I have been looking for a useful formulation, or metaphor, for why the NFT premise feels so [preposterously] wrong to many including myself. Here is one idea,

I have been looking for a useful formulation, or metaphor, for why the NFT premise feels so [preposterously] wrong to many including myself. Here is one idea, for how we intuit value: As a fraction, in which non-fungibility (~= "authenticity") is the denominator; nominal value (whatever that is, a function of context etc.) is the numerator. In the sports card example, a physical object with a provenance has intrinsic guarantees of uniqueness. Low uniqueness means high intuited value. In the NFT case, a hash has non-intrinsic guarantees. They are provable; they are not perceptible. Uncertain uniqueness means low intuited value. It's not that it's not provably unique; it's that if we don't perceive it, no one cares. Perceptible and provable for us monkeys is a serious and real difference. That's the general idea. The edges are full of corners, for sure, e.g. a counterfeit or reproduction can be exacting enough to create a new game for us to play (I am reminded of the rabbit hole of reproduction collectible watches...)... the quest of authenticity has a fractal quality in the case of mass-produced but limited goods (what edition number? What pressing? The one with the misaligned cyan?)... ...but in the 80% case, I think it's simply, we monkeys like objects; ideas remain a hard sell. My own belief is this is so deeply baked into the relationship between our world modeling that it will not be overcome through culture. A lemma might be, non-fungibility is less important than materiality. Authenticity for fungible goods, like gold, is persistent, in part because they are fungible. It's their material (perceptible provability) that reassures us. I believe this is rooted in intuitions about the scale and durability of consensus on value containers, which appears until recently to have been in the long view winner-take-all, in the case of things without pragmatic use-value.