The fatal problem is literally: "who cares". Real "authenticity" doesn't comes from math and comes instead from culture. Using the "if a tree falls in a forest" philosophy meme: if the blockchain claims that you have the Nyan Cat image but nobody cares about it, then do you really "own" the image?
More about the history of authenticity: Religion supplied this culture of "authenticity" for some time, but after the Industrial revolution the widespread duplicate production of commodities, along with the invention of photos and videos, has been eroding away the value of the authentic "the one and only" irrelevant for some time. Walter Benjamin has a nice essay about this change of culture in his famous essay - "
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". And the Internet seems to further accelerate the notion of communal art, where memes only have value if they are shared freely and not when someone hangs it in a museum. My gripe with NFTs has nothing to do with the technicalities of crypto and everything to do with everything else (primarily, politics and culture in relation to technology).
The DRM comparison is one I was dying to see. This NFT stuff feels like the returning nemesis of open culture from previous web sub-eras. I hardly want to own a work. Take it, build on it, sing it somewhere with someone else who likes it.
You can't restrict ownership of physical goods or art really, it's just that there's "authentic" goods and "fake" goods.
So you're right you can't restrict possession of digital goods but you can restrict the right to sell a digital good because any potential buyers will want to know what they're buying is "authentic".
CSGO skins go for thousands with the rarest going for tens of thousands, you can download them and possess them right now but valve says you don't "own" them and can't sell them.
CSGO skins are a slightly different case because of their use in-game. You can't play in an actual competitive game of CSGO with a knife/skin that you don't own.
Yes, there are servers that will let you try out custom skins and knives but you can't play an official game with them. The knives also offer different animations which look cooler than the default one. It's slightly different to me in that there's no inherent usefulness of the NFT's (at least currently - maybe in some metaverse future they have a use).
It doesn't seem like people really want to "own" the NFTs, they are viewing them only as investments which means eventually someone will be left holding the bag. In contrast, people DO want to own the CSGO skins and knives.
Well, no; the best case is they're trying to sell bragging rights in the style of "I'm so rich I can buy original Picasso paintings for no reason beyond showing off how rich I am!". Which is stupid and says depressing thing about human civilization, but isn't really any worse than trying to sell any other kind of artwork in physical form.