All digital artwork are "prints" when you save or transfer the work. There's really no concept of "original" in digital as they are indistinguishable. NFT's attempt to add time as a metric of scarcity (this artwork exists on this blockchain at this point in time, regardless of copies). It relies very heavily on a social and cultral decision to place value on this new form of provenance.

If there is no original than all digital artwork is worthless because it can be endlessly copied which would diminish its value.

Rarity is what dictates price, not only social decisions.

If I make an NFT of my photograph and sell it to someone, what is stopping me from making copies and selling it to someone else again? Or giving it away? Nothing. This will crash the price of an NFT if the NFT's value was dictated by the artwork.

So NFT's are just bitcoin, another scam.

> If there is no original than all digital artwork is worthless because it can be endlessly copied which would diminish its value.

Digital art is worthless, though. It's as you said. There are no original copies, all of them are equivalent. They can be trivially and endlessly copied. Once created, the cost of creating more copies might as well be zero.

It's the artist's labor that's valuable. It's the artists themselves who are scarce.

The art itself has value even if all the copies are equally "original", interchangeable, and superabundant.

Put another way: there may not be any change in value between one copy and two copies, but there is a big difference between one copy and zero copies.

Of course. At zero copies, the art does not exist. At one copy, it exists. The artist's job is to generate that initial copy. This is what all human intellectual work boils down to: discovering data, numbers whose bits are set just right.

Once that initial copy is found, any number of copies can be created and distributed at zero cost. Value is determined by supply and demand. If supply is infinite, value must be zero no matter what the demand is.

That's the big question. Will there be any cultral shift in recognising NFT's as legitimate signals of "value" after the hype dies down? You can stretch the hype train out by convincing some big brands to get on board, this will push the price up just by force of recoginition but are the fundamentals sound for what values the NFT? as like you say, there's no real scarcity and we still rely on meat space for settling real disagreements about ownership.

NFTs are a public proof of purchase.

They aren't digital prints in any sense of the word.

And a public proof that you purchased the NFT, not the artwork itself or any particular license or rights in it.

As the OP mentions, people are selling NFT's with URLs pointing to art without the permission or involvement of the artist. This demonstrates that ownership of an NFT does not "prove" anything about ownership related to the art itself.

hey siri: set a reminder to publish my grocery bill on the blockchain

I'd go further. Only NFTs that have the image stored on chain are signed digital copies. It's the association between the signature and the actual data that's important and if that can rot it's bad.

Which only leads on to the next problem of how you associate the signature with a real human.