[bonestamp2]

> But I don't see what the NFT aspect adds.

It's a very good question, and the answer was conveniently left out of the blog post at hand. The reason art NFTs were created to begin with was because in the traditional art world, the people who make nearly all of the money are not the people who actually make the art. It is the art dealers and the art collectors who take the lion's share of the money.

The purpose of putting art in an NFT is to better balance the economics of art so that when the dealers and collectors continue to sell the art for increasingly higher prices, the original artist also gets some of the financial reward. This is especially important for young artists who are talented but are not yet able to sell their originals for a liveable wage or get any interest in a distributor to make prints.

A lot of people think NFTs are a waste of time and money, and I completely understand that paradigm, but NFTs are very important to the Artists who are trying to make a living wage from their passion. Ideally, this will contribute to even more imaginative art in the future.

I'd argue that Art NFTs actually share the values of open source software that were listed in the article, at least when it comes to improving "abundance, post-scarcity, universal access, and equality" for artists.

[wpietri]

There's no particular evidence that NFTs will change the economics of art. Indeed, given the rich history of scams, money laundering, grift, and fraud in the fungible token space, I'd say there's good reason to think artist will end up at least as screwed over. Indeed, given that the traditional art world will be eager to get in on it, it could be worse.

> Art NFTs actually share the values of open source [...] improving "abundance, post-scarcity, universal access, and equality"

This is flatly wrong. The whole point of an NFT is to create artificial scarcity in a post-scarcity medium. And it is the sort of "up is really down" crypto promotion that has turned me into a reflexive skeptic.

[bonestamp2]

> The whole point of an NFT is to create artificial scarcity in a post-scarcity medium.

That's not true for art NFTs. If you don't own the rights to an image, whether it's a regular old bitmap or an art NFT, there's no difference in scarcity as an observer of that image. But, as the artist who created a digital image vs an art NFT, there's a massive difference, and THAT is the whole point of an art NFT.

[wpietri]

Nah. A post-scarcity, open-source-like solution is letting people sponsor art creation. An NFT is creating artificial scarcity: one person thinks they "own" a digital asset. And there's plenty of agita when people don't play pretend with them: https://mashable.com/article/non-fungible-tokens-nfts-right-...

[bonestamp2]

> An NFT is creating artificial scarcity: one person thinks they "own" a digital asset.

This is true for most digital images, NFT or not... one person usually does own it. In either case, there is no scarcity for observers -- anyone can look at the image as much as they want.

In both cases, people can even copy the image and it use it without the owner's permission, if that's what you're really concerned about losing. But at least the NFT makes it very clear who that owner is, for those who do seek permission or licensing (unlike your average jpeg). For anyone who believes in intellectual property, that seems like a step forward.

[wpietri]

Yes, NFTs are like other images in that respect, which makes them even more pointless. And also worse, in that the ownership is less reliable and subject to far more terms and conditions than regular ownership.

But regardless, you make my point for me. It's just as illegal to copy somebody's NFT'd JPEG as it is any other privately owned JPEG. NFTs do not "share the values of open source software", which is about making it legal for people to freely use IP, more or less the opposite of the sort of free-market fundamentalist "who believes in intellectual property".