IMHO, it's just the same game as with the gallery art scheme, except on top of cryptocurrencies.
As a broke artist, if I can get some rich assholes to start convincing each other that my art has ludicrous amounts of money, then I will happily let them pay me for it, and let the gallery owner who was instrumental in convincing them of this value have a healthy cut. If the gallery owner wants to arrange a money-laundering kickback to the rich assholes that's their own business, personally I feel like I'd rather avoid it but who knows how I'll feel when I'm being offered a price with enough zeros at the end of its number?
Create a bunch of art, put the ownership into a decentralized autonomous organization with 51% held by the artist and the other 49% held by a bunch of random, anonymous "owners".
Start the hype train with a loud, crazy scandal that results in the "death" of the artist.
The artist's estate leaves their stake to the gallery owner who starts to sell off the stake at stupid prices following the death of the artist.
Secretly, you've faked your death and also were in control of the "anonymous" ownership stake. You can launder the increased value of that part of the stake and recombine it through a bunch of shells and mixers.
Who knows, maybe this was "Satoshi"'s plan all along. That "unclaimed" stake was just there to increase the mystery and the hype, meanwhile "he" actually had control of a bunch of other coin that "he" was able to launder at a later date.
Funny, but the actual plot of this timeline is to support living artists, and we've collectively leveraged that sentiment to create entirely new infrastructure to support that. This is the beginning of it.
Honestly I think Patreon does just as well to support living artists, without all the bullshit that comes from the "convince some absurdly rich asshole that your worth is worth absurd amounts of money" game, and also without the extra layers of bullshit that comes from involving cryptocurrency in it. I'd rather convince a few hundred people that my stuff's worth a buck or three per month. Feels a lot more sustainable, and less likely to end up with someone deciding to kill you to bump up the value of their investment in your originals.
I mean if you've got a bunch of money burning a hole in your pocket, I'll gladly take it off your hands. My Patreon's over at https://www.patreon.com/egypturnash.
It's the same game and sentiment, and there are plenty of people that don't like the trend of patreon, onlyfans, github sponors to make a buck.
The NFT space is building in royalties via transfer taxes. Which means you the artist would earn a lot more from volume than from the initial sale, and this is potentially even better than the subscription SaaS model, and for people that want to support you they may be even incentivized to keep you alive to make sure the royalty goes to you instead of possibly burned.
I don't really see using stablecoins such as USDC or DAI as "extra layers of bullshit that comes from involving cryptocurrency". In the US with the latest OCC regulations, these are the same as using settlement networks like FedWire or SWIFT. Your self-limiting philosophy requires conflating all aspects of cryptocurrency as the same, and the good news is that you will find a lot of camaraderie in doing that, for now.
As a broke artist, if I can get some rich assholes to start convincing each other that my art has ludicrous amounts of money, then I will happily let them pay me for it, and let the gallery owner who was instrumental in convincing them of this value have a healthy cut. If the gallery owner wants to arrange a money-laundering kickback to the rich assholes that's their own business, personally I feel like I'd rather avoid it but who knows how I'll feel when I'm being offered a price with enough zeros at the end of its number?