[kranke155]

Yeah it’s pretty terrible so far I agree.

My hunch is that crypto is focusing on the wrong things. I suspect we’ll never have land registers in blockchain (dumb idea anyway).

In NFTs crypto kind of stumbled upon something important, because digital art didn’t have a way to be authenticated by artists themselves, they had to use galleries, it was a mess. Now a digital artist can just drop his stuff onto the world and authenticate it. This was a Real Problem, if you make physical art you can just go to the local arts and crafts or Etsy and charge money for it. But digital art was really hard to monetise. So crypto came in a bit sideways and solved a Real Problem People Had.

Curiously they seem to really focus on “real world” problems, like banks or land registry or whatever, when I’m starting to think this is the entirely wrong way to see crypto. I think it needs to focus on problems that exist in the digital arena Only IE data ownership, data portability.

But the obsessions of the original conceptions around crypto are hard to kill, and I feel like right now there’s a lot of resistance to leaving the Nick Szabo idea of “smart contracts will replace lawyers”, same as it was before with a lot of Nakamoto’s ideas. But I think the “crypto will replace lawyers” and “crypto will replace banks” folks will be sorely disappointed. I see a very low percent chance crypto will change that much about banking just due to the security issues.

[majewsky]

> But digital art was really hard to monetise.

Is it though? Honest question since I'm not an artist. But looking from the outside: For ongoing support, Patreon/Flattr/etc. are a common solution. For specific work, you can commission a piece and pay for it through whatever channel, even with cash.

[kranke155]

It just didn’t work for individual digital art. Patreon doesn’t pay you for making art, that’s incidental. At least the way I’ve seen it used. It also creates no secondary market, there’s no resale, royalties. The possibility of making a single art piece worth 10,000$ That is impossible in patreon. Patreon was more of a decentralised art school at its best, where you could pay for individual tutors.

I also know the average income I saw being generated from Patreon was low. Not high enough to quit your day job, more of a second job type thing. NFT income is incomparable, I know of cases of people who are now millionaires.

NFTs are essentially just a way to sell digital art in a way that approximates physical art auctions, and in that regard they are an overwhelming sucess.