Hey just wanted to first say thanks for taking the time to write a detailed response.

> I've never even seen the thing with my own eyes, but I know it's a pretty big flex by the French that they own it.

> It was insured in 2021 for $870M.

That's fair but I would argue that physical ownership of it is different than digital ownership in that physical ownership inherently has some fundamental copy protections built in (at least to a point).
Also I do think that the art market in general is a bit special in that it's kind of hard to assign an underlying value to the asset given that art is so subjective from both a personal and cultural perspective.

Some in this HN discussion have made the comparison to star registries and that seems apt as theoretically anyone can start their own star registry and naming a star in there largely has no effect outside of that [1][2][3][4]. If you want to pay a few bucks to "name" a star in some one's personal record of account then fair enough; I can see how that could make a fun gift, especially for a child. But if now you were to spend a couple thousand or millions of dollars then I'd really start to question the intent of the registry.

Maybe I misunderstood your point though.

> It's not about donating to the artist directly, exactly. It's about putting a value on their work, which is likely more valuable to the artist than a direction donation.

Also a fair point.

> Maybe, but if you ever need to "really" own the piece for some reason, you'd have to reconcile to mainnet anyway, and the artist would get paid then.

If the royalty fee is percentage of the resale value, which I believe is common [5], then ownership can still be had without paying the fee by any party by selling the token to the contract for free, trading the contract for some amount, and then triggering the sale from the contract to the contract holder for free. Since the amount the token is ever sold for in this scenario is 0 then no fees are ever owed.

Now if a fixed amount royalty fee were used then one party would have to pay the fee to put the token in the holding contract and then the final party would have to pay a fee to take it out but in between the contract could be traded fee free.

> Actually, most artists want their work to be widely seen. This creates a virtuous cycle. You buy an artist's work, which increases the value of that work, which increase the artist's exposure, which increase the artist's perceived value, which increases the value of the work you purchased, which leads to more sales for the artist, etc.

So artists want their work to be widely seen to increase its popularity and desire and narrowly owned so that value can be assigned and transferred.

I'm not sure how NFTs on their own accomplish this for digital assets. It seems to me the inherent fungibility of the digital art sets it apart from physical art or objects. Just because the token is non fungible doesn't make the asset it intends to represent non fungible. One would need some way to enforceably and meaningfully bind the two fully or partially (say with a limited view count per individual, restricted use, etc) to accomplish this. Without any restrictions on the digital art then all you have left is social perception as an enforcement mechanism.

Now that I think about it I think that's the crux of the argument.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_designations_and_names...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Star_Registry#Fa...

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Star_Registrar

4: https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=b&k1=-1&kam=osm&kak=-1&kax=-1&ka...

5: https://www.nft-innovation.com/post/how-do-nft-royalties-wor...