For physical objects, scarcity is an unescapable fact. It would be great if we could right-click on some Michelin starred chef's food and have another copy of it, but we can't.
NFTs unnecessarily add artificial scarcity to something that didn't really need it.
I disagree. It is pretty possible now to create a replica of a painting that would be indistinguishable to the human eye from a distance of, say, 2 feet.
Yes, the object could still be distinguished by other means, but presumably the only reason we enjoy art like paintings is for their visual effect - there is literally no other reason to appreciate it.
So my point is that the scarcity for the reason we value it in the first place is actually not an inescapable fact for something like a painting.
Arguably, however, someone wanting to own the original painting by a well regarded artist (say a van Gogh) you're stepping into Veblen goods territory[0] as its a display of wealth, status and prestige. This is what NFTs are trying to achieve
Artificial scarcity is merely a signal/status booster in a virtual world where post-abundance is present.
If you are in a VR world and want to mingle with other fellow “tribe members”, what signal do you go off of that’s hard to replicate?
The scarcity is not in the image itself, it is in a combination of image + canvas.
But when we’re talking about very expensive paintings, the physical scarcity of the raw materials plays essentially no role in the valuation. Provenance is everything. Sure, the canvas and paint is scarce, but the cost of canvas and paint is vanishingly small. Make no mistake, provenance is the reason people pay lots of money for original paintings.
I think what it really boils down to is that, in the "real world", consumers are willing to pay many, many millions of dollars solely based on provenance. That is, one mediocre painting may be worth a couple hundred dollars, but if it can be validated that the painting was actually painted by some famous (dead) grand master, that painting is now suddenly worth millions of dollars, even though nothing about that painting has changed.
So, what NFT boosters were arguing was that, if people are willing to pay millions of dollars for provenance in the physical world, why not the digital world? In my belief it's that humans have evolved to view 2 distinct physical object, even if they are exactly the same, as separate - an exact copy of a painting so that it is indistinguishable from the original to the human eye would still be a different painting and not have the provenance of the original. For digital jpegs, we don't view them that way - the same image on two different monitors is "the same image". For physicists out there it's kinda like the difference between fermi dirac statistics and bose einstein statistics.
Thus, while I agree that NFTs are all scams, I think we should also be asking the question of why we are willing to assign so much value to provenance in the physical world - that seems crazy to me, too.