Like anyone else with ears, I’ve heard a lot about NFTs of course. I understand (at least the broad strokes) how cryptocurrencies and blockchains work. I even get (I think) how NFTs work for digital assets (e.g., say for a representation of the first tweet, it’s not necessarily the actual “thing” that’s non-fungible–anyone could replicate the ones and zeroes that represent that tweet–but only the “true owner” can show that Jack Dorsey actually transferred it to them on the blockchain).
However, I always see that one of the use cases for NFTs is authenticating real-world things and I’m not sure how that would work. For example, if an artist sold an actual physical painting and the provenance was established using an NFT, how is that one, real, original painting ever again proven to be the one linked to the NFT? In other words, I buy the painting, I own the NFT. Ten years later the painting has appreciated 1000-fold and I want to sell it, but the buyer wants to make sure he’s getting the real thing and not a copy. Is that a problem that NFTs purport to solve? (And yes I realize in the non-NFT world this exact problem has always existed, so if the answer to that question is “no,” then I get that. But I thought one of the value propositions of NFTs, like cryptocurrencues, was to disintermediate transactions, i.e., you don’t have to hire someone to authenticate a work, you don’t have to use (say) Sotheby’s to mediate an auction, handle escrow, etc., etc.)
