But you could have done this with a credit card.

And I think for most people getting a piece of paper, physically signed by the author stating that it's their work is far more valuable than some UUID on a computer.

Some NFT platforms also support credit cards. But, I'd rather buy art in a way that doesn't include exploitative third parties that take a significant cut (Stripe, Shopify, PayPal, currency exchange fees when paying an artist in another country, etc).

For reference, the last NFT I purchased on Hicetnunc.xyz had a protocol fee of 0.002947 XTZ (around 1¢ USD) and a platform fee of 2.5%, the rest of the sale went directly to the artist's wallet.

To your second point; this remains to be seen—society can place value on many different abstract concepts, "ink on paper" may not be the only valuable vehicle for art and culture.

Platform fee of 2.5% doesn’t seem that different from the fees the payment processors you listed charge.

In practice, the fees in traditional e-commerce systems tend to be significantly higher than 2.5% (I say this as an artist running a Shopify print shop for a few years). Some services like Bandcamp are upwards of 12-18%.

Hicetnunc fees are fixed, and the free market gives an opportunity for other platforms to improve on this if the community desires a marketplace with lower fees (it's much easier to build an alternative to Hicetnunc than an alternative Stripe/Shopify/PayPal). Artists are also given a 10-25% royalty (which they decide) for each resale of a token on the Hicetnunc marketplace. And, of course, since it is all peer-to-peer, you are free to exchange art tokens with no fees at all, save the negligible protocol/transaction fees.

> society can place value on many different abstract concepts

What society definitely can't place value on is a URL to a digital asset that may or may not be there tomorrow, because an uninsured, untrusted value store can't be relied on.

There's nothing saying NFT artifacts have to be digital, though, I'd think. Using them to facilitate trade of physical artifacts would back the trade with (relatively) reliable value stores (physical artifacts) while benefiting from the low transaction fees.

you’d think that but you would be wrong. Kids today happily buy skins and items from games and are quite proud of them.

You don't need to buy an NFT to hang prints of the art that's pictured in the URL in the NFT on your wall.

Not even legally. Unless the artist sold you an exclusive license to hang on your wall, I guess, which they can do with or without an NFT.

I hate to break it to you, but things on IPFS can and do evaporate.

You can always pin it on your own IPFS node rather than rely on others to keep the content available.

Indeed; nothing in life is permanent.

> And, most importantly, the artists and non-profit organizations in the arts are getting paid via NFT sales.

So why couldn't you have just donated money to the artists and right-click-saved / printed the art anyway, without involving a blockchain?

For many reasons, including lower fees (see [1]), acquiring ownership of an artist-signed asset, rather than a digital media file (the limited-edition token is cryptographically signed by the artist, the media file is not), participating in a digital art community, supporting decentralized systems, etc.

A simple way to frame Hicetnunc is a social media platform that is not driven by FAANG, advertising models, and "Like" buttons, but instead by artists, collectors, and OSS developers participating in a digital economy: selling and trading tokens, and also exploring ways to steward and maintain that work without solely relying on traditional centralized third-party services.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29160891

> For many reasons, including lower fees (see [1])

The lower fees derive from the medium used (crypto instead of traditional payment processors). You didn't need to involve a NFT to send crypto to the artist's wallet.

> acquiring ownership of an artist-signed asset, rather than a digital media file (the limited-edition token is cryptographically signed by the artist, the media file is not)

I'm going to refer to the rest of this comment thread about whether 'ownership' is a suitable word for having a cryptographic signature applied to your blockchain address, when the media file in question is bit-for-bit identical.

As you can guess, I hardly think so. There is nothing you can do as an 'owner' of a digital ape picture that anybody else who right-clicked it and saved it can't also do, with the possible exception of getting kudos from the artist for the money you gave them. But a simple donation would have had the same result.

> participating in a digital art community

Which hardly requires NFTs, only your involvement and communication. Online art communities go back to Elfwood.

> supporting decentralized systems, etc.

Tautology. "I use NFTs because I want to support the use of NFTs".

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> A simple way to frame Hicetnunc is a social media platform that is not driven by FAANG, advertising models, and "Like" buttons, but instead by artists, collectors, and OSS developers participating in a digital economy: selling and trading tokens, and also exploring ways to steward and maintain that work without solely relying on traditional centralized third-party services.

I'm a Fediverse user and I want to nuke the FAANGs, so I'm fully on board with promoting alternative, decentralized social networks. I just don't believe that adding glorified baseball trading cards to the recipe makes them better or stronger in any way.

I never heard anyone saying that Team Fortress 2 became a better community after it became an online market for ugly digital hats.

And I can copy that url off of the chain, pay nothing, print it out and hang it on my wall. You bought nothing. If you want to support an artist, give them money. NFTs are the new penny stocks. Pump and dump.

Are any NFTs at all actually on chain? First time I hear about this.

Yep, see ArtBlocks, Deafbeef tokens for example.