[cslarson]

Cryptocurrency (dumb term) just means token - it is a very broad concept. Tokens can have stable value pegged to a fiat, or represent share of a company, or a non-fungible item like a house, or a fungible share of a house, or claim on profits from a financial protocol, or memecoin, or a way to pay for transactions. Of course traditional valuation models can be assigned - it just depends on the characteristics of the token in question.

[jw1224]

Exactly this. I see so many people conflating NFTs with “expensive JPEGs”… No, an NFT is a cryptographically-secured representation of ownership of an economic asset.

Yes… It also happens that there’s a ton of money being ploughed into weird, niche, expensive digital art. But this has now created an economic market in a space where previously one was not possible, by virtue of the fact you could never prove something was original, unique, or “yours”.

[groby_b]

Except most digital art lacks provenance in the first place, so you paid for a cryptographically-secured link to a bunch of bits somebody claims are original. (It turns out an https link on a domain you own does the same work)

The lack of provable provenance means that a good chunk of NFT "art" is actually stolen from the artists who do the work.

Bored Ape demonstrated that the theft of NFT art is easy, and the supposed ironclad ownership can easily be changed by the sites listing the art work - because they can just decide that those ironclad bits you hold aren't really yours. At which point you have a central authority arbitrating ownership, which is even worse than what the art world has right now.

It's certainly a lovely place for all sorts of cons, but as economic asset or cryptographic representation of ownership it is an utter and complete failure. You still can't prove something's original, unique, or yours. It just has a thin veneer of technobabble to hide that fact.