Ultimately the system will evolve toward more centralized entities which can verify the providence of items. Whether that's an auction house, or a twitter verified badge. The sites which allow "viewing" and "transacting" the NFTs will display this "chain of authenticity".
Thus, its baked into the price; plenty of counterfeits exist, but the "real" one ("this is the one Deadmau5 tweeted about") will be worth the most.
The argument that this is antithetical to the distributed goals of blockchain are missing the point; its a marriage of old-school centralization and new-school peer-to-peer. Centralization is great for some things, like verifiable providence. It's been a negative force in other things, like limiting or taxing access to financial services & marketplaces.
Furthermore, if you're in the camp of "zero centralization"; it's great for that too. Imagine an artist publishing their GPG key, creating an NFT of a piece of art, then signing some part of the content of that NFT with their GPG key.
This idea of combining NFT and GPG to demonstrate both ownership and authenticity is very intriguing. Would the artist's public GPG key have to be something similar to a verified Twitter account, i.e. some kind of due diligence by a third party that the key actually belongs to a specific person/artist? How would the artist "sign" the artwork with the private GPG key in such a way that the signature wasn't simply duplicated when the digital artifact was copied? Is there a way to combine some identifier from the NFT with the GPG key such that there was a way to cryptographically demonstrate authenticity?
All NFTs have a verifiable chain of providence baked-in; you can see the wallet address of the account which minted it.
So, I present GPG signing not really as a novel mechanism for establishing authenticity given a lack of any other method; the NFT itself is the authenticity. Today, zero-trust creators may publish their GPG public key; tomorrow, maybe they publish their address; "the only legit NFTs are the ones minted from this address"; this is cryptographically secure.
But, maybe a creator is more "well known" for their GPG public key, or wants to mint from a large number of addresses for whatever reason. They could sign a phrase which includes the wallet address which minted the NFT; when combined with the verifiable providence blockchain already offers, this is a compelling and secure solution for them.
Blockchain has all the same "zero-trust bootstrapping" problems as GPG does; where does the artist actually broadcast "this is my address", and how can fans know that it was actually the artist who said it? It's something GPG has struggled with for a long time. Ultimately it usually falls back to centralized authority; that doesn't mean GPG doesn't have value beyond the authority who told you "Yeah, this is Deadmau5's public key".
The idea is simply presented more-so as a bridge between the old and the new. Many people here understand what GPG is and why it is valuable, but don't understand how blockchain delivers an extension of that value. GPG is great at asserting authenticity; blockchain extends this and asserts both authenticity and providence ("is it real, and where did it come from?"); this is a critical addition required for a concept of ownership. But blockchain's ability to assert this ends at the blockchain, as you'd expect; the world will still need centralized authorities to jump the gap between the blockchain and a human being.
IF that matters in the context of a given NFT. There are tons of NFTs which created 'virgin value' so to speak; value of thin air. No one cares who minted them; the token itself is what is valuable.
Wouldn't it be basically the same as a centralized blockchain that was exclusively used to verify "original" NFTs? That would seem to be a better way to me, IF the community could settle on a singular blockchain to hold it.
Thus, its baked into the price; plenty of counterfeits exist, but the "real" one ("this is the one Deadmau5 tweeted about") will be worth the most.
The argument that this is antithetical to the distributed goals of blockchain are missing the point; its a marriage of old-school centralization and new-school peer-to-peer. Centralization is great for some things, like verifiable providence. It's been a negative force in other things, like limiting or taxing access to financial services & marketplaces.
Furthermore, if you're in the camp of "zero centralization"; it's great for that too. Imagine an artist publishing their GPG key, creating an NFT of a piece of art, then signing some part of the content of that NFT with their GPG key.