I think it is considerably more bizarre. People have always done strange things with their money; NFTs have made it maybe more visible, and have certainly dressed it up in new tech-y buzzwords, but they've hardly introduced the idea of spending money in strange and stupid ways.
But I am considerably more upset about whole countries' economies being founded on strange and stupid decisions than I am on individuals making such decisions. (Which is not to say that I could, or know how to, do any better; we're just comparing bizarre-ness, not solutions.)
It's only bizarre when you believe that money is a concrete, tangible thing with unchanging intrinsic value.
When you believe that then of course it seems wrong and unnatural to create new money out of thin air.
Isn't the following approximately right: suppose that some country has a net worth of 10B (calculated somehow). The government decides that it needs some cash, so it prints another 10B of that currency and injects it into the system. Well, all it has done is devalue the currency by half, thereby looting half the economy of half its value, transferring that to the government. It's just a ploy to steal 5B by declaring it to be government property, which is possible since every instance of money is a tiny abstract contract which is controlled by the government's treasury/mint.
It's like issuing new stock to raise cash, without any increase in the total market valuation, which nothing but a cash grab from the current share holders made possible by controlling the issuance of stock.
The money supply is increased by government spending.
The US economy grows by approximately $700B per year. (23T * 3%). Therefore as a first approximation the money supply needs to grow at approximately $700B per year. If the government deficit is less than that, it acts as a brake on the economy.
When the government spends money, it buys stuff with that money. Whether that is inflationary depends on how rivalrous the spending is -- IOW if it's competing with private money for that stuff or it's buying stuff that nobody else would ever want to buy.
Suppose you actually approached the author of the gif, and bought the exclusive copyright to it, conventionally. The gif itself is still not affected any more by that transaction than of the non-fungible token purchase. Exact copies of it exist all over the place, shared by people who don't care about your copyright.
The Mona Lisa isn't valuable because it's a nice painting: it's valuable because of its history and meaning to the arts.
In principle it doesn't need to be transported by helicopter or transported at all, that's a formality that predates the Internet. It's not a particularly big detail that is worth changing, much like it's not a particularly big detail that a President must be sworn in by having a judge physically stand next to him and have him exhale CO2 in such a manner so as to produce vibrations within a narrow audible range.
Both things are just formalities to express intention.
"In case of emergency, a trillion-dollar coin could be deployed to bridge any gap between the money running out and the debt ceiling being raised".
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Brinker,_or_The_Silver_Sk...
Do they invalidate it? Because 5 minutes before it was stolen, it was considered a valid currency.
The most you could do is destroy it, the end result would be as if nothing happened and that's about it.