Technology

NFTs are simply a straightforward con, without the financial hullabaloo of cryptocurrency. The con is simple: convince someone that something is valuable when it's not. Selling a brass ring as gold to a mark too naïve to check, has been around as long as there have been gold rings.

Nah, NFTs were always about the grift first and the art second.

After all, all an NFT token is is a digital receipt which links to an image hosted somewhere off-chain, not the image itself. All the "art" does is help to persuade people that the tokens are actually worth something and hype up the price even further.

It is an allegory for the whole financial system ... it's all made up imaginary money, funds and amounts that don't exist and never will .... it's all based on trust, faith and belief. If enough people wake up tomorrow and stop believing in a segment of this entire system, it can all quickly collapse.

I remember reading about ten years ago that if all debt was stopped all over the world and all of it was to be repaid ... it would take the world several million years to do so.

There is wealth in the world but we've created very complicated, imaginary ways to make it seem that wealth is worth millions of times more than there actually exists.

I see it as a modern day religion ... it exists because we all believe in it .... if the faithful ever lose faith, the religion dies.

IIRC, NFTs were there to help finance artists who work on a purely digital medium

That's not true at all. They were a con from their inception. The "helping artists" bit was something they made up to further that con. Just like when they claim cryptocurrency is an actual viable currency alternative to fiat.

The fact that it cost a hundred bucks in "gas fees" to list a piece of work basically means that no struggling artist could even afford to put their works on an exchange to sell.

Yeah it was huge in the art world, all the art magazines had articles about how it was the next big thing and how to mint your own nfts - which of course all turned out to be 'pay my buddy $200 and we'll turn your jpg into an nft!' which was a scam within a scam.

Artists generally aren't tech minded and honestly often pretty surface level in their understanding of things because that's where their focus is, they're looking at the visual not the mechanical. There's nothing wrong in that because life needs a wide range of people.

NFTs were there to help finance artists who work on a purely digital medium, but then grifters coopted the NFT space and try to sell sets of same-looking artwork.

I'm curious if you have a source for this. I haven't heard it anywhere else...