Yeah, I just don't understand why people would pay tens of thousands of pounds for a .jpg or .gif

First of all - you're right.

Second of all - why do people pay more for a limited edition print than a normal print?

I think it's really similar to art. It's more about your relationship with the artist or the emotion that makes you want to own the original... And of course, the art market.

See my previous answer for a possible reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26288948

It's speculation. People who buy highly expensive pieces of art and store them in a vault in Geneva* don't enjoy them in any way. It's a value store.

Why not buy Bitcoins instead? I think it has to do with the cool factor. It feels probably better to own an NFT than a Bitcoin, as it feels different to own actual art than stock in the Coca-Cola company.

(I can only guess though, I have never owned any of those.)

* https://www.crozier.ch/en/services/art-storage

One major scam that's lower effort here is that you can simply sell someone else's digital art. Selling physical art forgeries has always been a thing but the risks involved in doing it (i.e. what if you get caught) and the costs (faking a detailed painting isn't EASY) mean it's not as attractive as just grabbing some Japanese or Chinese artist's stuff off Pixiv and selling it as an NFT to english speakers, where the original artist may never find out about it.

Except if I bought the rights to a song (like Hipgnosis Songs Fund are doing, for instance), I could profit off them as the song is mine. As far as I understand, for the most part with NFTs, it's more akin to buying a baseball card - I can't reproduce or profit off it, I just 'own' it.

> It's a digital unfakeable deed to an asset, that asset being a trading card, artwork or something else.

Well...no. Quite the opposite. The art is an asset. NFTs are not the artwork, and they're not a deed to the artwork. Buying an NFT gives you ownership of the NFT; it doesn't give you ownership of the artwork.

Selling digital unfakeable deeds to an artwork, and trading those deeds on the blockchain, sounds really cool. That might have value! But to the best of my knowledge, nobody has done that, largely because it's utterly impossible and we have no idea how to even go about trying to do it. And in any case, NFTs certainly aren't that. You're not buying and selling the artwork, you're buying and selling a numbered acknowledgement that the artwork exists.

Already started to happen. People have been posting complaints about junk or low-effort NFTs on Twitter a lot recently.

And I'm sitting on Marcel Duchamp's toilet chuckling to myself.

I thought each token cost over a hundred dollars to mint. Otherwise I'd play around with adding a few things. As it is, it's gambling to see if someone will want to pay you more for what you minted than the cost to mint it, right?