Ok, so I've been hearing "NFTs are worthless" for so long now.
Why is it being repeated so much that it's nauseating? The technology behind them is awesome, the things buying and selling with them are pictures. Of course it's stupid. People buy and sell baseball cards, and magic cards, and pokemon cards. They sell for far more than the fucking cardboard and ink they are made of, and they aren't reminding us they are worthless.
Yes, people who have been sceptical of NFTs have said this for a long time, but now even those who are willing to trade NFTs aren't willing to pay for them anymore (= the price on the NFT market places is zero).
So it's a prediction that has come true.
But its disingenuous. NFTs have value. It's functional value. Tying a image to an NFT and artificially inflating the monetary value of the images has ruined the public opinion on the NFT as a technology.
As an example this post is probably stored in Postrgress with some sort of identifier, possibly a GUID. If I went around and traded posts for cash because I had a GUID of the post, the value of the GUID doesn't change, and the post remains worthless.
Actually I'd even wager this was done intentionally. NonFungible Tokens as a proof-of-ownership cannot be duplicated. If I were a giant financial institution that worked with Fiat currency, high frequency trading, controlling order flow, and using derivatives that aren't back by actual securities, i would be fucking terrified that the common person would find out about the technology, and demand that all transactions made via the internet be non-fungible.
A NonFungible Token is a direct threat to fiat currency, and I'm really starting to wonder if these authors, and the stories of over priced .jpgs trading back and forth is all manufactured.
No, they do not. Value is derived from supply and demand and determined by trade in the market place. If there is an oversupply, but no demand, value drops and can drop to the point where value cannot be determined anymore. At that point things are essentially worthless. That's how the free market works.
I'm not about the price of the image, I'm talking about the value of a non-fungible token to computer software. A non-fungible token itself can't have a price tag, it's essentially a number.
Same with cryptographic private keys. They are numbers. To a computer a private key and nft have no value, but to the software they have function.
You are correct and if we as a society said "this land/material/resource has a value and legal ownership of that is determined by the nft" then yes.
But the actual object behind the nft in most cases is just a picture.
The deed of a parcel of land is essentially worthless except we all agree the person who owns the deed owns the land and the land has value. The issue with most nfts is even if we all agree the who owns the nft owns the art, and the art had no value... The nft has no value.
Most people (even with otherwise good understanding of tech) still fail to grasp that "an NFT" is not the monkey picture itself.
This is both why some managed to be bought for insane prices, and why we see reporting like this.
Your examples would actually be a useful case for NFTs since you'd have to both have a genuine card, and the token saying its genuine