NFTs didn't hold up to even the smallest amount of scrutiny. You'd have people say we will all be trading land as NFTs but can't answer what happens when hackers steal your land NFT. Obviously it makes no sense for the police and government to respect the stolen NFT but there is also no mechanism for correcting this mistake so the blockchain is now out of sync with reality.
And in the end, people care about reality a lot more than they do about blockchain data.
So you're telling me that this thing is going to have value because of artificial scarcity... but anyone can create their own new NFT (including one that links to the exact same image) at any time?
Oh, and many of the people involved are going to stay anonymous, and attempting to prove the authenticity of one of these things by deferring to off-chain authorities goes against the intended spirit of the entire thing.
There was a joke "It's obvious now in hindsight that NFTs are a scam, but to be fair, it was also obvious before, and in the middle too"
I'm not sure anyone at any point thought they were legit, it was crypto chuds hyping their next scam, and the media willing to join in for extra clicks. The real losers were the the ones who bought in thinking they would find a greater fool to off load their magic beans to later.
I think the media went bananas with NFTs because images are clickbait and NFTs are primarily a way of trading images. NFTs allowed news organizations to write a bunch of both positive and negative articles about cryptocurrency and include unique images. Entire narratives could be created and gained traction based on who the artist was and "why we do (or don't) like them". Previous articles about the weird cryptocurrency thing didn't have images or only had the same tired Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. logos or Getty stock images.
In an "art market" context it makes sense. I can print a copy of Warhol's Campbell Soup labels, but that doesn't devalue the original, nor is my copy as valuable as the original.
It's not about copying the pixels, it's about showing provenance.
But surely, the thing that makes Warhol's soup cans more valuable than a copy is the fact that Warhol (or his studio, anyway) actually touched the original. Being able to show provenance isn't what makes it valuable, it only shows that the particular thing in question is the valuable one.
I can paint something right now and show provenance for it, but that won't make my childish scrawl valuable.
The problem with electronic art is that there's nothing special about the original over copies in this sense. You can't hold it and know that you're holding the very thing that the artist was working on.
And the fact that a painting is not reproducible. The best you can get is close to the original, but it will still be different because its the real world. Copies of digital assets are exact replicas. Thus, the only real value is, as you say, provenance, but I think much fewer people care about that than we all seem to think.
The thing is though, no one cares about digital signatures. Tech bros can't even be bothered checking signatures for ISOs they are about to deploy to production. You think normies are going to check the NFT metadata, track down the original sale, find the artists public key and validate its legit so they can think "Oh no this NFT is a clone, I will now revoke my enjoyment of this picture"
Most of our interaction with digital signatures is indeed transparent.
You are viewing a website right now with a certificate stating this is news.ycombinator.com signed by someone in your OS trust store.
I can just make a certificate saying a different website is news.ycombinator.com. What I can’t do (hopefully) is get it signed. You will have a very different UX when I do this.
Even though I can easily make an unsigned document, the digital signature in the certificate still has value, just like the NFT.
You can’t automate checking NFT certificates because they are all “real” and valid NFTs. The fact that the one you have wasn’t signed by the person who created the picture isn’t something cryptographically or even technically possible.
I worked for a company that made NFT character skins for their games; of course when the game checked your wallet for game skins, it only looked for NFTs that were signed by the game company. As you said, impossible to clone or forge.
Of course anyone could (and did) clone the ARTWORK associated with the NFT and create fake/pirate NFTs; but they had no in-game value. That's still a problem for players who might get duped by the fakes though.
In the end, though, using the blockchain didn't enable any functionality for the users that couldn't have been accomplished using a plain database of ownership. In theory the blockchain would grant some permanence to the asset, but once the game company shut down the market value of the asset cratered anyway.
No one is talking about this because it doesn't matter. If there is a centrally trusted and approve key, then blockchains and NFTs add nothing. When there is no centrally trusted key, then clones are trivial.
NFTs are simply crypto scammers trying to find a problem to their solution they have.
There are many non centralised cryptosystems including PGP and Signal. It’s potty hard to convince someone you own a fake beeple. On the internet there’s token gating, in person it’s going to look weird when you pull out Apple/Google photos instead of a wallet app.
Or that the average person would care about these internal details beyond their understanding. Sure, you can't copy an NFT with the creators signature, but the average user has no idea how to validate this let alone even cares to validate your shitty profile pic isn't a clone.
And in the end, people care about reality a lot more than they do about blockchain data.