[brundolf]

The best explanation I've heard described NFTs as "baseball cards about things other than baseball players". Of course, baseball cards are valuable because of the centralized authority which limits the supply and designates certain ones as "authentic". Anybody can go print a picture of a baseball card; what's valuable is the official Topps one.

Whereas NFTs kind of give individuals the ability to "print their own baseball cards". What this means is that an NFT's identity isn't really just the item itself, it's the item + the person/entity that "minted" it. Anybody can go create an NFT for your piece of art, but arguably only the "official" ones from you are (should be?) valuable.

WRT NFTs as a whole: as with nearly everything else on the blockchain, I think it would be better as a centralized service that "minted" these "cards" and skipped the crypto stuff entirely. In addition to getting rid of the environmental concerns, this central authority could vet each "verified artist/creator", making sure that each NFT actually does come from the right party and isn't being fabricated by someone else (this is a real problem right now; I follow Twitter artists who deleted all of their art posts for fear of someone turning them into NFTs without their consent). If security is a concern for such high-priced transactions, just... use really long passwords/keys to secure people's accounts/items. Maybe upon purchase you get a custom YubiKey that has a picture of the item, or something.

...of course, then you wouldn't have all the crypto-fanatics hyping it up and boosting prices to get the whole thing off the ground :P