People buy expensive art because it's an exclusive item, and they value the bragging rights it confers to them (generally). It's different from NFTs, which are

People buy expensive art because it's an exclusive item, and they value the bragging rights it confers to them (generally). It's different from NFTs, which are just pointers to an item rather than the actual item itself. But I agree with you that crypto bears some similarity to art/gold/collectibles. However crypto can be spawned out of thin air and these other things can't. Why would the world settle on using a Blockchain where a few whales hold huge percentages of the coins? People will just invent a new one and standardize on that. If decentralized apps become the new norm. This would devalue existing blockchains and their tokens greatly. The only ones motivated to stay on a Blockchain with enormous inequality are the few early adopters. The public would create a standard and adopt that in longer run if Blockchain backed decentralized apps are truly the future.