this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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NFTs are not a terrible idea it's just another way of adding a signature to something. If a famous artist made a beautiful work of art and made an NFT of it and said "this is the only one I am selling" then I can understand how it might hold some value to collectors because it's just like how their signature adds to the value of their artwork.
My dog just took a shit outside and if I put my signature on it the value would still be that of a pile of dog shit. Dumb pictures of apes generated for the sole purpose of making more pictures of apes to sell that hold no value to begin with don't magically become more valuable after they have a signature on them.
An NFT is a way of pretending something is unique when it's not at all unique.
If you want unique art, buy a physical piece and put it on your wall.
Pretending you own a JPEG image just because there's a token somewhere in the blockchain is idiotic, and a complete waste of the electricity used to maintain it. Anyone can save that same JPEG to their hard drive the second it's displayed anywhere. Masturbatory technobabble nonsense with no real-world significance.
You are missing my point. It's more like a pile of photos. If some artist took a picture and printed a shit ton of copies of it and sold those but signed one of them the one they signed might hold more value to collectors. That is what an NFT is like, the single copy of the photo that is signed. It's not some amazing ground breaking thing that makes something so amazingly unique that nothing else compares to it... it's just like a signature on a photograph.
I also never said anything about ownership of the image. A signature doesn't imply that either.
Its not though, the signature and the digital art are stored separately. Their association only exists within a controlled a system. So that, you don't actually have a signature attached to art, you have a signature associated with art, and only when viewed through a website such as OpenSea. You're not investing in the infallibility of math. Your "investing" in some joker with an httpd server, who pointed two records at each-other in a database, the same way any other database works. Imagine someone giving you a number, and saying somewhere there's some art that this number means you own. You can check to see what art you own, only by plugging your number into my software... that's what you've purchased.
They don't have to be. That is just how it was done to sell thousands of stupid pictures of Apes, Cats, more apes and whatever else stupid crap they made thousands of iterations of.
I'm not missing your point, I just disagree with it. A signed print is physically distinct from a copy. If an artist personally spent extra time with a particular piece to sign it, adding another personal touch on their creation, I would think that legitimately adds value.
An NFT does not do that. All an NFT does is cause somebody's GPU to spin up and generate carbon emissions associated with the same literal string of zeros and ones that accompanies every other copy of the print. It doesn't represent any additional attention on the part of the creator. It's just a substandard copy that comes with excess waste.
None of that is true. You don't need a GPU to spin up to do anything. You are conflating mining crypto currency with NFTs. A NFT is just a cryptographic signature kept on some sort of blockchain that is associated with an image or file or unique pointer. You can use a preexisting blockchain or even make your own. Blockchains don't have to be mineable and blockchains themselves are actually a good idea.... mineable crypto currency is just a really shitty use case for them. It has nothing to do with mining and is just another form of cryptographic signature.
Edit: The fact that you think a physical signature has value while a unique digital signature (yes.. the signature is unique) has none is personal preference and once again not the point I am making. I am saying it is a type of signature and some collectors might find value in it.
No, NFTs are absolutely a stupid idea. Putting a few bytes of data on the block chain does not add any value whatsoever to whatever art is involved, nor does it prove any sort of ownership or legitimacy.
Whether the artist only sells one copy of their art or not, making an NFT is about the worst possible way to facilitate single ownership. This is because there's no practical way to store the entire artwork on the block chain. The images associated with NFTs "live on the block chain" in the same way that the a website "lives in" the URL that points to it - not at all.