[vokep]

But they aren't. They're pieces of cardboard with a particular story. The card has no value itself, which is why a rookie card isn't very valuable, unless its of someone famous. Why? because one is a story right at the beginning, which may not even be a good one, where there other has an established success story behind it. Owning the card is representative of owning a chunk of that story. You can say its arbitrary, but the fact is the picture on the card is of a real person with a real story, and their image on the card is part of literally that same story.

So with NFTs, its the same, anyone can write a document that says "this certifies ownership of a picasso painting" and it doesn't mean much of anything. However if Picasso writes up a document broadcasts somehow he has done so and the document says you own x painting, then its easy enough to certify to anyone that you own a Picasso from the man himself. The story is not arbitrary, this is precisely why it has value. The arbitrary easily copied stuff is cheap and meaningless and known as such. The "rare" NFTs and stuff selling for massive prices is expensive because it is genuinely so. You can write a comment here about how easily you can create a counterfeit NFT, but how easily can you actually convince someone to buy it from you? You can observe that baseball cards are just pieces of cardboard but how easily can you acquire a card printed when batter X was a rookie?

I'm not saying this sort of value is easily quantifiable, but it is easily observable, identifiable that its reflective of a real element of reality and not (entirely) arbitrarily imagined.