> People need to be paid to do the work, so they can eat and pay rent.
Yes, this is the part about reshaping society I was talking about. Artists do contribute value to the world and need a way to be supported, but the way we support them should not be to burn the gift of post-scarcity.
> We dont actually live in a post scarcity star trek world.
When it comes to information we really, really do. I have every single game ever made for every console generation from 1978 through 2002. This cost me next to nothing, because we live in the information age.
> So we find a way that people can be paid yet the information and content can remain free to everyone
We already have several mechanisms for that. I don't see how NFTs bring anything new to the table other than providing speculation-based scams to flourish, which doesn't really benefit the artists in any way.
> Sure thats a social/cultural status game with a side of speculation, but in turn we have art that is permeating culture rapidly.
I wasn't aware that there was a problem with this. Indeed, the non-scarcity of information has allowed art and culture to proliferate at ludicrous speed. We've seen someone's fanfiction become a big budget film series (with some IP changes), someone's basement-developed game became so big a company bought him out for billions of dollars, and a korean TV series become a smash hit in the west.
I'm open to having my opinion changed, but I don't see any problems things like NFTs actually solve better than any existing system other than being great for scams.
> I have every single game ever made for every console generation from 1978 through 2002. This cost me next to nothing
I think you are confusing the cost of production of these things, and the cost to you personally.
There is a cost (material) and scarcity(human time) involved in making things. I think we have got away as a society with not paying artists and musicians and demanding their content be free and "post-scarcity". That really isnt helpful to people trying to live in this world.
See Gillian Welch sadly singing "Everything is free now... They figured it out, I'm gonna do it anyway even if it doesn't pay".
> which doesn't really benefit the artists in any way.
the default on most marketplaces is a 10% resale royalty paid to the artist. compare this to existing aucition houses where we get 0. or second hand record shops where we get 0%. or spotify or youtube where the ceos are billionaires and we get fractions of pennies for streams AND have our work surrounded by adverts.
when i look at https://foundation.app/collection/clsfd I see an artist i really admire finally getting paid some money for her years of work and experimentation. and retaining control in that system. The work isnt tied and locked in to this particular website like posting on instagram, the provenance is clear and royalties fair (decided by the artist).
> I think you are confusing the cost of production of these things, and the cost to you personally.
No, I'm not. The fact that artists need to be paid for their work so they can continue to exist within world of scarcity economics is orthogonal to the fact that information can be copied and disseminated for an effective zero-cost.
Let me put it this way: if, instead of minting and purchasing an NFT, the potential buyer just gave the artist money, what has changed? Everyone can still copy the art for free, the owner can still say they paid for it and prove it in any number of existing methods. Absolutely nothing about adding a cryptographically secure certificate of ownership to that is valuable as far as I can see.
So why didn't people do that? There has been the option to give artists money forever, and yet as a society, we generally haven't. NFTs are demonstrably transferring massive amounts of wealth from crypto bros with too much money to artists who need it. It's revolutionary because _it's actually happening_. Even though it was theoretically possible in the past, _people didn't actually do it_. The traditional art market doesn't care about an artist until they're dead. The value of NFTs is that a massive new market for art, from living artists, has been created ex nihilo.
So your argument isn't that this is a useful and revolutionary tool that will change the world for the better, your argument is that it is a useful way for artists to exploit idiots? A.K.A, a scam?
I'm not convinced this dialog is in good faith, but no, my argument is that it is a way for artists to get paid, at a much larger scale than they have in the past. Personally, I think artists getting paid does change the world for the better, but I suppose that's open to disagreement. I'm not sure which part of that you think is a scam - are the people buying the NFTs being misled? Is the product sold not what was claimed?
> Personally, I think artists getting paid does change the world for the better
I don't disagree, but if it weren't for NFTs there are still other ways for them to get paid. Hell, there are still other ways to scam rich idiots for that matter. Point is, it isn't the technology of NFTs getting them paid, it's the sociology around it. My contention is that the technology itself brings us nothing of value.
