[miracle2k]

I know it is hard to wrap your head around, but really, the link does not fundamentally matter. Cryptopunks are just a hash of all the images. The whole point of an NFT token is to be a digital signature, essentially. It is just a shared agreement between buyer and seller to value that signature, and as long as we know that it represents the Beeple artwork, then the fact that the technical implementation points to a porn url, who cares - that is just an aide.

In fact, the original art could even be lost (as much physical art is). People could still value the signature!

Felix Salmon gets it:

https://twitter.com/felixsalmon/status/1372242410386944014

[TeMPOraL]

I see. But to that, I can counter: described like this, it won't scale past a small group of acquaintances. The same reasoning can be applied to a verbal agreement - I can pay you for "that thing we both know", and it'll work the same... until one of us changes their mind and declares the transaction invalid. And the arguments we may have will look completely unsubstantiated to any third party we'd like to involve in it.

A lot of formalism around real laws and real money exist to make word of mouth scale. It's why people pay money accepted by everyone in their society, why they enter written contracts - of the type they can expect the court of law to treat as valid, if a dispute escalates to the point of involving third parties.

Can't shake the feeling it's just the next chapter in the story of cryptocurrencies rediscovering the hard way the last 10 000 years of social development.