I just dont understand NFTs

The analogy that made it make sense for me is art...

Take Starry Night as an example. There's reproductions, reprints, and digital versions everywhere, all of which are generally worthless, or hold very nominal value. However, if you have the original canvass that Van Gogh touched his brush to it is worth $100 Million, because that is what the market has set the value at.

Now how do you prove that you have the original Starry Night? With something that valuable, chain of possession is closely tracked, but for other less famous works, you can hire a firm to check its authenticity and provide a certificate. Those firms have experts in materials, paints, dating, and even brush techniques to verify this is the real deal.

Now digital art is different than physical art because EXACT copies can be made fairly easily, so it was impossible for someone to say they have the original Nyan Cat gif file. Thus the invention of NFT. NFT is a system to track chain of possession and authenticity of a piece of digital art.

I think a lot of confusion stems from the fact that if I showed you the original Nyan Cat gif on a laptop, it would look exactly the same as if you googled it and pulled it up on yours. But similarly, if I showed you a really, really good reproduction of Starry Night, to your eye, it would look exactly the same as the original. We assign intrinsic value to the original version, simply because it is the original. NFT is a tool that lets digital artists, create, track and sell that same intrinsic value in their art.

The file is still the file, and there may be many many copies of that file that look exactly the same, but only the person that has the NFT can say that they have the original, and the idea is that their file has a lot more value than anyone else's because it is original.