The reason crypto tech is popular at all - people are starved for actual digital ownership.

If you look at the NFTs in their current state, they are not exactly as revolutionary as some people say. Practically speaking a skin from an online game on a regular database functions mostly in the same way and can often also be sold or resold for profit (officially or on a grey/black market).

But there is one crucial difference - you truly own that string of code. I think some can not fathom how fucking important it is for many people! For about 20 years now it has become increasingly harder to truly own something digital and we even lose ownership of some physical things through digital means (remote control, blocking or bricking of hardware).

Corporations create walled gardens. They sell us software that only works if they choose to support it and that can not be resold to anyone. We get a licence to play that game, a licence to use that program. We don't really have control over it. It can be changed at a whim without our consent, it can be abandoned and we will lose access to a product we payed for. We rely on tools that are not ours in our day-to-day life. Tools that can be taken away from us due to a mistake some algorithm made.

People feel it. Many don't realize it, but they feel this loss of control over time. We are the product, we take what we are given. People live in this digital world for about twenty years now, but are only visitors, tourists in it.

That's why people like NFTs. This string of code referencing a stupid JPEG is nothing special except it truly belongs to you. You decide what to do with it. You can sell it, you can burn it, you can send it to a random person, you can forget that it is even there and it will forever be yours.