This works if you just want to prove that you and the artist agree that you paid the artist “for” the work. But, if you can’t transfer it to someone else, is i

This works if you just want to prove that you and the artist agree that you paid the artist “for” the work. But, if you can’t transfer it to someone else, is it really a “token” in the relevant sense? Not that I think there’s much value in the NFTs corresponding to digital images, outside of from people being somewhat silly in what they value, but this nevertheless doesn’t satisfy all of use-cases of those blockchain tokens. With those blockchain tokens, as this article mentions, you do have to trust that the author is the actual author, and that they aren’t like, issuing more than they say they are (perhaps using different addresses), but these are adequately handled by reputation and the author simply having a single well-known-to-be-their-only-official address/public-key . But, this trust is only needed for the origin of the token, not for resale of the token. Whereas, with this system, attempting to use these “tokens” as something that can be resold, would be vulnerable to the double spend problem. Now, if all you want is to be able to prove to others that you and the author agreed that [you paid the author money in relation to the image or other document, and that they received the payment], then 100% yes this is a better solution. Why get an expensive public ledger involved if all you want it is to be able to prove to others is that you and someone else both attested to a particular claim? That sort of thing is exactly solved by public key cryptography. (If people don’t know your public key is yours, but they do recognize the artist’s public key, there are standard ways to prove you control a key (though not that no one else does)) Whether this serves the purpose that people want NFTs “of”/about digital images to serve, well, that depends on what that purpose is. And, I’m not sure what that purpose is exactly, seeing as, again, while I recognize the subjectivity of economic value, I still think buying such tokens is kind of silly.