[gnopgnip]

The utility of art or collectibles is a very small portion of the value. A game worn Michael Jordan jersey you paid $100k for has essentially the same utility as a <$100 jersey. It is valuable because it is scarce, and the provenance

[jancsika]

Sure.

But suppose you ripped that jersey into a thousand pieces, and sold each separately. People might still buy it, because those pieces as a whole were in fact a Michael Jordan jersey at some point. A piece of that history is cheaper to own than the entire thing.

Now suppose you rip it into 100 million pieces and create non-fungible tokens where each tiny piece could be scanned with a phone, identified, and associated with an arbitrary blob of data.

Now it's a race of a savvy PR team against the public's hazy and soon-to-be waning interest in what-- if anything-- is the value of one of those microscopic jersey specs. "Something something Michael Jordan," got you to distract a captive audience from Candy Crush for five seconds. What happens next has absolutely nothing to do with Michael Jordan, and everything to do with P.T. Barnum.

Edit: clarification