> What problem does Bitcoin (Or blockchain, if you prefer, I'll take either answer), solve?

I'll bite.

Currently, digital goods are relatively useless, which disincentivizes their creation and usage. NFTs change this, by making digital goods far more useful, which will encourage the creation of innovative digital goods we've never seen before, and add useful new functionality to apps/websites/games.

What's a digital good? It's basically any data stored in a database: tweets, forum posts, upvotes, badges, items in video games, etc. These goods aren't very useful for numerous reasons. For example, they're typically leased rather than owned. If Twitter were to close its doors tomorrow, you would quickly find out that "your" tweets are really their tweets, and they can delete them from their database if they want to. Also, digital goods aren't portable. There's no real way for you to take your HN points with you to another website. Instead, that website would have to ping HN's API (if it even has one) with your credentials to ask how many points you have.

Imagine if the real world worked this way. If you went to buy alcohol from a restaurant or a store, you wouldn't actually own a driver's license that you could carry around with you. Instead, each establishment you patronize would have to call up the DMV and ask them to check their database to see if they have your license on file and if you're above the legal age to drink. This would obviously be a shitty way for goods to behave. But that's how they work online.

By making use of the blockchain, NFTs are a decentralized way to track ownership of digital goods. In essence, your crypto wallet(s) can serve as a "digital backpack" for you to store digital goods (NFTs) that you've acquired from apps, games, websites, or other people. That means real ownership -- none of your goods disappear just because the entity that gave them to you disappeared, nor can anyone tell you what you can and can't do with your goods. It also means portability. Today when you show up to a new app/website, they have no idea who you are. In the future, you'll show up with your digital backpacks in tow, and you can reveal their contents to the service you're using, and they can see what you have and react accordingly. That's what portability means, and it's obviously quite useful.

For example:

- Let's say Reddit granted you an NFT badge for being a moderator. When you sign up for Hacker News, you could share your digital backpack, and HN could look inside and see the moderator badge NFT you got from Reddit, and decide you're worth trusting more than the average Joe. Maybe HN would give you downvote privileges without making you earn the points first? Who knows. But one could imagine lots of trust-based use cases like this. What if colleges gave students NFT-representations of their degrees?

- I believe Lyft employees get $400 in free rides every month. Imagine if that was handled via an NFT: new employees get an NFT, and Lyft gives anyone who owns that NFT the free rides. Most would just keep it. But some employees might choose to sell, trade, or give it away. After all, it's their NFT that they own, not just some row in Lyft's database. You could apply this to other perks and awards as well. Suddenly, perks are granular and portable.

- What if games give you NFT representations of the items you earn? Then other games can see that you earned those items, and if their developers choose to, they can represent the items in their games, too. Perhaps if I get an NFT showing that I'm a grandmaster in StarCraft 2, some other game can skip me ahead in the ladder so I don't have to grind my way up. Or if I earn a magical sword in World of WarCraft, another game might give me their version of that sword just because they know I'll think it's cool.

- Every time I sign up for a new social network, forum, or dating site, I have to reenter my biographical information from scratch. This is tedious. What if I could just write down my bio and keep it in one of my backpacks as an NFT? Now every time I sign up for a website, I can show them my backpack, and they can autofill my bio.

- etc. If this technology becomes ubiquitous, it's difficult to imagine what types of digital goods will be created 5 or 10 years from now, just like nobody imagined Airbnb or Uber back in 1993 when the web was new.

What this essentially does is transform the internet into a metaverse. Instead of a bunch of silo'd apps that store all their data in silo'd databases, we as individuals own and control our own data, that we take with us from place to place. Instead of apps having to make NxM API calls to interact, there's one global API (the blockchain) that every app can write to and read from. Suddenly, everything on the internet is interoperable.

> What problem does it solve that no other distributed system does as well, if not better? I've yet to see the answer.

This doesn't matter that much. Is HTML the best technology imaginable to build web apps front ends? Certainly not. But it's the one that won, so that's what we have.

Similarly, blockchains are winning handily. For various reasons, they're gaining mass adoption. It's quite likely that the internet of the future will be built on top of blockchains. In fact it's already happening.