Quote from: NotATether on Today at 06:36:06 AM

P.S. the Nakamoto Pepe cards you just displayed are also in this category. The truth is, it is quite easy to reproduce if you have basic art skills (or just use a website that does it for you).

The value behind the NFT has very little to do with subjective perceptions of the quality of the art. The art isn't even attached to the token on a blockchain level, by URL or image hash, or anything. The reasons why it commands a huge price tag is because of

- its token name (RAREPEPE -- it was in essence the first Rare Pepe)
- its age (a week shy of being 6 years old)
- its scarcity (it was created with a total quantity of 300 tokens, many of which are out of circulation)
- it represents the beginning of a new use for Bitcoin technology (making collectibles, more or less)

Think of it like a baseball card.

Looks a bit low-quality, and not a very impressive portrait. Yet these sell for millions of dollars. Why? Because they are scarce, very old, and made back when hardly anybody else was making baseball cards.

Age or historical-ness of NFTs certainly isn't the only reason they are collected -- they are collected for all sorts of reason. But the vast majority require perpetual hype to sustain elevated floor prices, and yeah, a lot of them are scams.

To answer your question, if you think NFTs have been "ruined," then its the same forces that ruined the name of bitcoin or crypto that are to blame -- mainly greed. This space just attracts a lot of incredibly greedy people. It always has. But once the meaningfulness of the technology can be separated from instinctual connotations, people can go a lot farther in understanding what beneficial uses it actually possesses.