DooWahDiddy said: "dramamama611 said: "Not you alone. While I appreciated the analogy, I still don't get it, either."
It's like when you pay money to "own" a star, or have it named after you or someone you know. There's no way of knowing if the company has "sold" the star to someone else, and there's no way to truly benefit from "owning" it, other than bragging rights."
This is a better explanation than I gave, but technically NFT companies have a way to prove that they didn't "sell the star" to anyone else.
Say you buy the Wrong Man cast recording off of iTunes, copy the audio files, and give the files out to your friends. The data between the two digital files is identical, so there's no way of knowing that the version you're listening to is the song from iTunes, or a copy of a copy of a copy.
NFTs use blockchain technology (the tech behind cryptocurrency) to keep a digital ledger of transactions on the file, which essentially proves that you have the real deal. This is something specific to art that's produced on the internet. You can tell the difference between the Mona Lisa and a 2-dollar print from the gift shop, but you can't do that with a digital image or audio file. The blockchain is the receipt that says "this is the original file, everyone else just has a copy".
No one would really care, except for the fact that the computers that make blockchains use an astounding amount of electricity, and more and more is needed as the blockchain gets longer and longer.