[jankins]

What you’re describing is the scam, and that’s become the definition, but “NFTs” in general do have more potential than that, even if it’s crowded out by bullshit. NFTs make more sense where a token’s utility is implemented in the same system as its ownership. For example, a domain name is an NFT, and there’s an ethereum name service: https://docs.ens.domains/ - ownership of a domain allows you to configure the domain.

I’d wager most people purchasing art NFTs don’t really have a good understanding of what they’re buying. Some think the art lives on-chain, or that if the art lives on IPFS it is a blockchain-based permanent thing (it’s not, data only exists in IPFS as long as >0 people “pin” it, and artists engage in pin rings to pin each other’s art).

So I see potential value of NFTs in general, though I don’t think the value is necessarily good. You could make the argument that art NFTs are like a MVP to see how ownership of different kinds of things in a distributed system works. I’m very skeptical because it’s attempting to create artificial scarcity of digital media, and if they figure it out for real, I can see that going wrong in more ways than I can see it going right.