Like REALLY dumb it down.....cause I dont get why people are paying half million for drawings of cartoon monkeys.
it's speculation in the space in general, on top of bubble delirium, shills, and money laundering.
even if you go to the supposed main coin, bitcoin BTC, it no longer represents the original community or white paper narrative. rather than replace money, it's largely now replace gold, then maybe some day money (dumb for multiple points i'd argue) - and the average person "investing" will claim it's "like gold but better" and they want it for a "store of value" repeating some other people they heard say this, meanwhile having no real understanding of currency, economics, history, etc. of any of what they are talking about. eg. a store of value is not supposed to grow your purchasing power over time, just protect it. you put in a barrel of oil's worth of purchasing power and 10 years later your expectation is to be able to buy a barrel of oil with it, not a lambo. but speculation has been the main driver of BTC, and every other coin, for some time now.
this includes coins that are only the slightest step away from straight up pyramid scams, like floki inu, where it is clearly just marketing and earlier people shilling their own book to everyone they know, with the eventual result being early people rewarded while later ones left holding the bag.
NFTs, at least 99.9999%, are purely pointless. it's blockchain established ownership of something over which there is likely no question of ownership and which has little to absolutely zero value anyway. you can use a blockchain for some meaningful ownership properties - let's say you live in an area of the world where the government poorly keeps track of who owns property like land, and/or your government is often at threat or replaced due to local politics, violence, struggle for power, etc. if you recorded ownership on a blockchain (and assuming goverment would respect it) then there would not be any question of who owned what and when that ownership changed hands, as recorded in a public, immutable, trustable blockchain. of course this is not the case for NFTs because they are not physical land, but just some set of 1s and 0s, and a set anyone else can have and use at any time.
NFTs are largely just bubble speculation, plus celebs/influencers shilling stuff they make, plus bragging rights for crypto rich. if you bought bitcoins in 2012 and have 50m of them today, it's not exactly easiest to liquidate them into your local currency and minimize taxes to then also go buy your lambo army, plus you've probably already done that anyway. and you still are crypto rich, so you can buy 1 or 2 of these and even throw them out as a status symbol.
plus they are absolutely ways to launder money through. this is already a big thing in the real art world.
Art has long been identified, even romanticized, as an ideal way to launder money. There’s a thread of logic here: the art world accommodates anonymous, high-dollar buyers and the industry allows large cash deals. For racketeers, it’s difficult to conjure up a more attractive set of circumstances.
www.artandobject.com
all the easier if you can do so digitally just sitting in your chair, especially if you can attempt to obscure ownership through crypto wallet IDs.
interesting article that recently came out around web3 and all the hype around it -
Despite considering myself a cryptographer, I have not found myself particularly drawn to “crypto.” I don’t think I’ve ever actually said the words “get off my lawn,” but I’m much more likely to click on Pepperidge Farm Remembers flavored memes about how “crypto” used to mean “cryptography” than ...
moxie.org
you can see some quite silly seeming design around the NFT space here at that. eg. this person made an NFT that itself changed depending on how you looked at it, and once it was banned from a platform, was for all intents and purposes essentially banned everywhere, despite that it should exist as uncensorable undeniable ownership on the chain. it was still there, it's just that tools that people would actually use to interact with it stopped showing it.
TL; DR:
1. status symbol for crypto rich
2. money laundering conduit
3. minted to shill; marketed and organized purchases to goose prices (coffeezilla iirc has some youtube vids on this)
4. general bubble speculation in the space, because you keep hearing about it, feels like FOMO cuz you're not getting rich
would i buy one for $5m:
jesus god good lord fuck no
would i buy one for $5
maybe, but only because i think some idiot might buy it for $10 and i wouldn't be left holding the bag. but this just further feeds #4