Can you folks help me understand this #NFT crypto art stuff? I’ve been seeing this flurry of activity with sites like @withFND @rariblecom @SuperRare and I want to better understand...

So there’s what I understand so far: https://twitter.com/withfnd/status/1362107732522721283

Non-fungible tokens (unlike fungible bitcoin/eth) link some kind of digital asset (art being the popular use case now) with an owner. The convenience is that they prove ownership (and I assume also prove the payment/transaction).

I think it’s really awesome that this new art economy of sorts is helping digital creators get paid for their work. And if this sticks, I look forward to some new digital frame companies (remember @ElectricObjects?) and digital art wallet/collection apps starting up.

What I don’t understand: where is the digital asset actually stored? How is the NFT actually made/linked to the asset? What happens if the site where you bought it from goes offline? It’s not like the NFT itself links to the huge video file/etc asset right?

Is the onus on the owner to find a way to store it after purchase? How does the NFT then prove ownership if the location of this asset changed? Is it based on a checksum of the actual file itself?

And of course the crowd favorite: “can’t I just screenshot/download the art from the website without paying and it’s the same thing?” I get that there’s some nuance to this and you’re doing more than just getting ownership of the art, supporting the artist, etc.

This reminds me of how I would sometimes use a third-party service to help me find what websites had stolen my photos and hosted them on their own. It was an annoying process and all came down to proving that these were my photos indeed. Could NFTs solve this?