cricket98

How are they not intelligent? You are able to put in arbitrary prompts and its able to return an image constructed to your specifications. Seems you are being pedantic

You also don’t understand the power draw of blockchain verification

Sounds like you don't understand. The blockchain that these monkey pictures are on do not use proof of work mining anymore, so there is no "wasting energy" anymore in the form of GPU/ASIC mining.

Not at all. Membership to a country club can be a status symbol, as an example.

Something physically existing or not is not what makes a status symbol. Are you implying something about energy consumption of blockchains? The network these are on (ethereum) no longer uses PoW mining, so the energy argument does not work here.

maybe they're just having fun. People purchase status items all the time and no one has a problem with it. There is nothing fundamentally different between showing off your 100k monkey picture with showing off your 100k watch.

It's not for you, that's ok.

it's just a party lol who doesn't like parties

That's a pretty fair response. Although I would say that I am against doxxing people who just happened to show up and didn't actually enter the capital/participate in any illegal behavior. You can't predict what the crowd will do and I think we would all agree it's wrong if a BLM protest got out of hand and they decided to punish everyone who was there simply because they "increased intimidation".

Never before in history have minor disputes been able to be aired to millions of people over the internet. I think it makes the response a bit disproportionate.

What about all the January 6th protestors who were doxxed?