NFT, like all crypto, are just scams right? Its people trying to trick other people into buying something intangible at whatever price they can get away with.
I read that most NFT transactions are from the "owner" buying and rebuying their own "product" to increase the price and trick others into think its worth something.
Well.
Anything is worth what people are prepared to pay for it. In a sense, NFTs could effectively be cryptocurrency, except with the complication that whilst one Bitcoin is worth the same as another, NFTs are all likely to have different values based on how desirable the jpeg they represent is.
Both NFTs and crypto are, arguably, relatively unsafe because a typical national currency is kind of associated with real world stuff more strongly than crypto is, which is why crypto value bounces around like a rubber ball, where the average national currency is very consistent over the long term compared to other national currencies. People can ignore and abandon Bitcoin tomorrow. They can't do that with dollars, yen and yuan.
To be fair, the idea of buying stuff to increase its value is argued to exist in other areas (although potentially illegal depending on what it is). For instance, it was known for artists or publishers to buy lots of LPs / books to get them into the charts as a marketing tactic. Some art collectors are also believed to buy art as an investment, because the act of buying lots of it (especially a renowned collector and little known artist) raises the reputation of the artist and value of their art, so it can be sold on later at a higher price.
On the latter point, I read someone opine that much postwar US art is wildly overrated: the reason being that the US wanted more reputation as a cultural giant and the USA was rich, so Americans flashed out $$$ on US artists thereby making them huge beyond the quality of the art. Although I cannot also help but wonder if the author of that article might have been snobbishly anti-American.