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Comment by creakingstairs | Hacker News Reader

I follow this artist on Twitter and NFT is what let them quit their day job and make these animations full-time. I don't like NFT (and I don't have any) but I think this might be one of the few positive effects of people buying NFTs.

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I agree with the sentiment about NFT's, but not because of the concept, but the current day implementations. NFT's on blockchains that aren't decentralized or permissionless are a farce. I do see a future for provable ownership of digitally native art or in-game objects on Bitcoin.

Congratulations to anyone who has been able to convince someone to buy an NFT (commiserations to the buyer), but I can’t help but feel a simple donation/patron system is a far superior method of supporting artists.

If NFT art becomes common place I don't see it generating more money than the donation/patron system today too. Part of the reason people make huge amounts with these early art NFTs is because people are throwing money into the novelty of NFTs, not from valuing the art. If you wanted to give an artist $1m (like this artist has gotten), there wasn't really anything stopping people from doing it before NFTs.

But if the NFT buyer believes that they could sell the NFT to some other person in the future for more money, then they would buy it from the artist today. This same person would not donate this money.

So selling NFT is indeed a separate source of revenue from donations.

This is a magical make believe situation that NFT people cooked up to pretend that NFTs could have value. It's very unlikely that this make believe situation will actually pan out in reality because then you're making a weird art trade market where people are reselling novelty. And then the only value the artist gets relies on a nonsense "revenue sharing" of NFTs where each resale gives back a portion to the original creator. Which doesn't even make sense because then the value of the NFT has to fluctuate so that people can recoup their losses/get actual gains.

> This is a magical make believe situation that NFT people cooked up to pretend that NFTs could have value

it's the same magic value assigned to art pieces themselves.

It doesn't matter whether those buyers of NFTs make a profit or not - i don't care. I personally don't believe NFTs have value, but i can understand how other people could believe they do.

it will stick, I suppose. Perfect thing to supersede high art sales for money loundering/tax optimisation etc

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