This article on The Register about NFT was great in their usual cheeky way. NFT is extremely interesting from a number of perspectives. Like currency (and Bitcoin), NFTs are worth something because a large enough group of people think they are worth something.
At present, they are valuable only because they make the owner feel good and might have some sort of financial return. Think of a painting. We have some nice art in our house which might be worth something (I honestly don’t know), but I would never sell it because I’d rather look at it on the wall. It makes me feel good. Plenty of things are like this. Stuff we don’t need, but it makes us feel good. In modern societies, this is probably most of the economy.
Maybe there is more to it though. One of my favorite authors, Neal Stephenson, wrote a book a few years ago called Fall; or, Dodge in Hell which describes a near future world where we will upload our minds to the cloud. In that sort of world, NFT will be really important. We will need some mechanism to establish strong ownership rights over digital things.
In the meantime, you might imagine all sorts of interim use cases (beyond people buying Tweets) where NFT is used to establish ownership of physical things. Maybe jewlery or something? A pawnshop or other secondary dealer would check the ownership ledger. If you have the NFT, you can sell it. Otherwise, you can’t.
Either way, in meatspace or cyberspace, NFT has an interesting future.