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Comment by ReadEvalPost | Hacker News Reader

There are two parts of NFTs, a really cool development and what most people will see. The first reason to buy an NFT is to support the artist in a way that may have value down the line if the artist's work gets more popular. There are a lot of digital artists who I would throw $50 to get some digital print with that in mind, or multiples of that to own something unique of theirs. The second reason to buy an NFT is as part of an insane crypto-ponzi-pump-and-dump scheme. The latter will overshadow NFTs until things settle down / crypto implodes.

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The concept of exclusivity is one of the rights of ownership, generally. There's none of that when you "purchase" an NFT that represents a "digital print", and, while it does support the artist (just like a direct payment would), there is precisely zero to indicate that such an NFT would increase in value with an artist's popularity. It's not like if you pay 10x for it as the second owner you get to hang it on your wall and the first owner doesn't. Also, precisely zero of that value increase would go to "support the artist" - all of the profit would go to the original speculator.

I'm a big blockchain advocate and I can't see any point to NFTs either, other than for perhaps tracking ownership of specific physical objects. For digital files of any kind, there's no exclusivity that "ownership" confers.

> is precisely zero to indicate that such an NFT would increase in value with an artist's popularity.

That's definitely how art works in the real world, I don't know why it would change here.

> Also, precisely zero of that value increase would go to "support the artist" - all of the profit would go to the original speculator.

Hold up, this is exactly why NFTs are interesting. They're contracts. When minting ones, you can specify that you get N% of the purchase price when its sold again.

> That's definitely how art works in the real world, I don't know why it would change here.

There’s no scarcity. In the physical world, any copies are simply approximations. In the digital world, they’re exactly identical.

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