NFTs Were Supposed to Protect Artists. They Don't | Hacker News Reader

NFTs Were Supposed to Protect Artists. They Don't

theatlantic.com

27 pointsKye11 comments

No, NFTs were supposed to be the ultimate tax evasion trick for the rich.

how does that work? genuinely curious. so sure, its a fake investment where you can hide money from the irs..but if actually does turn out that no one wants to 'buy' your number for 5m what have you gained?

I think the idea is that someone buys the "number" with 5m to turn it from dirty to clean. The person with 5m can just point to the purchase as the source of funds, and they don't have to account for where the money came before that.

So you have 5m in dirty money under a mattress. You buy crypto with it. Put up a 5m NFT, buy it with the "dirty" crypto, then cash out the crypto into a bank, and no one can prove you were the original owner of the crypto, so it's all clean.

I feel stupid for not realizing that crypto would be a successful meme and getting in on the ground floor.

Page and Brin famously tried to sell Google to Excite! for $5 million but got turned down.

Hard to get any more ground floor than those guys and even they had no idea their company was on track to become the UR-unicorn. and they had an actually useful product.

don't believe anyone who claims to have known all along how hysterically irrational the market for crypto, NFTs or tulips would ultimately become.

I feel like someone could have tied together the election of Trump and the rise of crypto and got in by 2017 with fully rational reasoning.

Virtually all of the artists I know despise NFTs (and by extension the rest of the cryptocurrency ecosystem), largely because of the absolute deluge of fraudsters stealing art and selling it as NFTs without the creators seeing a dime. It's absolutely infuriating to see and does little to modify my view that the primary value of cryptocurrency is to facilitate crime.

It's a shame. I've done pretty well selling my art as NFTs. Many collectors are genuine patrons. When I talk to other artist friends, some are open-minded and I've been able to onboard them to give it a shot for their own art. No one has had a negative experience giving it a shot. However, there are two types of artists I know that won't even consider it. First are the folks who have already made it in the traditional art world and are afraid that doing NFT related work will tarnish their reputation somehow, even though most of them could probably be millionaires over night. Second, are the folks who are indie artists that have had their work stolen and sold as NFTs, so they have a very negative read on the whole space. That upsets me the most, because I'm certain if they just gave it a chance, they would find success. And whatever negative opinions HN loves to pile on with regards to crypto & NFTs, I will say this. For many artists it has been life changing. People are getting paid for their creative output for the first time in their lives, and contrary to popular belief, there are plenty of collectors that are true patrons. At least that has been my experience.

It sounds like this person created blockchain-based digital art registration, not NFTs. NFTs weren’t created to represent art, that’s just the popular use case that the public latched on to.

The co-creator of NFTs (a precursor) joins the creator of Godwin's Law in having to explain how twisted people got about their creations. I was surprised to see Anil Dash's name in the byline. I had no idea he had a part in creating a precursor to NFTs.

It's because it's somewhat of a stretch to draw what he did to the actual history of the NFT ecosystem in crypto (and no one in crypto considers him a "co-creator" of NFTs).

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