Which is... even more evil? They're encouraging an externality which harms normal people but not them.

I think NFTs, along with the vast majority (but not all) crypto, are total bullshit, but I also accept (a) I could be totally wrong in this, in which case, my loss, and (b) offering rails to sell these items doesn't strike me as "evil" in the slightest.

How about the obvious breeding ground for scams, and the tacit approval by the community because all that money (assets) flows to the top?

There are more reasons, too.

Just because you don't understand someone's argument doesn't mean you should trivialize it.

The scams seems like a very weak reason. The internet is full of scams, is the internet evil?

Apart from a working PoS beacon chain, several multi client dev nets and the last merge testnet before the real merge (barring major bugs) currently running

One can argue that it's a bad thing (evil is still too strong a word I think.) But that's not what's going on here.

Offering a product is not evil or immoral. It may be amoral but that's not the same as immoral. Ultimately the market decides what stays and goes except in extraordinary circumstances.

You could say that a payment processor should morally screen their clients in general, but that seems like a stronger and not-so-reasonable statement. They do prohibit certain kinds of businesses, but I think the bar for that is very high and likely related to chargeback concerns and such.

Any consumer driven market is strongly indicative of its consumers morality, people just don't like to admit it.

> Offering a product is not evil or immoral

So weapons-grade uranium, chemical weapons, payday loans, extended car warranties, life insurance, habit-forming painkillers, etc are all fine?

As a society, we have decided that some products are indeed unacceptable / immoral.

Payday loans, while a bad reputation, can truly help someone out in a pinch who has no other options - but often they're not presented to be as abhorrently predatory as they usually are.

Extended car warranties are pushed by the car salesman who tell the consumers that they need it when they almost definitely do not.

Life insurance is actually a wise investment for some, not even sure why you put that on the list.

Pain killers provide an essential service when used properly, the vast majority of consumer don't form a habit, and those that do were almost certainly not told by their doctor or pharmacist the potential addictive nature of the chemicals.

All those products are, in my opinion, completely fine. What's not fine is the often fraudulent advertising required to sell those products. But that's a different discussion.

Now you can buy to maybe sell for a higher price in the future. That should increase engagement and the user base. It is still a very particular behavior that only a small fraction of society engages in.

But there is 6.6Bn smartphone users in this world. If a tiny 0.1% of the population buys/sells NFT for fun and addition, that's still 6.6 million user. That's billions of $$ pumped into the NFT economy and dozens of billions of "value" for these digital items.

The world is crazy once you go from the local scale to the global scale.

Try looking how many pages you need click through before you emerge from the minimum $0.03. The market for digital "art" is a hard one, because scarcity can only centrally be enforced.

https://steamcommunity.com/market/search?appid=730#p1_price_...

The regulatory hurdles of getting into or out of fiat from crypto make it nearly impossible for all but the biggest players due to Money Service Business laws in each of the 50 states let alone internationally.

As such this is a regulatory arbitrage play and one that will be welcomed by the industry as it is currently filled with extremely expensive options (Looking at you Prime Trust) and predatory actors.

Stripe can clean up here in the short term if their product offers fair and transparent pricing to industry as is their brand.

I do suspect they will stick around this time as the number of players has grown and the US government looks like it is finally ready to embrace the industry and bring some much needed regulatory clarity.

I’m also not interested in ideas on a shelf that could do this better in an alternate reality but aren’t active

I also recognize there are uphill battles conceptually for both adopters and builders, such as ownership models where access is not exclusive (which is also not without precedence outside crypto)

Not interested in discussing these distractions: the perceived quality of current art, what types of art are more deserving of their artists having a livable income off, ideas on a shelf for solving this at scale in an alternate reality, scam activity, or pretending proof of work chains are state of the art

I'd be curious to know what fraction of NFT enthusiasts had previously commissioned a piece of art, and of those how many were truly aghast at the dire state of payment systems without NFTs or at their inability to assert ownership via a blockchain. I suspect both are quite small.

The former is ludicrous, because Paypal/Kofi/Patreon/what have you offer a wide array of easy-to-use, feature-rich payment systems.

The latter maybe less inconceivable, but IMO it's driven by a desire to use blockchain tech for _something_, find something that it can conceivably do, and then deciding that that thing is therefore important. Personally, proving ownership and providence hasn't ever been a concern for any of my art purchases because they, like the vast majority of art, isn't worth selling a forgery of--nobody is coming to steal the forum avatar I commissioned or selling unauthorized prints of the obscure photographer I like.

