Usually when you sell something, there are a bunch of legal rights that go along with the sale. What exactly did this guy buy? The right to look at the tweet? The right to restrict others from looking at it? The copyright? Any advertising dollars which flow because of that tweet? What?
He bought the bragging rights to say "that URL of that image of that tweet, if you look at this particular public ledger, you'll see that the ledger says that I own it!"
If the NFT craze has shown anything, it's that too many people don't have any understanding of the law. They don't seem to know what "own a thing" means - neither the "own" part or the "thing" part...
Jack Dorsey sold a token with a link to a jpeg, the point being, that token with a link to a jpeg (we all know what a token is, we generate tokens all the time) is worthless. There is no jpeg in the token itself, just the link to the gallery that hosts the jpeg.
By the way, the token could contain any sort of short information, the address to a C++ pointer in the memory of my computer for instance.
So what? If Jack Dorsey took a dump, preserved in resin and sold it as an abstract representation of his first tweet, how would that be different, more genuine or less genuine than this NFT?
well for one, you could have exclusive access to that specific dump. Ironically there's more scarcity in what you described than an entirely publicly accessible NFT Pointer to a file with unrestricted access on the open internet.
