Exactly as I explained above, it is that simple. It's more like a Ponzi scheme, with a very small group of people who actually believe these things are worth something. Value is subjective, and with all due respect to Leonardo da Vinci, I would not buy the Mona Lisa for $200 if I couldn't sell it for $300. Someone else who "thinks they can see some magic on that painting" might be willing to trade it for their kidney.

Lord Varys in Game of Thrones made an outstanding statement:


I believe that:


You can see the same thing in all these famous brands. Some people would pay half their salary to buy a white T-shirt made by XYZ or buy a $50,000 watch that isn't any more accurate or better looking than a $50 watch. But then someone managed to convince them that these items have intrinsic value aside from their utility, and thus people are willing to pay for that value even if they don't actually see it.

Ordinals are no different. You would find some people who genuinely believe that Ordinals are pure art worth a lot, and then you would find other people who want to take advantage of the first group by selling them those "valuable pictures." In the surrounding context, the majority of people involved are in it for money.

Ordinals won't be the first or last "lie" to sell to people. The new trend might be: No-History coins are worth 5x those with history. So XYZ pool would now start selling fresh coins. You send your 1 BTC to XYZ pool, and they would include your address in the coinbase transaction of the next block they find. You get your new special 0.1 BTC that has not been "used" before by anyone else. A brand new input tailor-made for the VIPs. I won't be surprised if many people buy into that B.S and make something out of nothing.

Greed is a part of human nature. We all feed off it, just viewing things differently. But by the end of the day, everyone is greedy to a certain extent. As long as greed exists, scams will exist too, and history will never be enough to prove to human beings that the next "big thing" will end terribly like the previous "big thing." People will keep acting greedy for the rest of their lives.


@vjudeu, is the improvement you're talking about going to be built into the blockchain? In other words, will my grandmother not have to undergo any technical process to manage her transactions with someone else? Will she need to calculate anything, or else her transaction will be stuck? BTC is pretty complicated for the average person in its current state. Being a tech person like you and most others in this forum might think everything is easy to learn, but to most other people, setting up a wallet is scary enough. I'd bet that 90% of users don't even care to verify if their wallet is suggesting the best fee rate when they send anything; they probably don't even know how to do that. So, anything that requires additional steps to perform a simple transaction is most likely going to fail.