But you get a baseball card that's pretty hard to perfectly duplicate, not a link to a digital picture of a baseball card, which can be copied at virtually zero

But you get a baseball card that's pretty hard to perfectly duplicate, not a link to a digital picture of a baseball card, which can be copied at virtually zero-cost, and where you have zero control over the hosting of that picture, and can be replaced at any time. What's the point of 'owning' a digital baseball card if anyone can download it and store it on their PC? There's only one Mona Lisa, it only hangs in the Louvre, you can't just have an exact copy of it at zero cost. It's make-belief ownership. The only viable application I've seen is digital licensing, for non-free software or digital assets. This can work in a closed-garden system, like in-game assets, software licensing, ... where you don't have control over the environment you're in, but cannot work on an open internet. But anyway, the gas-cost on eth is WAY too high ($70-ish to mint?) for this to be actually used for these applications, and if you're in a walled-garden anyway, who needs decentralisation?