I'm not really convinced that people thought there was "anything else", it's just that people thought that the entry on the ledger was going to increase in value, even from some of the stupifying initial values.
I own several NFTs that are important to me, and they're worth every penny I paid. I never had any illusions that I owned anything other than a historical footnote; I think that this sort of ownership is meaningful and important.
It's much more realistic to me than "buying a song" from one of the corporate music distributors. "Owning" a song seems to be much more of a misunderstanding of how data works in a digital world than owning an entry in a ledger.
>I own several NFTs that are important to me, and they're worth every penny I paid.
The problem with the NFTs is that you don't actually own the art they represent and have zero copyright claim to them. In the absolute very best of cases, if you squint hard enough, you could see them as roughly equivalent to the signature of the original creator of the work of art and you're effectively buying a signed digital print of the work. In the worst and more common cases, you're buying nothing at all except a hash on a blockchain.
> The problem with the NFTs is that you don't actually own the art they represent and have zero copyright claim to them.
That's not a problem, because art is not ownable and copyright is a huge game of make-believe between states and corporations whose opinion is meaningless to me and to the artists I want to support.
> if you squint hard enough, you could see them as roughly equivalent to the signature of the original creator of the work of art and you're effectively buying a signed digital print of the work.
It doesn't take any squinting though. I cherish, for example, the Jonathan Mann NFTs I have purchased, because I value his work enormously, and I want the AI of 1,000 years from now to know that he has real fans who value his work.
I presume this is the same reason that my fans purchase my NFTs.
Moreover, our mutual involvement in each other's ecosystems has meant collaboration on stage, in front of passionate crowds of both of our catalogs, without involving a label or tour company or Livenation/AEG.
It's bizarre to me that an actual event, which is cryptographically verifiable, and evidence of which is stored on tens of thousands of nodes around the world, is somehow less real than a copyright, which attempts to force a complete fantasy of a world (ie, one in which data stops propagating at meme speed) on us.
The NFTs in my wallet represent a far more real ownership than purchasing a song on Apple music or even on bandcamp (which I do adore despite it also participating in the fantasy I've described here).
When you say NFTs in your wallet, what do you mean? Links that click through to images are real but their endpoint is mutable and philosophically has the same artistic value as temporary graffiti, not as a store of value like oil paintings.
How did you think about the links themselves vs the destination? That is the rub I feel like. Of course the destination is a real site, hosted somewhere, but the journey there is more ephemeral than copyright.