> The only reason why one NFT is worth more than another is because of who issued it and what it's linked to. So to argue that the individual token's uniqueness is the only thing that matters is to reject the entire relationship between NFTs and artwork.
I don't really understand your concerns to be honest. It is exactly as you say. The connection to the artist and art matters.
Yes if an artist releases 10-editions for their JPEG image (which happens frequently), then those 10-editions may be semi-fungible, in the same way that say "floor-price cryptopunks" are, where many people are sort of happy to put them in a basket and trade the floor without caring too much about whether they have token 1 or 3. But someone might well decide to care, because token 1 is the one their grandfather used to own many years ago.
Some people may value the edition number 1 more than the remaining 9, but maybe edition 8 was previously owned by Elon Musk and carries a premium.
beeple can decide to release 10 thousand more tokens representing the artwork sold at Christies for $69m, equivalent in every way except the serial number It's anyone's guess what would happen, but presumably it would cost him in reputation, and the original would still be able to command a large premium.
Artists releasing physical prints also on occasion release another series some years after the first; Damien Hirst is releasing more dot paintings, and they are all so fucking similar they may well be considered fungible.
The question becomes, what are NFTs adding to this system?
It sounds like the current system is working, that the social system for determining value based on context is working. NFTs aren't making that better or worse, we're using the same social process that we used before.
And I mention elsewhere, NFTs aren't even really helping that much with the distributed ledger either, they still have to hook into the existing systems for determining seller trust and authenticating that the NFT you're buying is "real". There's little benefit in decentralizing the ledger when sellers have to coordinate with each other to ban bad actors anyway.
So we have two systems that already work, that have worked for ages, and now they're linked to the blockchain because... why? All of the use-cases people talk about with NFTs are stuff that you could always have been doing, you don't need a blockchain for any of this. And it's not clear that the blockchain makes any of it easier to do.
I don't really understand your concerns to be honest. It is exactly as you say. The connection to the artist and art matters.
Yes if an artist releases 10-editions for their JPEG image (which happens frequently), then those 10-editions may be semi-fungible, in the same way that say "floor-price cryptopunks" are, where many people are sort of happy to put them in a basket and trade the floor without caring too much about whether they have token 1 or 3. But someone might well decide to care, because token 1 is the one their grandfather used to own many years ago.
Some people may value the edition number 1 more than the remaining 9, but maybe edition 8 was previously owned by Elon Musk and carries a premium.
beeple can decide to release 10 thousand more tokens representing the artwork sold at Christies for $69m, equivalent in every way except the serial number It's anyone's guess what would happen, but presumably it would cost him in reputation, and the original would still be able to command a large premium.
Artists releasing physical prints also on occasion release another series some years after the first; Damien Hirst is releasing more dot paintings, and they are all so fucking similar they may well be considered fungible.