This is just round three (or whatever) of blockchain being a solution in search of a problem: having failed to evangelize its wide use as a consumer payments system in general, its adherents moved on to hyping it as a solution to Enterprise IT problems (where selling bullshit is the name of the game anyway), failed to find traction (because everyone discovered it didn't actually solve any problems), and so we've circled back round to a consumer market, but now with more celebrity endorsements. It's still an effort to convince people that the blockchain version of something is much better and therefore worthwhile so that the worth of the tokens is tied to something other than transactions illegal goods and wild speculation. It's about supporting the livelihoods of people hoarding GPUs and wasting electricity to mine the tokens, not artists.

With NFTs the artist can get a cut of every transfer indefinitely.

How does that work?

Also, what is to stop people copying it anyway and what is to stop artist from getting underpaid?

All serious questions that I'd like to see answers to but don't understand how NFTs would solve any of them.

Not sure what you mean by the second question

I think I felt compelled to mention that people send it anyway because it's good behavior and not all scams/crimes people say it is. In general I think the royalty thing is just one nice bonus of using smart contracts

Language aside, I think you're being inconsistent with that concept: there are better solutions for compensating artists than NFT's already, so it's inconsistent to say that you want active-solutions as a justification for working on an less-active-solution.

Too bad this hadn't been invented when Ted Nelson was alive.

I wonder what he thinks about this potential enabling technology for transclusion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_de_suite

The main complaint I hear from actual commission-taking artists is that even something fun and innocuous but potentially readable as suggesting banned uses, like "fuck yeah," in the comment field on the paying side will make PayPal suspend your account. The artists I know are universally opposed to NFTs with more artists I know of coming out against every time a new NFT site launches with stolen art.

Also, re: art, kinda agree: the current gallery system takes a huge cut of sale prices and a lot of galleries don’t do much to help artists. The real winners, though, are the landlords.

We’ve purchased art with checks before, and even in the “mid-range” price segment, logistics are much more of a problem than counterfeit risk. The logistical part still needs a good solution. Putting a large piece on a palette and trying to get a shipping company to treat it like the delicate and irreplaceable piece it is is tough and/or very expensive. Putting a canvas in the mail is a huge risk. Discovery is another big problem, as many people who might buy art don’t even know how to do so. It’s not like you just scan a QR code and enter your credit card details. A lot of it today is a very personal high-touch sales process that doesn’t always add value (much like cars, but sometimes with zero sleaze if you’re dealing with the actual artist directly). Once you get to the broker model and “if you have to ask” pricing it’s even more opaque and in more need of a solution that isn’t just auctions, but NFTs aren’t the solution.

Maintaining records for art transactions, and thus enacting a fee structure that would benefit the artist when art is traded, traditionally meant introducing a middleman - and the associated overheads are why "fine arts" are known as a gatekept world and commissions have become the default for digital art. A sneer like "yeah well did you commission art before NFTs" is tautological. Commissions are the business model because they're available with minimal financial technology, not because they're ideal for society. The result you want is "more art is produced and more artists can afford to produce at a high level". But not everyone is interested in commissioning a large quantity of art of their furry OC getting porked. And likewise, people have trouble commissioning an artist to work freely without adding some kind of externalized upside like "build my own personal brand". There's a saturation point to that business model in and of itself.

It's only been relatively recently that artists also started to be able to access intellectual property law as a business model, but running an IP business involves a perpetual defense of property through legal enforcements, since we are in the age of mechanical reproduction. So it also has barriers to entry and ongoing overheads. I don't hear anyone saying that game developers should all work on commission, though.

The proposition of NFT art is just a revision of the gallery system - make intellectual work an asset, but on a much broader scale. The fee structure is automated, and the art itself is open to viewing and therefore doesn't need the same degree of IP enforcement as a paywall model; the only provenance question is the initial one of whether you actually minted your own work. And naturally, among the first people to have jumped on this are charlatans who have tested that exact question of initial provenance.

But I can say, having closely observed and participated a little, that NFT art on the whole is not uniquely bad or good, it's still "just" an art market, just one geared towards the artist who is interested in making their brand a speculative investment. And that is another way to get art made.

