Is this really a meaningful thing? I mean, of course it is somewhat in terms of how things are viewed. But, theres no religious law that NFTs must be a pure blockchain thing. Possibly they're finding their niche, and that is to be a sort of intermediate, which uses traditional systems as the origin of verification/trust, but can then go forward on its own with no further verification. (Of course, your wallet keys could be stolen and used to impersonate you, but the same is true for login credentials of twitter blue checkmarks)
What does the addition of a blockchain help with here? Selling? Not really, because the recommendation to avoid copycat NFTs is to sell/buy them through official platforms that will verify them. Display? NFTs do nothing to prevent link rot, and in fact make it harder to correct when it does happen. Coordination/portability between platforms? There's nothing that guarantees that platforms will respect each other's NFTs.
> But, there's no religious law that NFTs must be a pure blockchain thing.
Every time someone tells me that verification and enforcement are inherently social/legal processes and not processes that the blockchain is designed to solve, I feel like they're just one step away from finally understanding why people don't like NFTs. The only value of adding all of this math and environmental impact and complication and fragility to the system of buying digital assets is if doing so decreases the social/legal burden of verification. And NFTs don't do that, they don't do anything. They don't even make the secondary market safe.
There are of course systems you could build on top of NFTs that would help solve some of these problems. But you could also build these systems without using NFTs. None of the proposals I've heard about enabling decentralized verification on the secondary market, or making it easier to pay artists, or building a web of trust for issuers -- none of those proposals need NFTs to exist before they can be built. The vast majority of these proposals don't require anything other than basic federation, and many don't even need that.
The blockchain part isn't adding anything, it's useless. We could have the exact same conversation we're having right now, and come up with all of the same solutions for verifying and distributing digital assets without ever needing to talk about or consider a blockchain. It's not adding anything, it's just kind of there.
And you're right, there's no strict law that everything must happen on the chain. So we could also just drop the chain entirely, use the same token issuance systems that have existed for ages, and focus only on solving the problems that actually need to be solved.
