I’ve found this recent phenomenon quite interesting:

In case you’re not acquainted, there are a couple of things to understand. First is memes, which I suspect all of you know about. One of the common ones is below – – typically the females are labeled with different text. Like I could put “GME” on the right girl and “DOGE” on the left, and the Internet would laugh and laugh.

The other thing to know is NFT (non-fungible tokens) which, among other things, has become a mechanism for the sale of original digital art. In the case of the memes cited above, the owners of the original images were able to sell them via NFT. It’s kind of surprising to me how fast the prices fell off; I know all those memes, each of which are super popular, and the prices are in some cases awfully unimpressive.

Of course, this is very much a “long tail” kind of thing, since there are a very finite number of things which human beings would be willing to expend cash upon in order to simply say “I own that.” I doubt there’s much of a secondary market for such acquisitions.

Still, I keep describing crypto as “a solution in search of a problem”, and maybe this is a very very tiny instance of a “problem” which got solved (albeit not exactly a problem that has been burdening humanity for eons).