This will be the problem with every attempt at giving NFTs a use value.
At their core, NFTs are just cryptographically signed identifiers. They only intrinsically have exchange values. Any use value must actually be provided separately. That includes the image itself. In this post, the author demonstrated how much people take “fetching the identified image and rendering it” as intrinsic to the NFT, but it’s, in reality, still just performed separately. (He did so by making an NFT that would look different from various services).
This goes even moreso for more complex use values. Embedding as a Twitter profile picture is one. When video games have NFT items, using the item within the game is a use value provided by the game service.
The only decentralized cryptographically ensured thing that NFTs give you is the ownership of the NFT. No centralized authority can take that away. But they can lock down any use of it.
Marlinspike’s a barely reformed techbro but he can be very funny
To get a feeling for the web3 world, I made a dApp called Autonomous Art that lets anyone mint a token for an NFT by making a visual contribution to it. The cost of making a visual contribution increases over time, and the funds a contributor pays to mint are distributed to all previous artists (visualizing this financial structure would resemble something similar to a pyramid shape). At the time of this writing, over $38k USD has gone into creating this collective art piece.
He used to be a crust punk dirtbag, but yeah he’s been pulled into techbro world to some degree recently. That’s the career trajectory for cryptographers tbh. You can only bash your head against inconceivably complex cryptography problems and attacks for so many years before it’s time to sell out and make some ez money resting on your laurels. He’s earned it for sure.
