[manholio]

> 1. the capacity to signify a digital original and 2. to decentrally organize ownership (though it's more like possession) of these items.

There is nothing novel in this. You could do it in Bitcoin too by agreeing that a certain transaction structure that includes a digital hash is a valid way to signify an original with that hash, and a spend from that address represents an ownership change.

It's simply a convention, and people don't do it because it's mostly a useless diversion from established ways to record and trade IP.

The true NFT innovation is the marketing gimmick that such a convention has any real world relevance and somehow magically makes the IP non-fungible. This enabled massive speculation on essentially worthless (and fully fungible) IP, expressed in a clunky and impractical distributed database.