I don't understand the argument about shallow, and I can't help things that you find boring (I'm not too excited about it myself). It is an artificial construct where the last person standing finds they are holding something worthless, and everyone else along the way cashes out.

It is the literal definition of a Ponzi scheme. There is zero worth in a digital pointer to something, especially when (which is already happening) the platforms doing the pointing suddenly stop existing.

There’s a ton of fraudulent stuff happening in that space, but there are actual, legitimate use cases, e.g. when the actual owner connects an actual right to it, when some other service validates ownership, etc. And I’m not aware of other decentralized ways to achieve that.

There is nothing "decentralised" about it in a governance sense. If you put a NFT on the Ethereum blockchain, it is part of the Ethereum network. It has no legitimacy outside of that network. A genuinely decentralised way to do it would be peer-to-peer nonrepudiation like PGP.

Sure, you can view both Ethereum and Bitcoin as being not really decentralized. There still much closer to that ideal than any centrally hosted approach. Not sure how valid a comparison to some non-existent PGP-style variant is :)

They have all the downsides of fiat in that they only have value because the people trading them say so, but none of the guarantees because when the music stops, they are worthless. Hence Ponzi schemes. And yes, it is pretty boring to keep rehashing these arguments :)

My problem is that declaring something a Ponzi scheme means saying there's absolutely no value in it, in no circumstances, for no use cases, nada, zilch. While there’s a ton of valid criticism, I don’t see that being the case. But I’m happy to agree to disagree.

There are valid use cases _for blockchains_. Passage of goods through a supply chain is a fantastic example of historical corruption and/or mistakes that are simply eliminated by an immutable digital ledger. (And source code of course :) )

So you want to burn the planet

Nope. "Private" blockchains that use membership and authentication rather than proof-of-anything have near-zero operating costs and all the benefits of Merkle tries. Everyone in the supply chain has an independent identity and the hand-offs are signed as you would expect.