It's bullshit (in the sense "absurd and meaningless") but I wouldn't call it a scam.
Something I wrote yesterday[0] that I think is relevant here:
> I'm not sure I understand the hate for NFTs. Don't get me wrong, the concept of NFT as currently used is completely absurd and definitely overhyped. But what is bad about it? People who spend their money on NFTs mostly do it because they got rich in the past few years gambling on BTC or ETH, and now use that money to basically tip the artists they like. Or they plan to resell the token at some point, which is pure speculation, but nobody other than themselves risk to get burn. Minting and selling NFTs is almost zero work and effort for artists, all the risks are on the buyers side, and only if they buy them as speculative assets.
> It still make no sense to me, but if rich people want to gamble their money and by doing so support some artists, that doesn't sound too bad IMHO.
> I would be more cautious if retail investors would start to gamble in this market, but that's not what I've seen so far.
If someone truly understands that the money is coming from crypto speculators, and that the way to make money is to essentially become an NFT influencer, then it's hard to fault them for extracting money from millionaires. But most artists in the space are convinced that the money is coming from real-life art collectors. I've seen multiple people quit their jobs to sell NFTs full-time. They say this is the future of making money as an artist -- that the true value of their art is finally being appreciated. It's hard not to dislike such a misinformation campaign.
> I've seen multiple people quit their jobs to sell NFTs full-time.
Regardless of your view on NFTs, haven't they been "a thing" for like a week now? Perhaps I'm just too risk averse but that feels like a very low amount of data to make such a large decision on
> They say this is the future of making money as an artist -- that the true value of their art is finally being appreciated.
Does that also work for physical art? My parents were full-time artists, but did not know how to sell anything, so now I have inherited hundreds of paintings. Should I create NFTs for them?
I'm not sure if "quitting their day jobs" has the same effect for an artist versus, say, a programmer. They deliberately work jobs like restaurants, not because they can't do anything else, but because they are easily quittable when an opportunity arises.
What are you basing this on? Most of the artists I've met either work in film, television, advertising or video games. I've worked as both an artist and a developer and your categorization doesn't strike me as common.
Also one of the artists I was talking about, who quit to work on NFTs, was design director at one of the world's biggest agencies, so not exactly waiting tables.
But yes, I was thinking about artists waiting tables. My spouse works in theatre, and it's normal even for modestly successful actors and artists to be working service jobs. I have asked why they worked those kinds of jobs when they were clearly smart enough to have better-paying white collar jobs, and they always say that quittability was one of their top concerns.
In the period where one could live in San Francisco for a non-insane amount of money, I knew lots of visual artists and sculptors who lived like that. (Anyway, all of them are now coding or have left.)
I don't mean to contradict your experience: the word "artist" covers a pretty wide swathe.
The fact it’s been in the news way more on top of the Bitcoin stuff has had the retail investors around me ask a lot about these NFTs and Bitcoin and if they should sink thousands of dollars into them.
This stuff is in the news to sell the crap to the people who don’t really know what they are doing.
Anecdotally, I’ve seen a large number of retail-ish early adopters jumping into NFTs on Twitter.
And I can’t help but wonder if it is a true scam - you could do some massive early transactions to pump of perceived values and create get-rich-quick hype (optimally, these should mostly be left-hand-to-right-hand transactions), then go ahead and make money as an NFT marketplace. Or by selling other works from the artists that you just pumped to the moon (which you had purchased before the pump operation).
Minting and selling can actually cost the price of a meal at a restaurant depending on ethereum fuel prices. The nft marketplaces are making a killing even if your art doesn’t sell. In that sense, there is potential harm to artists who get caught up in this.
You're right as of right now. ImmutableX is an upcoming Ethereum-based zkRollup that will allow 9,000 transactions to be processed per second, thus completely doing away with the problem of gas fees:
That’s right, though that’s quite limited. And you can use other blockchains than Ethereum, Tezos (a proof of stake blockchain with smart contracts) has NFTs platforms too and doesn’t have the high gas fee issue.
Something I wrote yesterday[0] that I think is relevant here:
> I'm not sure I understand the hate for NFTs. Don't get me wrong, the concept of NFT as currently used is completely absurd and definitely overhyped. But what is bad about it? People who spend their money on NFTs mostly do it because they got rich in the past few years gambling on BTC or ETH, and now use that money to basically tip the artists they like. Or they plan to resell the token at some point, which is pure speculation, but nobody other than themselves risk to get burn. Minting and selling NFTs is almost zero work and effort for artists, all the risks are on the buyers side, and only if they buy them as speculative assets.
> It still make no sense to me, but if rich people want to gamble their money and by doing so support some artists, that doesn't sound too bad IMHO.
> I would be more cautious if retail investors would start to gamble in this market, but that's not what I've seen so far.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26448481