but a digital image is not tangible, i.e. something you can have displayed, in a physical frame, in meatspace.
In a pre-digital pre-social media world you’re right. But in the modern world where people spend more time socializing online than in meatspace, digital goods become easier to display than physical ones.
I think a lot of HN doesn’t get this because they don’t spend much time on social media. But for someone like Steph Curry, putting an ape in his profile pic gets a lot more exposure than a Van Gogh on his living room wall.
And I could in 30 seconds, find the most expensive nft, copy the image and use that as my profile picture...
Similarly if you "stole" the blockchain receipt of an actual NFT, therefore gaining "ownership" of it, the NFT community would simply pretend the person you stole it from was still the "real" owner, despite having zero "verifiable" status to it, beyond having possibly tweeted it before you did
I have to use a lot of quotes because even in a hypothetical there's so many variables that applying real world properties to just make my head hurt
Nobody would stop you from hanging it out up in your living room, or even announcing to everyone on social media that it's the original and you're the owner. Nobody would need to, because everyone in the art collecting community would recognize this as super cringe.
People purchase art for social status. What you're describing is the opposite of social status.