If you feel like participating in a large scam, perhaps. Personally I would feel bad and I rather not touch this.
You can still use it as a way to invest in artists.
And just to actually touch on this specific aspect of artists and being exploited, it's a laughable suggestion to mention this in this context when NFTs are one of the first times in recent history when artists can actually take back control from being exploited and unable to provide for themselves without succumbing to essentially giving up their soul - to unlocking their creative freedom and earning potential like we've never seen before.
Smug and lacking intellectual curiosity
An NFT registry is just a list of people who own numbers, and they get made fun of because a) owning a number isn't very useful, and b) anyone who wants to own the same number can just make a new list. But identities are exceptions: a) a username for a specific app is one of the few cases where it is useful to own a number, and b) because a specific app will only look at a specific list, i.e. it's reasonable and expected that I might own the 'ineptech' username on HN and someone else might own it on some other platform.
So, if you were going to make some sort of distributed social app, e.g. a twitter clone, it would make sense to use an NFT-like registry to track ownership of the handles. I believe this is basically how urbit identity ownership works, although it was implemented before the NFT craze.
There could be simpler solutions even without a big bad central authority. Nodes participating in the federated network could build consensus among themselves (after all, each node has to voluntarily honor the database, whether that database is on the blockchain or not). The identity ownership can be controlled via knowledge of the private key. Just like you can currently sell your Twitter or Insta username by selling the password.
This is indeed the most attractive reason for a globally distributed database of "valuable things", but proof-of-whatever powered "trustless" systems (cryptocurrencies) are still terrible. There was a really good experimental system with articulated trust: https://github.com/andres-erbsen/dename
I mean, it seems like an way for artists to collect donations, and to distribute the donations so that less popular artists get a larger share, because even the most popular artists only have 1 "you own the NFT representing the 'original' version of this piece" to sell per piece of artwork.
Unsurprisingly, all the scammers and get-rich-quick people are making a lot more noise.
The tax fraud schemes make sense for now. Party A makes 10 NFTs and sells 1 to Party B for $10,000. Party B makes 10 NFTs and sells 1 to Party A for $10,000.
They both then donate their remaining NFTs to a charity and take a $90,000 tax write-off each.
Will work until the IRS is able to hire the additional 80,000 enforcement agents they’ve asked for.
Otherwise why did the IRS pay out $30MM in refunds for “Slavery Credits” that had no basis in law?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/irs-pays-30m-in-slavery-credits...
There are literally thousands of examples of things like this.
It's easy to find a small museum to donate small amounts of artwork to at an inflated value. But what charity wants NFTs?
And donating intellectual property to charities with high claimed values isn't anything new. That's why in 2004 the American Jobs Creation Act required that any donated intellectual property be valued at the lesser of its cost basis and its fair market value. (See: 26 USC § 170(e))
So in your example, each would accrue a $10,000 income tax liability by their sale and be able to write off a $10,000 gain by their donation's basis, accomplishing nothing.
I attended an event last night in a museum where over $150k was raised for local Charities by auctioning off NFT Art. It will probably become more common than one might imagine.
It's an experiment for sure, but the nice thing is that the tokens are only $50 each initially (they base the total number of tokens on the purchase price of the house so that they come out to $50 each) so it's low risk.
You can get the tokens too at https://lofty.ai (I have no relation to them other than being a customer, but they are a YC company).
Jokes aside, it could be that for some people the public and decentralized history of token ownership is more robust and transparent.
> but you lose a lot of money on management fees that way.
(It's just not you paying the fees at this point in time.)
Too bad the game is boring; the future roadmap is stale compared to upcoming competitors; and the dev team has become deluded from their success derived from first to market.
I can see the next Pokemon-like NFT game do well.
Still doesn't seem to require a blockchain. Axie Infinity decides whether assets (on-chain or not) are compatible with their game. That means the control over (and value of) the assets are centralized with the game devs anyway.
The Axie Infinity model is verifiably unsustainable and doesn't even generate income unless the game is actively growing. Demand for SLP depends on demand for breeding which in turn is dependent on demand for new users, it's not a pretty picture.
Note I’m not saying this is a good thing and I think all the entities involved should have the same regulatory responsibility but you can see the greasy cogs whirring in some executives brain.
It’s also not a claim I made so I’m not sure why you addressed that question to me.
Basically take any ens domain and add ".link" to the end of it and it'll proxy to the ens domain.
But other than that, you don't have to use it if you don't want to.