Remember physical media, like records, tapes, CDs? Digital media has made them obsolete, but the experience of seeing your collection on a shelf, of having something tangible, well, that’s worth something to some people. Cool.
An NFT is a digital receipt to a product that you purchased or were given. In most cases it’s a digital receipt for a digital product. It’s an attempt to make digital ownership sexy. I can “buy” a jpg file and get an NFT for that file that says I own the original version of that one digital file. So technically I could create an NFT for this blog post and sell it, but if you bought it, you’d own the original copy of the text but not the actual “art” itself – you couldn’t put it on a poster and sell it.
This con is being pushed as a way for artists to make money. In an era where you get paid a penny per stream, people are going to pay big bucks for receipts to digital files you created? So you make a JPG and sell an NFT for it. Then you get the JPG. And I get a copy of the JPG. Our JPG files are identical, except you have a digital code that says you bought it first. WHO CARES?
NFTs will work for huge name artists taking advantage of people who don’t understand what’s going on. A thing is worth what others will pay for it. Is a 1959 Gibson Les Paul really worth a half million dollars? Of course not, but you can sell one for around that much.
Forget about the fact that the entire construct for this stuff might be built on a house of cards. Forget about the fact that all of this stuff might disappear ten years from now. Focus on this simple concept: a digital file, unless there’s some type of copy protection, can be perfectly duplicated with no loss of data. An exact copy. If you want to pretend that the first copy of a file is different than the second, you can… but it isn’t. The two files would be identical.
This is pure foolishness. People WANT to believe that you can OWN the first copy made of a digital file and that it will have value because you have proof. But the pet rock didn’t sell forever – eventually people stopped believing in it. And THAT was a physical product.