Commissioning art is one of _many_ ways you can do this. Non-commissioned works are readily available too! I also purchase those! Some of these are one of a limited set (common for photo prints), some of these aren't (Bandcamp albums). Point being, if you were someone who wanted to buy art before NFTs, you could do so. I'm skeptical of there being some large market segment that desperately wanted to buy art but only realized they could with the advent of NFTs.

The royalty business model also already existed, where it made sense. There's no contract governing me reselling the painting I bought from someone at the local farmer's market because there wasn't any expectation on either my or the artist's part that it'd be resold at all, much less for a sum vastly greater than its purchase price. It's going to hang on my wall until I die, at which point it'll likely get tossed in a bin.

That's in contrast to say, a film score, where the expectation is that it will be resold (as part of your theater ticket price, but whatever) many times over: ASCAP exists, and handles paying the IP lawyers on behalf of its members, because that's a business model that works for them. They've been managing this just fine for over a century.

Look, this argument is a narrow one against PoW chains. You can point out correctly that a large share of the market/money is on those, and maybe Ethereum will or will not switch at some point, but it remains an argument against PoW nonetheless. Go support artists selling NFTs on Tezos then.

> This is a solved problem: you pay them for their work, which is how artists have made money since time immemorial. The degree to which artists can make a living off their art is a function of demand and discoverability, not whether they have a payment system (they do need this, but they already have them).

Some digital art cannot be printed (i.e. videos). "Paint my portrait"-style commissions are undesirable for many artists. "Here is some money create whatever" style commissions run into the same problem that for digital art, in that it is not clear what the buyer actually gets. People are commissioning NFT artists! It's all good.

The attitude of "buyers don't need NFTs they can support artists another way" is strangely inverted. If you can convince more people to spend money on art in other ways, that's great. Meanwhile, /artists/ need to find a way to earn a living.

How many new art buyers will NFTs bring when the speculative dust settles? How much will artists need to adapt to cater to that audience (i.e. creating PFP style collections?). We do know that the number is > 0.

Patreon is also a huge rent seeker, we can do better for artist direct payment

Patreon is not passive income - people expect regular updates and special work/insight for private audience

In terms of consistency, meat space has big issues with accessibility and reach

Lastly you can look at the results. Patreon is not that widely transformative for giving artists livable income

NFTs aren't passive either nor are they consistent.

The whole point of NFTs is the scarcity aspect. Sure, you could maybe do 100 $10 NFT "prints" instead but now they need to manage that aspect and predict demand.

NFTs mimic the meat space art world with all the same problems like infrequent unpredictable sales with few benefits like convenience.

I'm more interested in solutions that I expect to be stable and last. I do understand why artists are hoping to cash on the NFT wave; I just worry that a lot of people will come crashing down along with the hype.

Those that do include human art have a strong tendency to just lift uncredited art from Pinterest or deviantart. Supposedly the purpose of NFTs was to provide the provenance for art. But it seems that most NFT art is stolen from actual artists.

You should track down the New York Times article from this past weekend. From memory, it says that despite all the hype, almost no artists are making any money from NFTs. The average sale price is less than $400, which doesn't even cover materials.

Photoshop?

I can talk more about how the system works if you are interested, but some established generative artists have created projects on their platform and have made more than they could before web3.

That said there are also public goods approaches, either where you have ownership without exclusive access (interesting but not obvious to most people how to productize) or grant models

Yes.

> Is it bad that they have an additional way to make money on top of commissions, Patreon, and merch?

No.

Coinbase whole business is spreads.

Coinbase collects fees. Even if the spread is minimal (I think Bitcoin goes to something silly like 8 decimals but even for a book in USD, the bid/ask spread may be 39 842.54 vs 39 482.55, so a spread of one cent), Coinbase still takes a fee on every trade. And they take a fee from both the buyer and the seller.

I'm not sure their business is related to spreads.

Did they just update this after you pointed this out?

[1]: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cKDBTS...

Also, it's quite possible others pointed this out (the Stripe team in general has great attention to detail!) and updated the page.

When crypto proposes something that *is*, rather than something that *could be* people will stop considering it as a big casino.

I've often wondered how NFT's would fare in a situation like Diablo 3's colossal failure of a marketplace, where people could sell their rare items to other players. The whole concept broke, because "rare" doesn't mean anything when players can just flood the market with weapons created via modding. This seems to be exactly the use case NFT's are made for.

For the record - as a digital photographer - I find NFT's for art to be a laughable concept. Keeping possession of my raw files has always been a sufficient means of copy protection for me.