That's really not accurate. Let's say you buy a table, and you get a receipt for it. Cool.
Eventually someone comes along and wants to buy the table from you. So they give you some money and leave with the table. The receipt does not participate. It is irrelevant.
You forgot to give them the receipt.
This is btw also why it is
highly relevant to keep the receipt for any bikes if you intend to re-sell them, as that nft is proof of ownership and that you didn't just steal it (and why the buyer wants that receipt too).
This is completely different from the concept of the NFT, for which you literally buy and sell the receipt, while neither of you actually possess the table. (Which is also why NFTs are extremely dumb, but that's not the point I'm making.)
This argument is just as flawed as "you wouldn't steal a car". Remember that the table is digital, and in that piracy comparison the nft is your steam-receipt that you own a license to one of their game-as-a-service.
This fact that you are trading a receipt of/"license to" a service, is why the best comparison in any analogue is a postal stamp:
You don't sell the letter you sent through the mail system and expect them to somehow use it to mail their own (though you
can detach the stamp and resell it), you sell the non-fungible receipt to use the service - because just like digital products it [the mailing service] is intangible goods.
Both steam licenses to a
gameservice, and postal stamps, are
classified as non-fungible. And I don't think anyone would disagree that a stamp is a token (and at least
I would argue that the steam receipt is a token of ownership of said steam license). Making them both NFTs.
That concept is pretty new. I suppose the closest "old" equivalent is a commodities market where you buy and sell ownership of something without needing to ever actually be near it, but--ultimately, someone does need to receive those things, so it's still not the same. Non-fungability is not a new concept and tokens are not a new concept, and trading abstract pointers to things isn't really a new concept either, yet NFTs really are a new concept. They weren't around before because they're a worthless idea, and became a thing once the infrastructure to run them was already in place and there wasn't a high barrier to creating such a scam anymore.
Now you are starting to talk about the specific usage of the concept that uses the crypto blockchain.
And if we are talking about crypto NFTs used as a receipt for a license to (or even ownership of) a piece of art, then we need to make the distinction that it is not actually the art-piece itself you own (since there
is no art piece to own). But rather the
intellectual property rights (aka the copyrights
).
Before crypto was a thing, this sort of token used to be called a contract (Or whatever you got from a commissioned hentai artist. A receipt?), and companies constantly buy and sell those, and overall force their artists to sign employment contracts handing over those rights.
And if you bought the ownership and not just a usage license,
neither them nor the crypto-based ones are actually non-fungible. If you had bought the IP then you could
absolutely proceed to split it into smaller parts and sell onwards (movie rights, translation rights, cinema rights, usage rights, etc). In other words, they are
absolutely fungible.
(which I suppose clearly proves I don't actually know what the crypto nft's actually refer to, since they shouldn't be fungible, per definition? ..But what I think it refers to, is fungible)