Somebody always host the NFT image, it can be taken down from ipfs or from a cloud service like s3 at any moment. Also NFT are only worth something because someone provides a frontend to serve the "NFT metadata".
NFTs are essentially sleek frontend UIs mixed in with a speculative volatile currency less juridicial than dollars. It also helps that blockchain assets led by bitcoin are in a bull run.
The innovation is now a company like Dapper Labs can provide a marketplace like NBA Topshot providing a digital experience with licensed content. This digital experience can be traded using Paypal but using a traditional method comes with tradeoffs. Dapper Labs created an in-house blockchain called Flow. The benefits of a blockchain is it is harder for double spends to occur. Blockchain makes it hard for race conditions to occur when the source of truth is distributed among computers in a network.
It would be easier to make a database of hash values but traditional databases are less transparent than blockchains. Blockchains are too expensive. Some digital experiences are worth it, most probably aren't, enough people care about the frontend.
NFTs are essentially sleek frontend UIs mixed in with a speculative volatile currency less juridicial than dollars. It also helps that blockchain assets led by bitcoin are in a bull run.
The innovation is now a company like Dapper Labs can provide a marketplace like NBA Topshot providing a digital experience with licensed content. This digital experience can be traded using Paypal but using a traditional method comes with tradeoffs. Dapper Labs created an in-house blockchain called Flow. The benefits of a blockchain is it is harder for double spends to occur. Blockchain makes it hard for race conditions to occur when the source of truth is distributed among computers in a network.
It would be easier to make a database of hash values but traditional databases are less transparent than blockchains. Blockchains are too expensive. Some digital experiences are worth it, most probably aren't, enough people care about the frontend.