Oh do I have a scam for you! So, no, obviously you can't divide an NFT, but what you can do is create a new fungible token (or smart contract not sure about the exact details) that represents partial ownership of the NFT. So you can issue 1000 of these fungible tokens that represent partial ownership of the NFT.
The whole thing feels like some kind of postmodernist performance art about property and ownership.
Actually, come to think of it, maybe that's a great idea. If people ask questions about NFTs, they might start asking more questions about intellectual property as well, and ultimately about property rights in general. In a sense, NFT is the ultimate absentee property - it's impossible to use or occupy. It's a title to itself.
I'm slightly afraid of the asking because of what answers parties might arrive to.
Someone pushing for intellectual property maximalism might see in NFTs a technical counterpart to the legal monopoly on the ownership of digital information. Why not encode the ownership of a copy of the newest game as a NFT, and then have the console check at startup? And similarlines of thought that I don't have the imagination to consider.
I mean, that's basically just DRM, and we already have it - the blockchain adds nothing to the picture.
Well, such validation would continue working for as long as the blockchain on which the tokens are checked is still running, as opposed to when the manufacturer takes down their DRM servers. But that's added convenience to the user; the manufacturer actually loses a degree of control, so I don't see why they'd go for it?
> Imagine writing the investment memo for “20% of a picture of a dog” and being like “the most we should pay is probably about $2 million because the whole picture of the dog sold for $4 million three months ago and it can’t realistically have appreciated more than 150% since then; even if the whole picture of the dog is worth, aggressively, $10 million, this share would be worth $2 milllion.”
> One model here is that everyone on earth wants to pay $4 million for a unique picture of a dog, so if you make one unique picture of a dog and sell it for $4 million you’ll get $4 million but if you cut it into 17 billion slices each one will sell for $4 million?
Fungible doesn't mean divisable. That does not imply non-fungible means something is divisable. I gave an example of somithing fungible which isn't divisable (a barrel of oil) and one which is (dollars). In fact I also gave an example of something non-fungible which is non-divisable (Van Gogh's Sunflowers).
I'm struggling to think of something non-fungible which is divisable, but in any case I'm pretty sure NFTs are not divisable. It might be the case that non-fungible implies non-divisable but fungible things can be divisable or not.
