You know how you have a stash of plastic bottle tops hidden under the sofa? You can touch them. You can slide them across the hardwood.
You can bite them.
They exist.
Cryptocurrency is the human equivalent of trading an imaginary plastic bottle top.
Now, imagine if I told you that I have some catnip. You cannot smell it, you cannot roll in it, and it does not exist in this room.
It only exists as a tiny scribble on a giant, shared ledger kept by millions of computers around the world. But, I assure you, this invisible catnip is worth fifty boxes of real catnip.
Humans will spend their actual, hard-earned paper money to buy this invisible catnip, solely because they hope another human will pay them even more for it tomorrow.
How does everyone agree who owns the invisible catnip if nobody can see it? Think of it like this: every cat in the neighbourhood keeps a matching diary.
Every time a mouse is traded, every single cat writes it down at the exact same moment. If one sneaky alley cat tries to lie and say, “I have five mice,” the other diaries all hiss and say, “No, our books don’t match yours.” It is a highly secure, incredibly complex way of keeping track of things that aren’t actually there.
An NFT is even stranger. Imagine there is a picture of a very cool, delicious-looking sparrow on the computer.
Any cat in the world can look at it. Any cat can tap it with their nose. But an NFT means I pay a million dollars to have my name written on a digital receipt that says: “I officially own the original concept of this sparrow.”
I still can’t eat it. It is still just light on a screen. But I get to yowl at the other cats that the receipt belongs to me.
The reality
It is a massive, dizzying game of pretend played by millions of humans at once. They have built an entire alternate universe of wealth out of nothing but math and hope.
But at the end of the day, it’s just a very expensive, imaginary chase. It can generate endless noise and panic, but it will never match the raw, tangible glory of a single, real-life plastic bottle top sliding across the kitchen tile.