... you think counterfeits are not a thing ? People spend inordinate amounts of time and money to ensure that the painting the buy is indeed from the painter it is said to come from
Because that's the reason people value the NFT. The fact that someone can take a picture of the Mona Lisa and try to sell it as an NFT is not the point; people don't value that NFT, and NFTs are not designed to prevent that from happening.
It is a simple ledger entry that records the ownership of an edition released by an artist, and people choose to value it because of that.
The problem is that anyone can mint an NFT. Verifying that an NFT is actually minted by the artist would likely require some sort of external certification that you can trust. This is done for paintings and other collectibles as well.
What I don’t understand is: Once you have an external certifying authority, why have blockchain based NFTs at all? Couldn’t you save a lot of energy and complexity by tracking purchases in a database?
It is none of those things. It does not record ownership, there is no guarantee it is released by an artist... And people do not really value them either, other than people speculating or scamming.
No, the point is that the NFT is from the artist themselves.