[noahatwi]

I agree with you that intellectual/digital property has value, but I think that it is impossible to establish authenticity in an entirely decentralized way.

If you are a notable artist wanting to sell NFT art, what makes your tokens valuable is that you have verified your identity with the service which deals the NFTs, and that the service is reputable. Otherwise, anyone may set up an account claiming to be you (on another service for instance) and sell the same JPGs attached to a new token.

In the absence of a centralized authority, the only sign of authenticity is chronology (who minted this jpg into a token first), which is very susceptible to chronological "squatting" e.g. an opportunist discovers an artist's works and mints them before the artist does.

The difficulty of replicating physical works of art has the happy side-effect of massively strengthening their authenticity.