Make a living selling NFTs?

[Pieter12]

‘Not starving artists anymore’: Chicago photographer blazes NFT trail for others like her

https://www.chicagotribune.com/peop...220213-7iii3d4bszaqjjrwpcucntgehq-story.html?

 

[Sirius Glass]

So a NFT cannot be duplicated? Or the owner can make as many copies as they want? It is not clear to me how it works or why someone would want one.

 

[Pieter12]

So a NFT cannot be duplicated? Or the owner can make as many copies as they want? It is not clear to me how it works or why someone would want one.

It's this new very weird and confusing digital art world. You register a digital work (video, photo, music even text) for a fee. The you sell that work but you retain the copyright. For the collector/buyer it is about ownership even though copies can be made (but not sold). And if the buyer resells the NFT, you get a percentage of the sale, unlike traditional art.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Other than reselling it and possibly making a profit, of what value is the nft to the buyer?

 

[Pieter12]

Other than reselling it and possibly making a profit, of what value is the nft to the buyer?

Owning it, I guess. And reselling it if the value increases. But the creator/originator still owns the copyright and can do whatever they want: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2021-05-17/emily-ratajkowski-nft-sells-for-140000

 

[Sirius Glass]

So it is the latest fad gimmick. Will it last longer than a fart in the wind storm.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

I'd rather have a Beanie Baby.

 

[Pieter12]

You make your money when and where you can. Tulip bulbs anyone?

 

[Dan Fromm]

Barnum's law: there's one born every minute.

 

[Sirius Glass]

H L Mencken - No one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of Americans.

 

[gone]

The next Pet Rock, just pricier.

This is a story on the internet, so it has to be true, right? Maybe I can make $3000.21 a mo w/ a home rubber stamp business, or invest in one of those "Learn Electronics and Computer Repair At Home" courses I used to see in, what were those things called.....magazines?

 

[awty]

Some of it is fad, but long term as the world becomes more virtual, it will become more normal to buy virtual pictures to do as you please.
Books are sold this way as is music etc.
The good aspect is the maker makes most of the profit, at least for now.

 

[Pieter12]

The next Pet Rock, just pricier.

This is a story on the internet, so it has to be true, right? Maybe I can make $3000.21 a mo w/ a home rubber stamp business, or invest in one of those "Learn Electronics and Computer Repair At Home" courses I used to see in, what were those things called.....magazines?

Exactly. Where are those magazines today? It may be a fad, but people with too much money on their hands are indeed buying some of these NFTs. Kudos to the young lady who has been able to take advantage of it while it lasts. Music has gone virtual, magazines and newspapers and to some extent books have too. (Old fart's remembrances here) I used to buy stock photography from agencies where the agency would have to pay $75 for research and a courier would deliver an envelope of slide sleeves. Now the research s free, you can even get stock images for a handful of dollars--even free if you work at it.

 

[ProfessorC1983]

While the current virtual art craze is quite clearly a tulip bubble, the underlying blockchain technologies that power NFTs and crypto aren't going anywhere and have substantial promise to re-shape society itself, not just technology, through their ability to allow two people to trust each other without a middleman.

For the purposes of photography, one aspect I'm especially interested in is the ability to associate an NFT with a physical artwork, by for example embedding a physical NFC tag into the object (say between the print and matboard) in such a way that removing it would destroy the art, and then minting a coin based on that tag's identifier. This would allow the artist/photographer to create a smart contract such that they get a royalty anytime the work changes hands, and the value of the NFT coin is tied directly to the value of the physical photograph. No longer would the artist have to wonder at the value of their work -- it would be right there on the blockchain.

 

[hoffy]

The good aspect is the maker makes most of the profit, at least for now.

While for most of us, it will mean squat, but for those who actively do sell digital artwork, this will be a big plus.

One thing I have read, though, by a few "artists" who have attempted to generate NFTs, they were concerned about the amount of energy used to process the NFT and were wondering its worth, based on how much they actually do sell.

 

[Luckless]

A long form of all you really need to know about NFTs:



A short form: They're nonsensical scams that don't actually solve any real problem.

