But strong crypto and signed cryptographic ledgers are 1970s-vintage technologies already widely in use on every single major website in the world.

The NFT idea offers less than nothing. It's based on a false premise - as follows!

Suppose you sell me your artwork digitally. You write and sign a cryptographic proof of ownership and originality.

You could have done this any time since 1980, and though we have better signatures and crypto now, the underlying idea continues to be a very good one.

But now suppose you get hundreds of thousands of complete strangers to camp onto this transaction. None of them know you, or me, or the art, or anything, but their automated programs simply stamp that this transaction occurred.

This costs millions or even billions of times as much CPU as the original signing did.

The question is this - what value, exactly, do those hundreds of thousands of rubber stamps offer, particularly given the astonishing cost?

In particular, consider the case where someone who isn't you sells art as you with a valid but different certificate. The system will mark this false transaction identically to the real one!

If we wanted this functionality that web3 claims it will eventually provide, we could have had it 40 years ago, for 1% of 1% of 1% of the cost.