Regardless of your view on NFTs, haven't they been "a thing" for like a week now? Perhaps I'm just too risk averse but that feels like a very low amount of data to make such a large decision on
Does that also work for physical art? My parents were full-time artists, but did not know how to sell anything, so now I have inherited hundreds of paintings. Should I create NFTs for them?
The artists who create the future cannot short-sell themselves, can they?
Also one of the artists I was talking about, who quit to work on NFTs, was design director at one of the world's biggest agencies, so not exactly waiting tables.
But yes, I was thinking about artists waiting tables. My spouse works in theatre, and it's normal even for modestly successful actors and artists to be working service jobs. I have asked why they worked those kinds of jobs when they were clearly smart enough to have better-paying white collar jobs, and they always say that quittability was one of their top concerns.
In the period where one could live in San Francisco for a non-insane amount of money, I knew lots of visual artists and sculptors who lived like that. (Anyway, all of them are now coding or have left.)
I don't mean to contradict your experience: the word "artist" covers a pretty wide swathe.
This stuff is in the news to sell the crap to the people who don’t really know what they are doing.
And I can’t help but wonder if it is a true scam - you could do some massive early transactions to pump of perceived values and create get-rich-quick hype (optimally, these should mostly be left-hand-to-right-hand transactions), then go ahead and make money as an NFT marketplace. Or by selling other works from the artists that you just pumped to the moon (which you had purchased before the pump operation).
Something I wrote yesterday[0] that I think is relevant here:
> I'm not sure I understand the hate for NFTs. Don't get me wrong, the concept of NFT as currently used is completely absurd and definitely overhyped. But what is bad about it? People who spend their money on NFTs mostly do it because they got rich in the past few years gambling on BTC or ETH, and now use that money to basically tip the artists they like. Or they plan to resell the token at some point, which is pure speculation, but nobody other than themselves risk to get burn. Minting and selling NFTs is almost zero work and effort for artists, all the risks are on the buyers side, and only if they buy them as speculative assets.
> It still make no sense to me, but if rich people want to gamble their money and by doing so support some artists, that doesn't sound too bad IMHO.
> I would be more cautious if retail investors would start to gamble in this market, but that's not what I've seen so far.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26448481