Skins are an interesting comparison. I feel like that falls under the utility category I mentioned, like when you buy a skin you are really buying the right to use something at a particular place and time (a cool looking gun during a match), and nobody else has the right to use it. In contrast, whenever I see the Disaster Girl meme posted somewhere on the Internet I don't see any indication of who "owns" it.

It has an owner. Its copyright belongs to the photographer who took it - Dave Roth, father of Zoë Roth, the girl in the picture. If you ever see it reproduced in a newspaper article you’ll see him credited.

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”.

> It has an owner. Its copyright belongs to the photographer who took it - Dave Roth, father of Zoë Roth, the girl in the picture. If you ever see it reproduced in a newspaper article you’ll see him credited.

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.

Those are good points. The comparison to an autographed photo is actually really fair and puts it in a different light for me. But half a million bucks for an autograph from the girl in that meme? It still sets off my BS detector but I'm open to the possibility that I just don't get it.

Roadmaps! Like those spicy ICOs in 2017! I wonder if 90% of them failed, or is it 95%?

I think 'utility' might be a stretch for the BAYC roadmap.

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