NFTs are HIGHLY inflated right now - paying $2mil for a tweet is NOT real demand. It's marketing by people with a stake in the industry. Justin Sun who bid $2mil for Jack Dorsey's tweet runs a blockchain network called Tron. I think NFTs will stabilize at some point but it isn't going to go away that's for sure.

So from the outside looking in this looks very silly, not highly inflated. In fact on the surface it looks clearly like a scam with a lot of hand waving and philosophical nonsense tacked on to confuse people.

Anyone can mint an NFT that points to whatever, and the benefits you get are purely imaginary or at best speculative that a greater fool may exist and buy it from you for a higher price.

The art world while also somewhat suspect at least has physical possession/ownership.

There likely is some foul play involved in some cases yes that's for sure. For example this Beeple thing looks like it's a scam to pump a token which Beeple has a stake in so that they can then offload the token at high prices to new unsuspecting buyers.

However just on your point "Anyone can mint an NFT that points to whatever" - sure they can but those NFTs will be and should be worthless. You are able to prove an NFT came from the actual author since it would have been signed with their private key.

When all the fake demand settles we will see if there is any real demand here or not. I myself have no interest in buying any NFTs, at least not yet :).

It's pretty baffling. You don't even own Jack's first tweet. You can't delete it or control it in any fashion. You have no IP rights to it. You own a unique link to it... it's like paying for a bit.ly link.

it's a gimmick run by a bunch of crypto insiders swapping tokens amongst themselves (acquired for fractions of pennies) at highly inflated valuations which they themselves bid up under cover of pseudo-anonymous shell identities.

the point, which is entirely rational from their perspective, is to attract media attention and thus new sources of unsophisticated money to crypto.

It's the standard ICO scam model, but tweaked to suit an even juicier demographic.

It boils down to the same question why somebody would pay millions for a picture with a couple of squares on it (see e.g. piet mondrian)? I guess one aspect is, that rich people can show off for their rich friends what shit they can afford...

You don't own the artwork, though.

You own the equivalent of a museum's accession number.