It's okay to not understand something. It's not okay to stomp around and call something stupid because you don't understand it. Get off Twitter.

If a digital file (of anything, not just this admittedly legit artwork) is duplicated and leaked, who cares about the person with "digital ownership", as evidenced by possession of the NFT?

The person suing and the person being sued. You act as if intellectual property never existed before. Stop it.

I get that this is an exciting new thing, but peoples' ignorance is once again being leveraged against them.

The overwhelming majority of NFT purchases have been by people substantially more savvy than you. Nobody drops 300ETH on Nyancat without owning 300ETH.

It's sad that this is one of the best articles yet explaining the situation.

A more interesting question is what happens to e.g. ETH when the mass NFT disillusionment begins.

NFTs are the mechanism underpinning digital rights ownership of Arianee, USAStrong.io and others. I've probably vomited 10,000 words on this shit by now.

Look. You're a smart guy. Vastly smarter than me. Yet you're saying deliberately ignorant things here because someone told you ignorance is cool. Stop it. Arianee closed a $10m round just four days ago: they aren't selling nyancats, they're guaranteeing the provenance of luxury goods. Same tech, bro. The issue isn't disillusionment - the issue is that this technology has been slowly adopted without normies noticing because we're raised to hate math and think that banks are vaults full of gold for some dumb reason.

Right now, I think NFTs are certainly helping drive up cryptocurrency valuations,

Bitcoin is substantially more volatile than ETH this year and you can't run NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Right now, I think NFTs are certainly helping drive up cryptocurrency valuations, but people may blame the medium of transactions instead of their own misunderstanding of what an NFT actually is.

It's pretty clear that you think you know what an NFT is while the people buying and selling them don't.

See that? $5.2m two months ago. How many Mickey Mantle rookie cards are there? Maybe 6? Who knows? Maybe another shows up? Does this card lose value? Damn right. Maybe one gets lost in a fire? Does this card gain value? Damn right.

There is ONE nyancat NFT. That's all there ever will be. To you, though, it's a stupid scam because it isn't a flimsy piece of card stock that sat next to bubble gum 70 years ago.

edit: OK so let's say I sell a digital file, with an accompanying NFT. What is permitting me from secretly keeping my copy of the file?

THE MUTHERFUCKING BLOCKCHAIN.

You don't get that. I can explain it. I've explained it before. Start here. The basic concept you need to wrap your head around is that blockchains make counterfeiting impossible, not hard.

The exchange would require trust, which, y'know, is the opposite of how a trustless system is supposed to work.

It does not. That's the whole point.

If I need to access and enjoy my digital file on a network or system that I don't control, that doesn't seem like ownership to me.

Quite an assumption to make. You don't need to be at the bank to use your money, why would you need to be on a "network or system" to access or enjoy what you own?

Didn't cost anyone 300ETH.