> I'm not sure which part of that you think is a scam - are the people buying the NFTs being misled? Is the product sold not what was claimed?
Yes. NFTs talk about "ownership" of some work, but that's the lie. No one has any ownership in any meaningful sense conferred by the technology of NFTs. I can have the exact same thing your NFT points to; hell, I can even mint my own NFT that points to it. If I bribe the artist I can probably get them to vouch for mine being the "legitimate" one. The NFT is meaningless. It's the digital equivalent of the star name registry scam. Even if we take the NFT to be backed by some legal contract entitling the "owner" to actual factual copyright, that isn't enabled by NFT tech, it's enabled by governments and treaties and has been functioning for hundreds of years without cryptographically secure anything and, in fact, depends on so many systems that are not cryptographically secure and decentralized that adding those things into the mix only makes it more difficult to work within that system.
"There are still other ways for them to get paid" is not the same thing as "they would in actuality be paid the same amount". I agreed in my message that it was always possible, and yet it wasn't happening. I don't care whether it's theoretically possible that artists could be paid, I care whether they are actually paid. NFTs are actually getting them paid. You seem to be missing, or avoiding, this point.
I am not making an argument about technology, or sociology, or any of the things you seem to be worked up over. I am strictly saying, NFTs get artists paid, in far greater amounts than they had previously, and I consider that valuable. I've yet to hear a refutation (or an acknowledgement) of this, and I consider it a strong refutation of your own quote "Absolutely nothing about adding a cryptographically secure certificate of ownership to that is valuable" - adding the certificate of ownership radically increased the size of the market, and got artists paid. QED.
I am primarily concerned with the technology's value as regards solving problems that actually exist. You know, the way nuclear fission or NVMe storage have value, not the way that Q-Ray Bracelets have the value of being effective at separating fools from their money.
If you're going to argue that Q-Ray Bracelets are valuable, then I do not believe that further discussion on this topic is possible as we live in fundamentally different realities.
Whether or not they are actually making money for artists in a profound way, as you keep asserting, is not an argument I'm willing to engage in since I haven't bothered to look in to the subject. My assertion is that even if they are[0], NFTs are still a broken-window-fallacy solution to the problem, not a real one. As the author of the original article states, this mechanism relies on a shared delusion that NFTs actually mean something and as soon as that delusion evaporates so will the "solution".
[0] I have seen no data one way or the other, so let's steelman and assume you are correct.
I think you're not wrong that some artists are actually getting paid whereas they wouldn't have were NFTs not a thing. But I think you might be wrong about the "why."
The Apple App Store got a lot of indie developers paid in the early days because Apple made payment easy and made side loading hard. There was a gold rush that is largely over now.
The question to ask is whether the NFT art market is sustainable.
My hunch is that there is a relatively small number of people with paper gains in ETH looking for something to do with it, but that the underlying demand for digital art hasn't changed much simply because there's now a new way to "prove ownership."
Yes, this is the part about reshaping society I was talking about. Artists do contribute value to the world and need a way to be supported, but the way we support them should not be to burn the gift of post-scarcity.
> We dont actually live in a post scarcity star trek world.
When it comes to information we really, really do. I have every single game ever made for every console generation from 1978 through 2002. This cost me next to nothing, because we live in the information age.
> So we find a way that people can be paid yet the information and content can remain free to everyone
We already have several mechanisms for that. I don't see how NFTs bring anything new to the table other than providing speculation-based scams to flourish, which doesn't really benefit the artists in any way.
> Sure thats a social/cultural status game with a side of speculation, but in turn we have art that is permeating culture rapidly.
I wasn't aware that there was a problem with this. Indeed, the non-scarcity of information has allowed art and culture to proliferate at ludicrous speed. We've seen someone's fanfiction become a big budget film series (with some IP changes), someone's basement-developed game became so big a company bought him out for billions of dollars, and a korean TV series become a smash hit in the west.
I'm open to having my opinion changed, but I don't see any problems things like NFTs actually solve better than any existing system other than being great for scams.