I think people are hoping they become semantically equivalent to rai stones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones

I think people are hoping they become semantically equivalent to rai stones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones These were discs of a special stone used as stores of wealth by the Yap Islanders. Over time, both because of the difficulty of moving such a large stone, and to protect it from damage, it became customary to simply keep the stones where they were and maintain an agreed upon (oral in this case) log of the history of ownership of the stone. There were even stones that sank in transit between the islands, and since everyone agrees the stone existed and no one has a way to pull it up, you can just keep the log of ownership going even with no people having physical access to the stone. Where the comparison falls flat for me is that those stones started as a (at least for the purposes of this conversation) fairly traditional currency that large chunks of their economy depended on, before transitioning to a more abstract concept. Not that many people's retirements are tied up in beanie babies (albeit probably non zero) so there isn't that structural and heavily collective force of will to maintain value. That's what NFTs look like to me.