The "a website for buying and selling JPEGS with your debit card" part simultaneously made me realise how ridiculous NFTs are and, nevertheless, how popular they are, and how that popularity fuels the value of bitcoin. Essentially paper money gets its value because you need it to pay taxes; that is, there is a demand. Bitcoin gets it value because you can do interesting and popular things with it; that is, there is a demand. As long as there are interesting and popular things to do with bitcoin, that attracts outside money, bitcoin will keep gaining in value. Obvious, I guess, but that helped it hit home.
You're confusing Bitcoin and Ethereum. Ethereum is the platform that supports smart contracts. Bitcoins intent is to be a simple ossified protocol used as a store of value, akin to digital gold.
> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution.
That's Bitcoin's intent as the first sentence of the original whitepaper. The intent is on transactions. In practice, it's an ossified store of value now.
Of course, it's not that because you can't actually store value. Saving money works as a temporary defection from everyone else trading it; the trading is what maintains the value.
