[Tossrock]

"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.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

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.

[stanleydrew]

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."