It is a bit like owning a protected building, for example a French castle.
You "own" it in the sense there's an immutable paper trail that proves you and you alone are the owner. However, the castle being protected as a national monument, you cannot bulldoze it or even change it in any way by law AND you are obliged by law to open it to the public.
But at least the same system that creates constrains also grants you explicit ownership, the castle can’t be duplicated, and it’s value is tangible. Here, Twitter isn’t selling the NFT — it’s a pledge of value from Dorsey on something that’s completely unrelated. For something that there isn’t one of… every person who views the tweet is looking at their own identical copy.
This all feels very strange to me, probably because it is so intangible AND Twitter is still broadcasting the message just the same AND Twitter already has a concept of ownership which isn’t being honored here.
It's how this is, at its root, about the concept of credit, rather than the concept of property.
If I grab something out of your hands and you say, "that's mine!" That would be property.
But if I put up a painting and you ask, "who made that?" That would be credit.
There is no scarcity of blockchain space - you can download Bitcoin right now and use less space than the newest "Call of Duty" collection. The property is very easy to acquire.
But then if you ask "who made Call of Duty", you are forced to point to the system of IP law, which may or may not credit the individual creators properly.
So, what NFTs are trading is a particular form of credit. This tears up some economic assumptions around what credit is "worth". A popular blockchain is one that allocates credit accurately and fairly.
But credit isn’t the same as ownership. Here we can all go to Jack Dorsey’s profile and have the question answered “who made this tweet?”. This is more “who bought this tweet,” except because it’s not physical and infinitely copyable with zero degradation by just going to his twitter profile, I fail to see how this NFT carries meaningful value that will last in time. We’d need society to recognize the value, and when there’s no cost to the copies, it seems to go against most of signaling theory.
You "own" it in the sense there's an immutable paper trail that proves you and you alone are the owner. However, the castle being protected as a national monument, you cannot bulldoze it or even change it in any way by law AND you are obliged by law to open it to the public.
Basically you are buying bragging rights.