We have a large and robust financial system that is perfectly capable of facilitating low/no-cost donations. The latter would be forgivable but it also seems highly unlikely there would be a large market of altruistic donators wanting to provide patronage specifically via NFTs. Would we say "selling stars enables amateur astronomers to profit from their work"? Or would we rather say selling stars enables scammers to scam people who don't know any better? Or charitably that selling stars enables charitable people to donate money to whoever is selling the "star", both parties to the transaction recognizing that there is nothing of value being exchanged. The money they are making isn't because of their art, it is because their sales skills allow them to convince greater fools that inherently worthless digital signatures are actually worth something. I mean, sure, but again, they are selling digital signatures with no inherent value that they need to "make a market for". "NFTs allow digital artists to profit from their work!"
How is the market for NFTs any different from these essentially ponzi-scheme markets?
Let's substitute "digital signature"/"NFT" for "tulip", or "star", or "moon crater", or "beanie baby", or "MLM beauty product". And the owner needs to convince other people that their "owning" the signature has value, so that other people will pay larger sums of money for transferring "ownership", or other people will be recruited into the market to buy more stuff. It is a pointer to an infinitely and freely reproducible resource, meaning the owner of the signature doesn't actually have control over the underlying resource, they just have "proof" that they "own" it. So an NFT is a digital signature that is worthless unless it "makes a market for" itself.
IMO NFTs right now are little more than a good way to fund artists you like by buying digital signatures over their digital art. They can do something they couldn’t do before, which is to digitally sign X amounts of their artwork and sell it on an permissionless global market. But really they are just enforcing DRM over a bunch of pixels. It used to be that in order to enforce DRM on “legitimate” copies of a film for instance, Netflix runs a bunch of servers, sells you the streaming and reliable delivery of pixels to your screen. Think of it as a form of DRM for digital artists, in the actual meaningful form of the term - Rights Management being the operative words here. You might ask - well what the hell is the point of buying just signatures? To what I’ll reply that everyone has their own kink, and that it has solved a big problem for digital artists who can now make money for their art instead of having to shill for brands or make trash to fund what they really love. Curiously, what we’ve found is that if you make just a Market for digital art, where you sell only the signatures, people will come and trade them and buy them. The art, being digital and infinitely reproducible is still out there. What you’re getting with an NFT is just the signature. Since the digital art is infinite, you’re mostly really paying for the signature. So think of NFTs as when we “decoupled” the art from the signature.ĭigital copy (one of infinite) + Signature NFTs are meant to be used for digital art, where the physical object doesn’t exist, and anyone can make their own copy. It used to be that when you bought a painting, if you bought an original, you got a painting + signature showing it’s an original. That’s it I’ve decided I’m making a post about NFT myth busting.
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