That’s it I’ve decided I’m making a post about NFT myth busting. (Not this one but another one)<p>Think about it like this
It used to be that when you bought a painting, if you bought an original, you got a painting + signature showing it’s an original.<p>NFTs are meant to be used for digital art, where the physical object doesn’t exist, and anyone can make their own copy. So think of NFTs as when we “decoupled” the art from the signature.<p>So
Before you bought
Physical Art Print (limited) + Signature<p>Now you buy
Digital copy (one of infinite) + Signature<p>Since the digital art is infinite, you’re mostly really paying for the signature.<p>What you’re getting with an NFT is just the signature. The art, being digital and infinitely reproducible is still out there. Curiously, what we’ve found is that if you make just a Market for digital art, where you sell only the signatures, people will come and trade them and buy them.<p>You might ask - well what the hell is the point of buying just signatures? To what I’ll reply that everyone has their own kink, and that it has solved a big problem for digital artists who can now make money for their art instead of having to shill for brands or make trash to fund what they really love.<p>Think of it as a form of DRM for digital artists, in the actual meaningful form of the term - Rights Management being the operative words here. It used to be that in order to enforce DRM on “legitimate” copies of a film for instance, Netflix runs a bunch of servers, sells you the streaming and reliable delivery of pixels to your screen. But really they are just enforcing DRM over a bunch of pixels. Same thing with indie artists today. They can do something they couldn’t do before, which is to digitally sign X amounts of their artwork and sell it on an permissionless global market.<p>IMO NFTs right now are little more than a good way to fund artists you like by buying digital signatures over their digital art.