I don't disagree, but if it weren't for NFTs there are still other ways for them to get paid. Hell, there are still other ways to scam rich idiots for that matter. Point is, it isn't the technology of NFTs getting them paid, it's the sociology around it. My contention is that the technology itself brings us nothing of value.
> I'm not sure which part of that you think is a scam - are the people buying the NFTs being misled? Is the product sold not what was claimed?
Yes. NFTs talk about "ownership" of some work, but that's the lie. No one has any ownership in any meaningful sense conferred by the technology of NFTs. I can have the exact same thing your NFT points to; hell, I can even mint my own NFT that points to it. If I bribe the artist I can probably get them to vouch for mine being the "legitimate" one. The NFT is meaningless. It's the digital equivalent of the star name registry scam. Even if we take the NFT to be backed by some legal contract entitling the "owner" to actual factual copyright, that isn't enabled by NFT tech, it's enabled by governments and treaties and has been functioning for hundreds of years without cryptographically secure anything and, in fact, depends on so many systems that are not cryptographically secure and decentralized that adding those things into the mix only makes it more difficult to work within that system.
I am not making an argument about technology, or sociology, or any of the things you seem to be worked up over. I am strictly saying, NFTs get artists paid, in far greater amounts than they had previously, and I consider that valuable. I've yet to hear a refutation (or an acknowledgement) of this, and I consider it a strong refutation of your own quote "Absolutely nothing about adding a cryptographically secure certificate of ownership to that is valuable" - adding the certificate of ownership radically increased the size of the market, and got artists paid. QED.
If you're going to argue that Q-Ray Bracelets are valuable, then I do not believe that further discussion on this topic is possible as we live in fundamentally different realities.
Whether or not they are actually making money for artists in a profound way, as you keep asserting, is not an argument I'm willing to engage in since I haven't bothered to look in to the subject. My assertion is that even if they are[0], NFTs are still a broken-window-fallacy solution to the problem, not a real one. As the author of the original article states, this mechanism relies on a shared delusion that NFTs actually mean something and as soon as that delusion evaporates so will the "solution".
[0] I have seen no data one way or the other, so let's steelman and assume you are correct.
The Apple App Store got a lot of indie developers paid in the early days because Apple made payment easy and made side loading hard. There was a gold rush that is largely over now.
The question to ask is whether the NFT art market is sustainable.
My hunch is that there is a relatively small number of people with paper gains in ETH looking for something to do with it, but that the underlying demand for digital art hasn't changed much simply because there's now a new way to "prove ownership."
