> But unchecked ability to mint any number of tokens by anyone for any artwork makes them pretty fungible to me. They aren't any more non-fungible than artwork

> But unchecked ability to mint any number of tokens by anyone for any artwork makes them pretty fungible to me. They aren't any more non-fungible than artwork replicas in a gift shop (sure, there's a warehouse full of replicas, but your copy is yours only!) A couple of notes: - 'by anyone for any artwork' is a source of confusion. The only that matters is legitimacy. There is only one Cryptopunk #1234, and only one XCOPY NGMI. Anyone else can "mint" a token claiming to represent that XCOPY work, but short of fraud, people will not treat it as the original one. - Some artists do mint multi-edition pieces, i.e. an "edition of 30". These are then basically 30 fungible pieces, because for the most part people do not care which one you have; there may be a premium paid for edition 1, or something that a celebrity owned before, but then the same thing might be true for a giftshop replica that used to be in the Oval Office. - It's not super helpful to think about fungible/non-fungible as a binary. "Floor" Cryptopunks are sometimes treated as fungible-like, when people for example put them into pools where you can get price exposure by owning a share of the pool. > Immutability shouldn't depend on the use of IPFS. It could be enforced by including a hash of the image file on the blockchain. Again, some notes: - An IPFS url essentially is the hash of the file contents; ergo, an NFT using ipfs urls does contain the hash of the file. Some NFTs link to a metadata JSON file first, but that just makes it a chain of hashes. Blockchain contains hash of JSON -> JSON contains hash of file. - The Cryptopunks, one of the original NFT experiments, did exactly what you said: It added a hash of the image files into the contract. It's an excellent method and more was never required. Or corollary here is that NFT critics being concerned about the image files disappearing, because it's just a URL, is somewhat misguided; sure, someone will have to host the image somewhere, but think of the URL has a helpful tool to make it easier to build generic display clients; not something essential to the NFT. > Why is this not required and enforced is baffling to me. Inclusion of a perceptual hash would also help with production of duplicates. I guess smart contracts aren't smart enough to implement any of this? What if an artist wants to produce duplicates? What about that whole world of dynamic NFTs, where the visual representation is supposed to change? What if two artists both want to mint a conceptual art project that is represented by very similar empty squares? What about artworks that are HTML files, or include audio? What about Mitchell F. Chan's Immaterial Zones, which have no representation? What if I steal an image from an artists Instagram and then "mint" it, as a griefer? What would be the point of any of this if there are multiple blockchains?