And if an NFT did represent the right to download and play a particular game from Steam (like, you had to present proof of ownership of an NFT to Steam to be allowed to play the game), such that I could sell that NFT outside of Steam to someone else... well, the value of that NFT is only as good as Steam's willingness to abide by the agreement it embodies, which they can unilaterally withdraw at any time, so there's little value in Steam honoring such a thing. If they wanted to permit game resale, they can do that, inside their own database, without any NFT nonsense.

So yeah, it's still a bit of a mystery if or whether this actually adds anything, but I'm just trying to put myself into the mindset of people who are excited by this and trying to figure out what excites them, rather than just assuming they're all dumb because they think buying numbers is going to change the world.

With all this fancy software and energy spent on mining, what then is the point of all that effort?

But people don't run "smart contract software" in their own brains and at the end of the day if these things are to be meaningful to people they have to interact with people and institutions and good old fashioned "contracts". It's trying to solve sociological and political problems with code, but we don't have a real world substrate for those "programs", what we instead have millennia of institutional history and contract law and at the end of the day those still matter more than what the computer says even you personally don't trust those institutions for whatever reason.

ETA: [1] Don't forget that it's a common fallacy among tech idealists that computers are unbiased and objective "because math" rather than machines that will reflect the biases and subjective opinions of those that program them.

Ethereum is already full of fun stories where "smart" contracts did extremely dumb things because they took a programmer's word extremely literally rather than a programmer's intent.

In a world where programmers are assumed to be ordinary, fallible humans that's a ton of pressure to put on a programmer to never make a single mistake. While there's a lot of active research into trying to bring technical solutions to that human problem such as strict "formal proofs" and such of the programs being made into smart contracts, I'm increasingly of the opinion that would benefit them the most would be political and sociological solutions such as classics like "courts of appeals", "trials by jury of peers" to determine intent over literal substance, and so forth.

Those aren't "fun, technical" solutions, and would require placing trust again in institutions and people, so I absolutely have zero optimism that any smart contracts system would embrace them. I just think that they need such political structures to exist otherwise you left with merely a lowest common denominator tyranny of software bugs (no matter how formally the best contracts mathematically prove their claims/efforts).

I can see smart contracts working with very low volume specialized scenarios for this reason.

Also traditional dispute resolution is expensive plenty of times where both parties would be willing to accept the risk of a bug over paying lawyer fees

Whether or not that is an expensive process is orthogonal to the question: if a "smart" contract makes a mistake, how do you fix it? Right now there is just zero recourse and everybody shrugs their shoulders at it, "oh well, that's just how software bugs work, sorry about your loss". That's an awfully hard pill to swallow for the average person. Real contracts built up a lot of mechanisms to keep contracts fair and equitable by making sure that when one goes wrong there are ways to deal with it.

Right now with "smart" contracts it's a wild west of whether or not escrow accounts exist and you can maybe, optionally get people (or institutions) involved to fixed something about to go wrong or in the process of going wrong, and there's just about no way in most "smart" contracts to fix things after they've gone wrong. But critically it's a "right" in most contract law-based countries to challenge a contract in a court of law and get a human opinion from a jury of your peers, and I don't see how average citizens can trust a system where that "right" is not given as such and is an "optional" feature that they generally have no idea exists in a specific "smart" contract code (much less if that feature itself is buggy or not).

I realize (per above) that this is often a "feature" and not a "bug" in "smart" contract design today. Most of the designers don't trust institutions (and maybe not even people) and like the "freedom" of "smart" contract platforms with few regulations, few "required features", and few places for instutional/personal intercession. I just don't think that's a good situation for most people to ever trust "smart" contracts in the real world.

The NFT Zoë Roth sold doesn’t convey any rights over that image or its use. It’s got the faint frisson of exclusivity to it - kind of like if you had a print of that photograph signed by Zoë Roth. It’s a little bit special that it’s an NFT minted by her in specific reference to the meme; and it has some additional cachet as a historical artifact of being maybe one of the first meme NFTs, so there’s that.

So sure, I can sort of see there being some value in the bragging rights of being able to say “look, I have the private key to the ethereum wallet that has the right to transfer ownership of this binary string to someone else, and look - this cryptographically secure chain of numbers shows that that very same binary string is the one Zoë Roth cryptographically signed with her own private key way back in 2021…”

Just, that’s going to be a lot to explain, for the bragging rights, I think.

Compared to pointing to a picture in a frame and saying “yeah, that’s signed by the person in the picture”.

Note that we casually may call him the owner, but having certain legal claims such as copyright is not the same thing as the legal concept of ownership.

This is relevant, because pointing to a picture on the wall saying "yeah, that is an original Disaster Girl print" is a very different social flex than saying "I am the artist of this well-known photograph". The latter doesn't really need nor benefit from an authenticated digital print on the creators wall; of course the artist can print dozens of copies and they are all authenticated.

For Dave Roth to sell the the copyright or certain license rights to the image is just such an entirely different transaction that I am not sure why NFT critics keep mixing them up.

That model of NFT is very much on the MLM end of the scale.