That’s because the application of new technologies tends to be low hanging fruit. The interest in NFTs is the idea of decentralized ownership. Right now, it’s digital art. Later on, it could be entire inventories in virtual worlds and games that can be traded or used in completely different ones, land and homes, luxury items that currently require middleman verification of authenticity, the entire transcript of everything you’ve learned academically no matter which school you learned it at, and other applications we’re not thinking about yet. NFTs are currently synonymous with ridiculous purchase prices for digital art. But the idea of decentralized ownership is the real concept. And we won’t see a lot of this unfold for a while.

So it's a scam to convince rich morons that jpegs and gifs are worth the same prices they'd pay for real, original artwork, and real limited prints?

A long long time ago when humans used shells, rocks, and precious metals as currency, it would have been very difficult to convince someone that a paper dollar was going to hold value. Then it would have been a challenge convincing someone that transactions recorded in an account on a card would be one of the most widely used methods of payment. And then it would have been a stretch to convince someone that some invisible list of transactions stored on millions of computers worldwide would be a means to store value. But here we are.

I was on Reddit back in 2009 having this same type of conversation with the Bitcoin naysayers. I’m glad I didn’t listen to them.