The NFT concept seems stupid at first, and a 60 million NFT is definitely stupid. But imagine Youtube is the metaverse where videos, or NFTs, are published, and the owners will forever receive royalties from Youtube advert/membership profits. People can upload similar videos, but then there is, for example, music rights violation arbitrated by the site that some or all the profits of the video revert back to the original creator. And generally all free for the consumer. By no means perfect
Mining could be people caching, and serving NFT content, through which they could get paid, and preserve internet. Partially replacing web hosting, and preventing censorship. Using your neighbors pcs to speed up video encoding
For example the Google News problem with Spain and Australia URLs can be NFTs, and have rules. If a site is referencing a URL and is profiting, a part should go to the URL owner, but if the URL is clicked then a part goes to the site that referenced it https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/3/22761041/google-news-rela...
You might say that people don't like these new concepts, or mining is bad for the environment, but right now we can make them what we want them to be. The internet will evolve somewhere and if we don't think about it, someone else will and we won't like the result! Everything is up for grabs, payment systems, identity authentication, personal data management, web3 economic model, social media, news platforms...