Presumably....
...I could just take an image of the document (perhaps by cropping the image in in this very article), and create a new NFT?
Which raises the question - why bother?
A dual-format auction of a physical and digital non-fungible token (NFT) version of a job application penned by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has come to a close – and the physical side has emerged victorious, by an order of magnitude. Set up by former ad exec Olly Joshi and launched last week, the auction took a physical piece …
Yes, you absolutely can and there are definitely cases of people creating NFTs for things they have nothing to do with and making bank already. There's also nothing stopping multiple NFTs for the same thing. At the end of the day an NFT isn't proof of anything at all and has no useful value at all other than reselling to the next sucker. They're the virtual equivalent of a void replica deed to a property.
Also because creating an NFT is significantly more complex than creating a cryptocoin they're many, many times as environmentally impacting to boot. The average NFT emits as much carbon as a cross country drive, and the more they're bid on/transferred/sold the worse it gets, it's not just at time of manufacture but continuous and forever.
I saw someone describe them as an ecological nightmare pyramid scheme, and that's pretty much right on. At least tulip bulbs could be planted into tulips.
She clearly understood the "hype cycle" and that at the point that auction was carried out NFTs were probably peaking so it wasn't an unreasonable prediction.
I'll bet the resale price of this NFT has already fallen since the 15 minutes of fame for NFTs in the popular press is already over.
NFTs will end up with some purpose, as proof of ownership of the "original" copy of something digital which can be proven to be from its creator will always be worth something in the same way that the typewritten copy of a Hemingway novel as sent to the publisher would always be worth something. I imagine Linus Torvalds could offer an NFT for the initial version of Linux he released, for example, and draw some pretty high bids. If I offered such an NFT, however, it should be near worthless since I had no connection to the release of the first version of Linux.
They were auctioning ownership of a copy of the original document, and were then surprised that it went for less money than the actual original document? That's like expecting obvious recreations of the Mona Lisa to sell for more than the Mona Lisa itself!
They could have tied the NFT to ownership of the original document itself, thus the NFT would be a cryptographic (and public) attestation of ownership of the original document. That could then provide a protection against theft or forgeries, such as if you were to buy the document, and the NFT is transferred to you, but later find out you were given a forgery, you would still be considered the legitimate owner of the original if it were to be uncovered, rather than just being a schmuck with a worthless piece of paper.
Surely to maximise returns for your favourite charity, the trick is to sell the NFT of the incredibly collectible and historic bit of paper first. Then when the hubbub dies down, sell the extraordinarily rare and covetable physical object.
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I have just shredded my old (7 years plus) bank statements, and car service history documents (I sold the car for scrap recently, but the file was over 1" thick and included all the failed MOT certificates, receipts, insurance documents and other stuff). I could have made a fortune selling the NFTs for those 100+documents and the paper versions as well.
In what alternate reality? You're essentially pitting a scan of a document against the real thing. Make up all sorts of technical sounding bullshit about fungible tokens, it's still a picture of something versus the real thing. And everybody thought the picture, the copy, the not-the-real-thing would attract the higher value? In what alternate reality?