A Guide to NFTs, and How They Are About to Revolutionize Pretty Much Everything

Maybe someone more knowledgeable than me can help me understand but from the time I spent to take a look at NFTs they don't really make sense?

If I want to buy a NFT currently there are many different marketplaces where I can buy it from. What's stopping a creator from just creating on multiple marketplaces?

Also it seems like only some marketplaces have verification for creators so wouldn't it be easy to create a fake account and upload/ sell someone else's work. (Doesn't it seems wrong for this to be a onchain application if it's just a chain reflection of what a centralised entity has verified in meatspace?)

Furthermore it seems like all NFTs don't actually store the data onchain but rather just store a pointer to IPFS or to some bucketstore. Doesn't this mean that the actual content could change/ be removed underneath your contract and your NFT would be worthless?

I'm really excited about all this new tech and innovation in the cryptosphere but NFTs seem to be highly exploitable and don't get much of an advantage by being on chain.

EDIT: Forgot to mention but I've also been wondering about duplicate marketplaces on different chains.

With the Bianance Smart Chain taking off a bit it seems like we now have the potential for marketplaces (and all NFTs in them) to be duplicated and run on different chains. In this case it would seem that the NFTs you own are only worth as much as that chain has popularity. If BSC became the most popular chain your ETH based NFTs would be worth less and so forth with other chains.

It also seems like this would have the same issue that duplicate content be created and sold on multiple chains.

CryptoKitties are NFTs. A NFT on the Ethereum network is an ERC-721 token which makes a what cryptokitties is built on.

Colored coins was a proposal to add tokenized asset capability to the Bitcoin blockchain but I don’t think that went anywhere. Ethereum was originally going to be built on bitcoin but Vitalik was not welcomed by the bitcoin devs so he started his own thing.

The concept of exclusivity is one of the rights of ownership, generally. There's none of that when you "purchase" an NFT that represents a "digital print", and, while it does support the artist (just like a direct payment would), there is precisely zero to indicate that such an NFT would increase in value with an artist's popularity. It's not like if you pay 10x for it as the second owner you get to hang it on your wall and the first owner doesn't. Also, precisely zero of that value increase would go to "support the artist" - all of the profit would go to the original speculator.

I'm a big blockchain advocate and I can't see any point to NFTs either, other than for perhaps tracking ownership of specific physical objects. For digital files of any kind, there's no exclusivity that "ownership" confers.

NFTs fascinate me as a technical/political concept, in terms of creating new digital certificates of ownership (I don't think it's that new, as CryptoKitties and offshoots have been around for a while).

What confuses me is how this ownership will be enforced, as it seems like one of the main purposes of governments is to enforce property rights. I think it's simpler to enforce these ownership rights with bitcoin because 1) the token has to be on the bitcoin blockchain and 2) each bitcoin is equal to the others.

Questions I have:

1) If one person registers a thing (can be digital but also analog, as I see the NFT as just the certificate of ownership), what stops that person from registering it on another blockchain? Is there only one blockchain for these proofs of ownership?

2) Assuming there is more than one blockchain and they exist independently, what stops another person from registering that same thing on another blockchain?

3) What stops a person from registering a very slight deviation of a thing (e.g., in the link, tweaking the green color in eyes of the smiley face)?

4) What stops someone from registering something that others have created but haven't yet registered, i.e., me scouring the internet to find un-registered art?

5) What rights do the people who own these NFTs have over the item they own? E.g., some people talked on CH about how if one buys an NFT of a digital art piece, some NFTs will say the person cannot print that art piece on t-shirts and sell them.

6) Most importantly, who will resolve the myriad of disputes that will result from the above?

As I ask these questions, I realize that maybe many of these issues get reduced/eliminated by having verified identities of the person registering the thing. I'm not sure, I'm open to hearing answers that help reduce my skepticism :-)

I think the biggest promise of NFTs is proof of patronage/bragging rights for supporting an artist. Displaying an nft piece is like a painting being on loan from a private gallery to a museum. Owner and creator are clearly designated.