You can think of NFT like a baseball trading card. You may get an ownership to the card, but you won't get ownership for that baseball player depicted on a card.
Now of course, if there's a contract that says "whoever owns this baseball card owns this baseball player" then you get an ownership, but that's unlikely. Same with NFT, unless there's recognition and contract in place that designates ownership of actual work, you won't own the work itself.
There are unlockable NFT's where you get access to what is inside. Think of a JPG with the words "My favorite Color" in a black font on a white background. That's it, and that's all any non-owner sees. Only the owner is able to unlock and see what it is. Everyone else knows my favorite color is inside that NFT, but they don't know what the color is.
It's an overly simple example of course, but now carry that out to trade secrets, future stock prices, gambling picks, private videos etc. The "art" on the outside isn't really relevant. It's just an indication of what it is you're owning. It might be just that art, or it might be something else depending on the contract. You're seeing the box, not what is in the box. You have to own it to get the contents of the box.
> There are unlockable NFT's where you get access to what is inside.
The use of NFTs for tracking subscriptions, memberships, or other credentials is an interesting idea in its own right, but let's not confuse the issue by claiming that these external services keyed to NFT ownership are somehow "inside" the NFT. They're a hybrid of centralized services with decentralized access control. Everything "inside" an NFT is a matter of public record on some blockchain; the nature of the system precludes storing any hidden information. Ownership of an NFT can serve as credentials for accessing information on some other server, but then you're forever dependent on whoever runs that server.
Of course if you're dependent on a particular centralized server for the content anyway then that server could just keep track of the ownership itself and avoid the overhead of a blockchain, but there could be cases where multiple services want to share the same access control in a decentralized, market-oriented way.
Well, technically one could save some information that could only be unlocked with a private key directly on blockchain, without centralized servers. Selling such piece of data would mean decrypting it with old owner's private key and re-encrypting it with new owner's public key.
I have no idea if any NFT is encoded this way though.
> Well, technically one could save some information that could only be unlocked with a private key directly on blockchain, without centralized servers.
Sure, but that just moves the problem around; instead of secret data you have a secret private key to manage. The cyphertext can be stored anywhere—on the blockchain, in IPFS—but the private key to decrypt it remains separate from the NFT: If you put it in the NFT then everyone would have it.
> Selling such piece of data would mean decrypting it with old owner's private key and re-encrypting it with new owner's public key.
Any protocol such as this would require out-of-band communication and carry counterparty risk. What happens if someone sells the NFT but refuses to hand over the data, or claims not to have it? The smart contract can't deal with this as that would require making the key public. I'm not seeing any way that an NFT improves the process over simply paying someone to give you a copy of the secret.
> NFTs can be resold on-chain, whereas unlockable content are items that live off-chain, and therefore cannot carry on to future owners on the blockchain.
That pretty much says all you need to know about "unlockable content". Simply put, if you buy the NFT through their platform they'll give you something extra. This bonus content isn't actually part of the NFT at all and is indistinguishable from any paid digital download, apart from being bundled with the purchase of an NFT.
The thing is that even with a NFT token, you are not even including the art itself in a token, rather a link or identifier to it. So there's nothing that prevents multiple tokens pointing to the same art.
This is just as multiple baseball cards pointing to the single baseball player.
Yep, I’m agreeing with that. I’m also augmenting the argument that NFTs are pointless by saying that in the case of digital goods there can be an infinite amount of identical copies as people want so even if you somehow manage to limit the number of NFTs pointing to an asset, it’s still not really unique.
Thing is, what’s “non-fungible” here is (arguably) the token itself, not the thing it points to.
Now of course, if there's a contract that says "whoever owns this baseball card owns this baseball player" then you get an ownership, but that's unlikely. Same with NFT, unless there's recognition and contract in place that designates ownership of actual work, you won't own the work itself.