Mark your comment down and revisit it in a few years, having an opinion on the sidelines is just fine. Now let the downvotes commence.
If you dig in my own comments on this website you can probably find discussions from 2017 or even earlier where I ask when people think that cryptocurrency tech is going to finally deliver something useful. It's always "one or two years from now". It's always "we're early". Remember ICOs? Remember how it was going to revolutionize IoT? Remember dapps? Remember lightning? It's been around the corner for years now.
Can you think of a single other technical innovation that required so much faith and patience before it delivered? Maybe self-driving cars, but even then I'd argue that it made immense progress compared to blockchain technology.
In the end you can hype it as much as you want, it's still fundamentally just a crappy, slow, extremely inefficient append-only database that's only relevant because it's super good at supporting pyramid schemes.
Before 2020, I was interested in crypto as an academic exercise. In 2021, it became an urgant need. I don't think i'm alone, to me crypto is an exit from the large tech monopolies that dominate our world today.
"We're early" in the internet had the dotcom bubble, the development of mobile 3G infrastructure and devices, the advent of smartphones, the VC-fueled app craze, and then eventually, now. The innovation mostly occurred in certain geographical areas, under the control of a relatively small population, with global impact.
The progression of blockchain technology - and dare I say culture - is speedrunning the history of human communication, including currency. Mainstream attention is high, but not adoption of paramount fundamental tech like ENS for identity and reputation. I'm guessing critical mass sometime in the next 18-36 months.
I also worry you may be subject to observation bias and ensuing feedback loops; if you primarily encounter negative headlines around crypto, it reinforces your opinion. But there are treasure troves of data, assembled by tens of thousands of exceptionally talented engineers, researchers and philosophers, that are also available for your observation. I wonder, if you spent some time there, perhaps your opinions would be more plastic.
And I say in 2025 I'll be having the same discussion I had in 2017 and I'm having right now as somebody will reply to a comment I make on HN telling me that whatever cryptofad of the day is 18-36months away from mainstream adoption.
With enough spin you can make everything sound revolutionary. Smart contracts are effectively like stored procedures, just ridiculously wasteful.
Nfts may or may not be the blockchain's killer app (I think they are), but the average person's track record identifying a technology's killer app is a tad less than perfect
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.
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.
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.
How is a bit of data on a blockchain pointing to a URI a breakthrough? It's utterly ineffective at proving ownership of anything, since the data at the uri can be changed, or more likely - the entire server will disappear at some point in time. And then what about uris on the blockchain pointing to illegal material (things that are actually copyrighted by someone through the legal system, CP, etc)?
Obviously storing actual data on-chain is too costly as well (both financially on the large chains, and practically/environmentally on any of them).
Everyone I know who's into NFTs and crypto was a con artist before blockchain and they'll be con artists after. Wait until I tell you about the drug addict scammers I know that started a crypto coin of their own and got a friend who knows literally nothing about crypto to write their whitepaper.
NFTs open a new World of opportunity for me. Not only can other humans easily collect, and compensate me for my work, I also have a whole new stream for consuming royalties. Now think further about the ecosystem potential and all the third parties that consume my unsplash content for free today, NFTs can change that.
Do you confer a license to the photo that I can use elsewhere? Can I use it in an ad? Can I sell copies of it?
> Not only can other humans easily collect, and compensate me for my work
They could have done it before, what makes you think this technical change will make people want to fund artists more, beyond a momentary financial mania?
2. Just my opinion - I believe that over time people will increasingly value digital assets, I don't think we're even close to understanding their utility. NFT collectors are a growing segment for artists and things like virtual galleries will represent new places to showcase and share those collections.
Edit - I think people should make an effort to distinguish between visual and "technical or attributable" ownership. Too often these threads on NFTs are, "how do you own something if I can copy it" (the picture). That's missing the point. I don't care if you replicate my NFT and its visual identity, I will always be the owner of the underlying attribute and the evolution of that attribute.
To get in the right mindset, you should stop thinking of NFT's as pictures. That's not the primary use case. It's a stupid game that became popular. NFT's are just tokens on the open blockchain that you can exclusively control.
Generally not.
> NFT's are just tokens on the open blockchain that you can exclusively control.
Exactly this, and nothing more.
People rant and rave about how this is a huge when for digital artists while ignoring the darker side. I see more and more small artists venting their frustrations in fighting with the NFT markets to get their stolen art taken down. Also in dealing with crypto bros cyberbullying them for refusing to participate in this whole crypto shit show.
Outside of that, 99% of the artist I know are super happy NFTs exist and they can make money out of them.
Indeed you haven’t even told us how many digital artists you know. Only that you are one.