The actual NFT is just the 'box' or address the data is stored at. Whoever owns what that address actually points to can change whatever is hosted there. Or host nothing at all there. It is entirely unrelated to the actual content and offers zero protection against other people generating NFTs of the same content.

 

[Moose22]

First, good for Ms. Pierre finding a way to sell her photographs.

That said, I'm just going to leave this here: https://news.yahoo.com/nft-marketplace-shuts-citing-rampant-191522940.html

 

[ProfessorC1983]

The actual NFT is just the 'box' or address the data is stored at. Whoever owns what that address actually points to can change whatever is hosted there. Or host nothing at all there. It is entirely unrelated to the actual content and offers zero protection against other people generating NFTs of the same content.

True, however the premise of blockchains is that blocks can't be modified after the fact; only new blocks can be added. So the owner of an NFT does have a mathematically verifiable claim that they were "first" to "own" the piece of content (since on some level, the token is generated from the underlying digital signature of the file) which of course is the primary/sole appeal to paying real money for assets that are by definition infinitely replicable and therefore worth nothing.

All the snickering here is well-deserved but it reminds one (well, okay, me) of the tut-tutting at Pets.com around the time of the first tech bubble. Yes, a lot of idiots lost a lot of money on a lot of (both in retrospect and at the time) quite obviously untenable positions. And yet the technologies developed during that era produced the foundation for most of the world we know today. I suspect in 20 years we'll see the NFT craze similarly.

 

[Luckless]

True, however the premise of blockchains is that blocks can't be modified after the fact; only new blocks can be added. So the owner of an NFT does have a mathematically verifiable claim that they were "first" to "own" the piece of content (since on some level, the token is generated from the underlying digital signature of the file) which of course is the primary/sole appeal to paying real money for assets that are by definition infinitely replicable and therefore worth nothing.

Except they don't have proof they were the first 'to own the content'. They might have proof they were the first to own a token holding an address that points to something currently holding the content, but nothing about that process verifies they have any ownership over it.

I will happily sell you an NFT contract stating that you are the one true owner of anything in the world. Anything at all. Even the whole world itself. You can own THAT NFT if you really want to buy one of it.

I have zero authority to sell the whole world in reality, but there is absolutely nothing preventing me from selling you a useless immutable digital contract saying that I sold it to you...

I can sell you an NFT pointing to any of my art on my own servers. And tomorrow it can point to different art of my choosing at that same address, because I'm more than a slightly trollish person when it comes to things like that. Whatever you 'buy' as an NFT from me would never again appear at that address, because selling the lesson on what an NFT actually is and does is the only remotely valuable thing that NFTs solve.

Unique tokens are a massively useful thing. I've generated and issued literally millions of them over my career. But they're ultimately worthless in and of themselves. They are scams. Doesn't matter how much anyone selling them believes they're not a scam, they are still ultimately a scam.

 

[ProfessorC1983]

Except they don't have proof they were the first 'to own the content'. They might have proof they were the first to own a token holding an address that points to something currently holding the content, but nothing about that process verifies they have any ownership over it.

Agree completely, which is why I scare-quoted "own" in that sentence. The most generous interpretation is that what's being bought and sold are bragging rights, and all the cryptography can do is establish in a mathematically verifiable way that those bragging rights are indeed yours.

Where blockchains break down are when they interact with real (or I suppose what some in the community might call "legacy") human values/concepts that can't be mathematically checksummed, such as whether a thing in fact exists. Which is why I'm so drawn to the idea of using them in combination with physical objects.

 

[Cholentpot]

H L Mencken - No one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of Americans.

And yet here we are, the strongest country in history. I'll take what I got, boils and warts included.

 

[VinceInMT]

H L Mencken - No one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of Americans.

Actually, he wrote:

“No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.”

1926 September 18, The Evening Sun, As H. L. Sees It by H. L. Mencken, Quote Page 7, Column 2, Baltimore, Maryland.

Note that he pointed his comment at “the plain people,” not everyone.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

A fool and his money are soon parted.

 

[Cholentpot]

Something about suckers and minutes.

 

[4season]

Nice windfall, but not a sustainable career plan, I think.