I read this article hoping to get honest arguments, but instead all I got was propganda and dishonest arugments. I'll give you the benefit of you just being optimisitic. Just because an NFT is listed at $140M, doesn't mean it is actually worth $140M. The highest cryptopunk went for $7M and the higest bid for any cryptopunk is < $1.5M. That's an unrealized loss of 80% if NFTs are securities or a real loss of 100% if NFTs are goods and services, and in that case, the lack of privacy means that the tax man can come for you if they wanted to. So the actual loss can become more than 100%. You've not only comitted tax evasion in the hope of getting more, but you are showing off that you possibly committed tax evasion...NFTs would be more like products that have 0 uses other than digital artwork. You can buy in order to flip it later, or you can buy to use it now. You tried to argue NFTs are luxury goods, but at least luxury goods have a primary function that can't be gotten for free. Primary means that value is derived from the good, not the goods retail/resell price. If the value is based on price rather than the product, that's a bubble and a risky investment, not a good. It would be very interesting to run a study on the number of NFTs that end up selling for less than purchased, the number

Truth is, only other people in the same echo chamber care about your NFT profile picture. No one is going to go through the trouble of asking you for proof.

You use the term "honest signalling" as if it means something, but it's a subjective argument. If NFTs are like Gucci or Chanel, then the common man will never own NFTs and will also think they are a waste of money. So NFTs aren't for everyone and thus this whole argument becomes subjective. Let's have objective conversations about NFTs not subjective ones, shall we? I would laugh at anyone that told me they paid for their profile picture and that they can prove it on the blockchain. I didn't pay for my profile pictures, wallpapers, and my Firefox theme. I made them myself.

How is a global transparent ledger a good thing!? Privacy is important and if you think Governments will just release information about their people, you'd be dead wrong. I'd rather stick with Monero. Transparent ownership is just stupid and just facilitates envy, not happiness.

If you're using StubHub, it's because you didn't create your own ticket service. Why would artists would use StubHub if they could do it themselves? The smart contract feature of ETH doesn't magically reduce costs, not all artists are technical and are definitely not capable of programming a smart contract or NFT for tickets. There are investment costs associated with NFTs other than transaction costs. It's way cheaper to run a centralized server + QR code tickets, than setup a smart contract and still create the centralized service for ticket verfication. Verification is not easy because if the ticket is now an NFT, we still need to verify that the physical person owns the ETH address which requires signing a message with private keys I believe? Plus with NFTs now the artist or whoever was involved with the smart contract, can harvest your ETH income data if you are self-custoday. If you aren't self custoday, your exchange can track your spending habits. Monero has none of these issues. Privacy comes first and legacy applications can remain the same with little change.

You cannot make blanket statements like "the only reason." It is evident from the 2018 bubble, that Bitcoin's worth depends on future buyers. People buy in anticipation price will go up, and when price stops going up (when all the gullible people already own BTC), chaos ensues. Price discovery will hopefully take another 5 years before we reach stability or an upwards trend (by this I mean no long periods where price goes down).