You're not early, so stop congraturating yourself.
This isn't just some random point of order; it actually has relevance if you want to make money in NFTs.
But...
If you've ever traded a digital stock, you're actually trading an NFT.
The ownership of your stocks, for convenience, have all been transferred to a company, Cede & Co. "Cede" as in you cede (give up) control of that thing to this entity. Wow. Can you be any more fuckin...arrogant?
So yeah, you're not early in NFTs. And the issues that have always revolved around digital stocks are the same ones that haunt the retail NFT market.
Ownership
That whole big kerfluffle about you not really owning your Opensea NFTs because Opensea hosts them on private servers? Same thing with your stocks — Cede & Co. actually owns the stock and can sever the link between that piece of data on your ETrade screen and the actual value of the holding any time it wants. It won't do this willy nilly, because that would cause a retail shitstorm (and out the company; it wants to be the devil that don't exist). But just like the ToS in the CEX that just froze your withdrawals, Cede can and will completely bankrupt you if it needs to.
Value
Does your stock really represent value in the underlying company, or just a value someone is willing to pay you for it at that moment in a secondary market? If NFTs haven't made this apparent to you, I don't know what will. There is literally no link between the price of a stock and the value it represents. The link is only tenuous at best, because "smart money" doesn't want to invest in stuff that dumb money doesn't uphold, so if dumb money starts selling, smart money gets mad (and stops withdrawals/halts trading on Robinhood 😂). But let the bottom drop out and see what the tide really brings in...
Utility
In theory, those shares of stock are supposed to give you votes on actions the company takes (DAO, anyone?). In reality, you need to own millions of shares, and even then, there are all kinds of rules in place to keep uncurated individuals from doing this. In reality, the company does whatever it wants, especially in times of crisis, and the "voters" really have no recourse other than to sell the shares if they don't like it.
NFTs have always been with us. You're just catching up. And the NFTs you see on Opensea will eventually behave the same way as the NFTs that surround us now. There is very little new tech coming out of this, at least so far. I plan on changing that.
---
