I threw together a contract in Solidity that would do all this and cut out the middleman / middlewinkelvii. It wasn’t hard.
What am I missing? Why is the contract not the token?
You need to use a well-defined, pre-agreed interface (ERC-20 for tokens, and ERC-721 for NFTs I believe) so middlemen like OpenSea can understand and transact your NFT on their platform.
If you don't need OpenSea or Rarible, you're free to define them however you like.
Also, the reason the "token" is usually a location inside an array in the contract is primarily for gas (and legacy) reasons - storage on-chain is expensive, and it doesn't look like it's getting cheaper anytime soon.
I don’t understand how this is any more susceptible to cloning or any other problem. Maybe also not less susceptible but I still don’t get the value add of the NFT versus basically just a good transparent contract with a few things stored.
I do get the value add of the gallery/dealer but what’s their advantage in using the NFT instead of a contract? Is it just so Beeple can set numerology prices in USD?
Still feel like I’m missing something fundamental here, I’m usually not more right than everyone else.
If the contract stores the owner, how is it not the “token” at the same time?
Royalties are pretty easy: contract knows the artist, artist gets say 10% of every resale, owner gets the rest, purchaser becomes new owner. Anyway this and NFT both have a big vulnerability around royalties: I can make some of the payment in cash if I want to cut out the artist.
It depends on the smart contract. I can write a smart contract such that if you did that, the ownership of the art would be still the previous owner. The previous owner cannot change the ownership of the art to you without paying fee to the original artist.
Do you have a solution to that?
The advantage of which is.... I guess centralization.