Stop right there! Almost every article about this topic makes this claim and it's totally false.
Strong cryptography dates back to the late 1970s. The Merkle tree, the cryptographically immutable data structure that's behind all blockchains, was patented in 1979.
Strong cryptography is all you need to "verify the rightful owner and authenticity of digital artworks". No blockchain is needed, no wildly expensive consensus has to happen every few minutes, because there is a "single source of truth" for each claim about authenticity or ownership.
The consensus blockchain is only useful in the case where there are many more-or-less anonymous participants, each with equal weight. But in the case of, "Is this authentic?", for example, quite the reverse is true: only the original artist can authenticate their own work.
And artists have tried to use that to sell their digital art to others since the early 1980s, but it simply did not catch on, because they couldn't get people to care about it.
But I don't believe people care about the art one whit more today. A lot of money has sloshed into the area because of the cryptocurrency bubble, and people with millions of dollars created out of nothing are desperate to prove that the technology has some value outside cryptocurrencies.
In my numerous discussions with NFT investors and proponents, I realized that all of them, every single one of them, thought of art as a thing to purchase exactly and entirely as a financial investment — that the only reason you'd want to buy art is to sell it at a greater price to another person.
I have easily spent over a hundred thousand dollars on art in my lifetime, on making my own and buying other people's - simply for my own aesthetic gratification. Let me be blunt here — I find this attitude horrifying and repulsive.
There's a reason that all the art is wildly superficial and even quite ugly. There's a reason almost all NFT collectors say they had never bought art before (not that they are buying art, even, but a pointer to art existing elsewhere). It's all aimed at people who do not actually have any interest in art as from its financial value — the superficiality and ugliness is the point, it shows that worthless dross can be anointed with the Magic of the Blockchain and transubstantiate into Great Art worth millions of dollars.
Digital signatures are useful, free, and require only tiny amounts of computation time and storage, can be added to large real world documents (images, music, video) or stored independently, and have been around for forty years. NFTs are slow, expensive, take a huge amount of storage because of the massive reduplication, and cannot store actual real world documents. In every technical way, they are inferior.
The reason to use NFTs is this: people are buying them right now, because the billions of free magic cash that cryptocurrencies have made appear needs to justify itself somehow. This can’t go on much longer…
If you can sell NFTs and are willing to stomach the fact you are selling something to people that will certainly lose them money, you should do it, but do not buy an NFT — if you want to give the artist money, just give them the money in cash.
