NFTs and a Thousand True Fans
&gt;<i>NFTs are blockchain-based records that uniquely represent pieces of media.</i><p>There is a jpg of an artwork on the internet that anyone can view and copy. There&#x27;s also a non-fungible token that&#x27;s linked to this jpg. I just don&#x27;t see how NFT proponents want to make the actual connection between the one and the other in a way that&#x27;s both decentralized and unique.<p>- You can have some authority that says &quot;THIS artwork belongs to THIS token&quot;. Then, you don&#x27;t need blockchain, because you have a central authority.<p>- You can encode the relation on-chain by e.g. taking an md5 of the jpg. How do you know which token claiming to be &quot;the unique token for that jpg&quot; is the real unique one? Even if there is a class of token that preserves uniqueness, it can only do that internally within the class, we&#x27;re back to the previous point of needing some centralized allocation to say which class of tokens is the real one.<p>Edit: for the last point, you can take the one with the earliest timestamp of course, as per another comment.<p>Anything I missed? Has anyone even thought about this in-depth? Are a16z&#x27;s crypto dabblings just empty hype chasing?