamps that their parents collected. I use to listen to a radio show 5 years ago for card collecting that the whole show was basically people calling in and the host telling them the cards were not worth anything. This past year though is the all time high for sports cards but we already well off the peak. The problem with NFTs is they came along at the peak of the everything bubble so the prices have nothing to do with reality. Digital collectibles make perfect sense and are no less goofy than anything else people collect. Not something I would ever buy but ultimately nothing is as goofy as the price of an original Mark Rothko painting. To me that is the gold standard of collectibles and the rationality of the collectibles market.