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Comparing an original painting to a photograph of the painting is the exact issue the OP is making. They are asking why people would pay for a photo, when anyone could have the same photo. There is no original, scarce painting to own. Just all identical copies.

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"Original" doesn't really exist in the digital native world. Data is literally copied when it gets distributed.

Maybe think of NFT as a pointer to the head of a link list, the start of the data distribution chain. And we assign some arbitrary monetary value to that pointer, because, well, there's only 1 head of a link list.

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