I'll give it a shot – and you might already know all of this. So let's say you're Van Gogh, and you just finished painting "Starry Night." Let's say in this hy

I'll give it a shot – and you might already know all of this. So let's say you're Van Gogh, and you just finished painting "Starry Night." Let's say in this hypothetical scenario, you made it in a context that already celebrates your work and is willing to pay you insane sums of money for it. You sell it to the top bidder and there's all the papers that say X buyer now owns "Starry Night," bought the original painting for $70million. But you as Van Gogh still own the rights to licensing reproductions of it, even if there's only one original. The entire village you're a part of now buys printed copies of the painting. You get to hang the original painting on your wall. Everyone else also gets to hang a printed copy on their walls. Everyone, including Van Gogh and you and the village people, all know who owns the original one. The copies maybe can be resold for perhaps $1.00. Maybe even $10.00 if you're a shrewd negotiator. But the original can resell for a bajillion dollars. So I know people throw this example around with variables swapped out. And for me, I'm a digital artist, and it didn't click until I saw artists I genuinely respect and admire and have followed for years post their GIFs on NFT sites. Other artists' work that I'm not interested in, I thought to myself, "This is stupid; what a load of crap." But for the artists I genuinely admired? I didn't go so far as to want to buy their GIFs but I definitely was rooting for them to get top dollar. For me, I already valued their work before any NFT stuff. So when they posted it on auction sites, I knew it was worth something and had power to it. I could see myself saying, "It would be cool to own that GIF" for the first time ever. It's a feeling, that is different from right-clicking. It felt more like a personal connection to the artist. So if the artist were to then mint the exact same GIF on another platform because the ETH 1.0-based ones collapse, OR, this who NFT art speculation thing goes bust and it becomes worthless? I'd feel like the mad left with the bag, so to speak, and feel a bit dumb. But I can't deny that I wanted to own rights to GIFs from artists I deeply respect, and that seeing many others ascribe real monetary value to said GIFs completely changed my perception that GIFS can be imbued with value. Again, if the bubble pops and these become worthless? Then yeah, everyone who paid any money for these GIFS looks like an idiot. Long story short it feels like a kind of personal connection to the artist. Might just be some woo woo nonsense, but seems like many people buy things from a visceral emotional reaction, rather than cold hard logic and reasoning. Not saying everyone does. But many definitely do.