Confused with pointers - what real purpose do they surve?

I thoroughly reviewed many tutorials on this, and from what I can gather a pointer is a data type, basically meaning it's a byte(s) that reference other bytes?

So a pointer is to say, in Layman terms, data pointing to other data, or data getting data from data.

It makes sense, but what I fail to understand is why should data point to other data?

I've also heard of low-level programming, such as Assembly languages, involving pointers, but are those the same?

I'm a bit confuzzled here.
"Why should data point to other data?"
Pointers are what allow you to do things like linked lists, binary search trees, and iterators just to name a few. They are very important to many many aspects of programming. writing something in memory and then just pointing to it is so much more efficient and easier then moving that chunk of memory around every time. If you are having a lot of trouble understanding them read a good c book about them.
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