It’s easy to just dunk on the NFT community for this Which Ape Is The Real Ape stuff, but it reveals the fundamental challenge facing NFTs, the one that dissolves the claim of “inherent value.”
NFTs are not legal contracts. NFTs are not encrypted versions of desirable digital assets. They are tokenized pointers to URLs where digital files live — at least at the time of purchase.
Purchasing an NFT is purchasing a pointer, with the understanding that the NFT community implicitly agrees to pretend that is the same as owing the referenced digital file. Words like “contract” and “unhackable” and “ownership” are very specific terms of art in NFT-land.
You can “purchase the Mona Lisa via NFT”, but that means something very specific. You’ve given someone money, in exchange for them telling all other NFT users that a particular metadata file belongs to a particular account number.
The account number is what “owns” it, not you. If someone gains control of your account (by your fault or the fault of the “digital bank” you use) then all the digital things you own can be looted.
The “crypto assets” in the account are not yours, they are the account’s, and keeping the account safe is definitionally outside the problem-space of cryptocurrency.
In addition, in the Mona Lisa scenario, the “crypto asset” that is “owned” by the account is not the Mona Lisa. It’s a pointer to the ID of a file somewhere on the Internet, often just the URL of a JPEG.
Nothing in the structure of an NFT inherently grants any rights to the digital file the NFT points to, let alone to a physical work of art that the digital file represents. The Mona Lisa is not yours because you paid someone to tell the world your bank account contains a URL.