I don't own any NFTs and personally find them a bit silly, but I think it helps to view them as trading cards more than anything else.
Anyone can print off a picture of a pokemon card, but the one with perceived value is the one actually printed by Pokemon Co.
Same with NFTs. The NFT's distributed by the actual artists, or the MLB NFTs actually distributed by Topps, etc. should be the ones with perceived value. This doesn't stop scammers of course, same deal with people making counterfeit pokemon cards or using artists' work on shirt-printing sites.
When any artist sells an NFT of their work, theyre not selling an authentic original of the art, they're selling a digital trading card collectible version of it. What that's worth is up to the people buying it I guess, monetarily and psychologically. It's all value pulled from thin air, so I'm skeptical of it, but that's true of any collectible market.
The analogy falters a bit though when you consider that when you buy a trading card, you actually bought a physical, tangible object that is then unbound from the means in which it was printed/sold. No one is in control of the future of that card beyond me. I own it, the object itself, and can do with it as I wish. I could just store it somewhere, put it on display for people to see. I could hoard it in a box and literally no one could see it. I could re-sell it, using any currency I wish, or even barter with it. I could roll it up and smoke it if I really wanted to.
But I'm not granted all those same rights with an NFT. The object is essentially bound to the server in which it's uploaded to. I don't own that data, and I have no ability to change it. And all I'm purchasing when getting an NFT, is the link to where that data is. I have to hope that link never dies (which in 99.99% of cases is outside my control), or else I literally am left with nothing. Is it upon the seller to make good on the fact that I no longer have access to the thing that I paid for if it goes dead? Or is that the person who minted it who's legally responsible? Or is the reality that I paid "for the link, not the thing it links to" stop me from having any recourse in asserting my supposed ownership of something if it vanishes?
I don't see how this is any sort of improvement over just paying an artist for their art directly. I give artist money, they send me a file. That transaction represents a legal contract that I am the owner of a copy of something they produced. Hell if we wanted to get real fancy, we could actually write up a proper contract to enforce that. And then I "could" just do whatever I want with that file. I could upload it for the world to see, which yes, would allow people to right click save it and copy it for themselves, just as NFTs allow now. I could keep it to myself never showing the world, or re-using it however I wish (although possibly within the bounds of a sales contract if there was one).
Instead we have an incredibly convoluted system designed to lock the assets into the ecosystem so desperate to prove itself valuable, while simultaneously not actually granting you as many (or ANY) legal rights to the thing you bought as you would have if you actually just bought it.
Nothing is stopping me from commissioning an artist for a picture, and showing the picture to the world, with legal proof that I own it (and that the artist has proof they could legally sell it). What did NFTs do to improve that?
