# Fictitious commodities
A *fictitious commodity* or *pseudo-commodity* is a product that is traded like a commodity but has no [use value](use-value.md) and whose demand curve is not generated by any external economic processes. It is a [non-economic](non-economic.md) product which is generated either through [enclosure](enclosure.md), [artificial demand](artificial-demand.md) or as part of a [greater fool](greater-fool-theory.md) scheme or bubble.

Structurally it is similar to a [financial asset](financial-asset.md), but unlike a financial asset it renders no contractual claims on [income cashflows](income-cashflows.md) and thus has zero [fundamental value](fundamental-value.md).

Examples of fictitious commodities include:

* Many [crypto assets](cryptoasset.md)
* [NFTs](nft.md)
* Name-A-Star Registries
* [Indulgences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence)

See also [Tinkerbell effect](tinkerbell-effect.md), [bubble](bubble.md) and [market mania](market-mania.md).

## References
1. Hanley, Brian P. 2018. ‘The False Premises and Promises of Bitcoin’. ArXiv:1312.2048 [Cs, q-Fin], July. http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.2048.
1. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. 2021. ‘Bitcoin, Currencies, and Fragility’. ArXiv:2106.14204 [Physics, q-Fin], July. http://arxiv.org/abs/2106.14204.
1. Krugman, Paul. 2021. ‘Technobabble, Libertarian Derp and Bitcoin’. The New York Times 21. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/opinion/cryptocurrency-bitcoin.html.
1. Bellinger, Matthew. 2018. ‘The Rhetoric of Bitcoin: Money, Politics, and the Construction of Blockchain Communities’. ResearchWorks Archive. PhD Thesis. https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/handle/1773/43342.
1. Bindseil, Ulrich, Patrick Papsdorf, and Jürgen Schaaf. 2022. ‘The Encrypted Threat: Bitcoin’s Social Cost and Regulatory Responses’. 7 January 2022. https://www.suerf.org/docx/f_88b3febc5798a734026c82c1012408f5_38771_suerf.pdf.