Is this madness or what?

[Reatim]

It seems to me that this is just made for bragging rights lol but even then no one really cares.

If that person is an influencer then most likely they did that for interactions and for the sake of his followers. People will do all kinds of crazy things nowadays even if it meant they are going to lose a lot of money. That person must be crazy rich, though because I can’t even think about wasting 5 USD lol

[livingfree]

Stompix explained it well and everyone understands now. Thanks stompx! 

If I am that damn rich and I have control over my wealth and can do a lot of things such as this but, in no way I'll do this. I hate ordinals, runes, brc20s.

They're making our lives tougher because of what they do with the fees but I am also thinking about the demand that they create but it seems not visible with Bitcoin's price, only the fees. 

[Darker45]

It's not because the next block after the halving is expensive. It's because the halving block itself is expensive, highly coveted. The preceding and succeeding blocks aren't special. Block 840,000 is special because that's the halving block.

So these tokens are competing for a space within that specific block. We all know competition means paying the higher fee. The mempool is an auction. The bigger fee you pay, the more likely you can mint your worthless Rune in that halving block. Missing that block means missing that special value. So, these fools wouldn't mind paying hundreds of thousands just to have their transaction included in that block.

So, it's not really the amount of transaction. It's what etched on it.

[GreatArkansas]

(....)

And they paid that much to make sure that it gets minted on block 840 000, that's for bragging rights!

This is next-level bragging! Well played. Since it is in the Bitcoin blockchain, and this is a new protocol that is using the Bitcoin blockchain.
What they did is amazing and expensive, there could be some PR on this new protocol.
It seems this is a competitor or Ordinals (BRC20) and I am curious if this could affect the Bitcoin network stability, like high transaction fees.

[SamReomo]

For some time now I have been trying to rap my head around the reason why a lot of persons were ready to pay such enormous fees so their transactions would be included in block #840,000.

Some of those paid such amounts so others can remember them and they can proudly say that they made transactions during the halving block. While most of the ones who paid such high fees were interested in gaining more from that approach.

I have already mentioned that Rune creators were willing to pay premium fees to get their runes minted at that block so their runes may gain very high value just because those were minted earlier than other runes.