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Comment by katmannthree | Hacker News Reader

After browsing OpenSea one may reasonably come to the conclusion that for every competent artist selling NFTs of their art, there are approximately 40,000 low-effort mspaint primates.

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It's impressive how quickly the NFT space has abandoned any semblance of selling unique artwork, and converged on ten thousand variants of "randomly generated animal pictures" with half of them being monkeys because they're cargo-culting Bored Ape Yacht Club. Ironically in trying to create "digital scarcity" they've lowered the bar to entry so far that their "scarce" assets are buried under an endless avalanche of nearly indistinguishable "scarce" assets. Market price is the only thing that would set them apart, but even that's meaningless due to the prevalence of wash trading.

Is it impressive? I would've thought this is exactly what we expected. Actual artists are off making stuff they can sell, and 99.99% of them don't know what an NFT is. Meanwhile there's a whole community of teenagers on the internet who don't make anything but do know about NFTs.

If you run the numbers on "artists who know/care about NFTs" vs "Idiots on the internet gullible enough to buy into anythin" I think 10,000:1 is generous.

> Actual artists are off making stuff they can sell, and 99.99% of them don't know what an NFT is.

In my experience, it's the opposite. If you're an artist with an internet connection, then you know about NFTs.

Art communities across the internet have been fractured by the topic this year. Some have banned the posting of NFTs[1], some have built software to alert members when their work has been stolen and turned into NFTs[2]. Artists who speak out against NFTs are frequently dogpiled by crypto enthusiasts claiming that they don't care about their fellow artists[3]. Even famous artists know what NFTs are[4], since they've all been approached at some point by a crypto investor who wants them to make NFTs. As an artist, it's difficult to escape the topic, and it's causing quite a bit of backlash.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/comments/rrb8s8/rpixelart_...

2: https://www.deviantart.com/team/journal/DeviantArt-Protect-8...

3: https://twitter.com/simonstalenhag/status/136987854676887142...

4: https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/20/22846654/brian-eno-nft-c...

The thing that saddens me the most is that cats used to own the internet, and I find the monkeys not so fascinating.

I was also hesitating to post this because I was afraid that some cryptobro or what-you-call-them would take this complaint literally and open an NFT trading site for cat pictures.

It's incredible how they don't see how bad these projects look, so my concern is real.

Boy have I got some bad news for you...

https://www.cryptokitties.co/ is a thing.

The absurdity makes this more fascinating than cringe-worthy, if I'm being honest :)

Same thing happened in the online beat space. It used to be producers creating music. Now it's a race to the bottom. Who can download a pre made loop the fastest and put the same drums over everything then sell it for $5. I don't know what has happened with humanity. Everyone just wants to make a quick buck.

Were we ever so different? Perhaps what has changed is not our nature, but the affordances present in our environment. For all our billions of years of evolutionary history until just about last Tuesday, there has never existed a global market with virtually zero cost of creating “goods” to sell. Now, with digital “assets”, there is.

The ratio of perceived benefit (make money from selling shitty NFTs or shitty beats) to cost (essentially zero cost to mint a shitty NFT or create a shitty beat) is infinite, NaN, divide-by-zero. Of course this results in near-infinite supply and thus most people don’t make any money. But the zero-ish cost means the flow of supply doesn’t stop.

The cost isn't zero though, the environmental cost is huge for NFTs in general, just like the billions made on bitcoin are on the back of that.

That’s right, but the cost is externalized to the planet at large. The person creating the NFT does not bear the cost directly.

The Bored Apes are selling entry to a community not art.

At any rate, as far as I can see artists I enjoy in real life like Refik Anadol are benefiting from and creating interesting art around them. Most NFTs are of course crap (as per sturgeon's) or simply not about art in the first place but I just don't think that means as much as people with an axe to grind think it means.

What's the community and what happens when you enter it? What are the perks to buying into it?

> Lil Baby, the night’s headliner, finally took the stage at around 1AM. Most people had left by then. I was drinking my last vodka of the night and zoning out to “Life Goes On,” though, and a small group of attendees bounced near the front of the stage, and there was something inspirational about Lil Baby’s utter lack of concern with how small the audience had grown and how utterly dry the vibe in Brooklyn Steel was. He had none of Julian Casablancas’ cool kid embarrassment or Chris Rock’s self-consciousness. He was simply getting to the bag. “Brooklyn, if you’re making more money this year than last year, make some noise!” his hype man screamed to the crowd’s delight.

https://www.theverge.com/22824387/bored-ape-yacht-club-nft-p...

- You support the movement!

- Movement towards what?

- Freedom, decentralization, all good things!

- ...by "buying" the picture of an ape?

- It's about the mindset, we're not there yet, you are missing out! JOIN US!!

as far as I can tell, they’ve thrown a few parties, and they have a Discord.

the subtext is basically, for fools “you could end up hanging out with Snoop Dogg!” and for smarter people “you could find out what the next craze is early enough to flip it for a profit!”

(by watching the Discord chatter.)

Seems like it's a crypto secret society.

Or just straight-up stolen art. For every one artist selling NFTs of their own art, there are easily five NFTs sold by fraudsters misrepresenting themselves to have to right to do so.

I'm starting to wonder if we won't eventually go back to "this NFT certified by Christies of New York" otherwise they are basically all worth 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 BTC

Perhaps a sort of trusted authority could validate that...

So, why would you need all the crypto if an authority provides you the value?

One day people will get that crypto is an implementation detail raised to a cargocult status.

That's what I was hinting at

Wasn't this the literally exact thing NFTs was supposed to prevent?

Yet nothing in NFT's prevent it. Even if every artist minted everything they ever post as an NFT it would not prevent it.

At most there would be a "first to file" authenthicity mechanism in the NFT storefronts like OpenSea.

> At most there would be a "first to file" authenthicity mechanism in the NFT storefronts like OpenSea.

Just alter a pixel or put a minor filter, you’re good to go.

If you have the artist's address you can always check that the NFT originated from them. I don't even understand why anyone (mostly non-crypto people) would think it prevents copy pasting.

No, NFTs serve no purpose. As far as use-cases go, they have none.

To be fair, they do actually have some, but all of those can be better served without a blockchain, which as implemented doesn't even help with decentralization, let alone other claimed things.

Well, unless you count market speculation - that's what NFTs currently excel at.

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