"Aside from the fact that looking at "art" on a computer screen isn't any different whether it's an NFT or not... some of the world's finest paintings are drawn on giant canvases - 6'x8' or even 12'x16' and they're up to 500 years old or more. How the hell are you "liberating" the experience of standing in front something like that and seeing it for what it really is? It's like saying that taking a picture or video of Niagara Falls "liberates" the experience of actually standing next to that waterfall, trying to comprehend the volume and magnitude of it all, smelling the air around it, hearing the roar of the water, feeling the ground hum and the mist slowly drench you, seeing people from all over the world in the same awe as you, looking over the river into another country... It's just so fucking stupid. If you've been there you know that no pictures, no videos, no drawings or sculptures.... nothing can "liberate" the experience of actually physically experiencing that."
Q: So NFTs are just hashes of JPEGs and music and stuff right? A: Oh, no, it's worse than that. They're hashes of URLs to JPEGs and music and stuff. The actual content is hosted somewhere else, often by a company that has no legal obligation to keep hosting it if they don't feel like it. When you buy an NFT, you're buying the idea of owning some digital art. You're not actually buying the art. The artist doesn't even need to know or approve. It's as dumb as it sounds.
It's ridiculous, but it reminds me of the beginning of the internet; people could register every URL, without having anything to do with the brand or company. Some made a handsome profit selling...
That was different, that actually made sense. Buying up something that in the future have value for someone else. NFTs are like Second Life: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/second-life-leslie-jamison/544149/
Fantastic points you bring up, the nonfungibility of the assets make them impossible to create fakes, and gives it an easy way to validate the real NFTs. The same way I can not copy and paste a beeple painting and try to sell it for 3 million. Each has their own unique ID on the blockchain. If you could have a $750,000 Wayne Gretzky card, would you prefer to have a physical version that can be stolen or burned in a fire or have a digital version where you can print it out to have, but the real one is stored on the blockchain, free of theft and fire with the right prevention measures.
Meet the buyer of Beeple's 'everydays' To this day doesn't own a house nor car and started too poor to even own a laptop.