The point here is say you are in business with X party but it's illegal. X party can buy an nft worth nothing or generate one. You buy the NFT for the amount of your bill with X party. You've now technically not paid them for whatever illegal thing, instead you bought an nft from them. You could also break this down into multiple NFTs, buying 100 $100 NFTs from various "owners" that don't link back to X party through shell companies, and you've now paid them $10,000 "for pictures of chimps".

NFTs only exist for money laundering and illicit transfers. Once they've been transferred their value no longer matters, the business has been done.

For Logan Paul, yes, he wanted it to go up.

But if this painting was laundering at work, the important part is that the seller can point to this transaction as "real". The IRS or the FBI might be looking into his sudden gains of half a million dollars, but when they do, they find that he sold Logan Paul half a million dollars of art.

The NFT part makes it incredibly easy to generate said art. Before NFTs, rich people would mark up paintings, and those had to go up in value, because they would buy them at 100,000$ and sell them for 200,000$, so the government would see 100,000$ of profit, but the next guy with the painting, he'd have to sell it for 300,000, claiming 100,000$ in profit, and the next guy, 400,000$, you get the idea.

NFTs can lose value in a way real art isnt allowed to because anyone can claim that's the price, and after the sale, they can be discarded as trash, essentially. New ones can be made in bulk for no effort, and its alright to sell 1000 NFTs at 100$ each, because you can just keep making them and "selling" them and no one has to care about their value in the same way because they're mass producible without that crashing the market.