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What’s up with the NFT hate?

What’s Up With The NFT Hate?

Disclaimer: 99% of the content on denken.io is genuinely mine. In rare cases, when I stumble upon pieces I find extraordinary remarkable, often published to more volatile outlets, I “save” them here. The following has been contributed on Reddit by NoahDiesSlowly. It’s an astonishingly brief but comprehensive write-up and one, that speaks form my heart. I second every single one of Noahs thoughts from the below article.

What’s up with the NFT hate?

A number of reasons:

  • the non-fungible (un-reproduceable) part of NFTs is usually just a receipt pointing to art hosted elsewhere, meaning it’s possible for the art to disappear and the NFT becomes functionally useless, pointing to a 404 — Page Not Found
  • some art is generated based off the unique token ID, meaning a given piece of art is tied to the ID within the system. But this art is usually laughably ugly, made by a bot who can generate millions of soulless pieces of art.
    • Also, someone could just right click and save a piece of generated art, making the ‘non-fungible’ part questionable. Remember, the NFT is only a receipt, even if the art it links to is generated off an ID in the receipt.
  • however, NFTs are marketed as if they’re selling you the art itself, which they’re not. This is rightly called out by just about everybody. You can decentralize receipts because those are small and plain-text (inexpensive to log in the blockchain), but that art needs to be hosted somewhere. If the server where art is hosted goes down, your art is gone.
  • NFT minters are often art thieves, minting others’ work and trying to spin a profit. The anonymous nature of NFTs makes it hard to crack down on, and moderation is poor in NFT communities.
  • Artists who get into NFTs with a sincere hope of making money are often hit with a harsh reality that they’re losing more money to minting NFTs of their art is making in profit. (Each individual minted art piece costs about $70-$100 USD to mint)
  • most huge sales are actually the seller selling it to themselves under a different wallet, to try to grift others into thinking the token is worth more than it is. Wallet IDs are not tied to names and therefore are anonymous enough to encourage drumming up fake hype.
    • example: If you mint a piece of art, that art is worth (technically speaking) zero dollars until someone buys it for a price. That price is what the market dictates is the value of your art piece.
    • Since you’re $70 down already and nobody’s buying your art, you get the idea to start a second crypto wallet, and pretend it’s someone else. You sell your art piece (which was provably worth zero dollars) to yourself for like $12,000. (Say that’s your whole savings account converted into crypto)
    • The transaction costs a few more bucks, but then there’s a public record of your art piece being traded for $12k. You go on Twitter and claim to all your followers “omg! I’m shaking!!! my art just sold for $12k!!!” (picture of the transaction)
    • Your second account then puts the NFT on the market a second time, this time for $14,000. Someone who isn’t you makes an offer because they saw your Twitter thread and decided your art piece must be worth at least $12K. Maybe it’s worth more!
    • Poor stranger is now down $14K. You turned $12k and a piece of art worth $0 into $26K.
  • creating artificial scarcity as a design goal, which is very counter to the idea of a free and open web of information. This makes the privatization of the web easier.
  • using that artificial scarcity to drive a speculation market (hurts most people except hedge funds, grifters, and the extremely lucky)
  • NFTs are driven by hype, making NFT investers/scammers super outspoken and obnoxious. This is why the tone of the conversation around NFTs is so resentful of them, people are sick of being forced to interact with NFT hypebeasts.
  • questionable legality — haven for money laundering because crypto is largely unregulated and anonymous
  • gamers are angry because game publishers love the idea of using NFTs as a way to squeeze more money out of microtransactions. Buying a digital hat for your character is only worth anything because of artificial scarcity and bragging rights. NFTs bolster both of those
  • The computational cost of minting NFTs (and verifying blockchain technology on the whole) is very energy intensive, and until our power grids are run with renewables, this means we’re burning more coal, more fossil fuels, so that more grifters can grift artists and investors.

Hope this explains. You’re correct that the tone is very anti-NFT. Unfortunately the answer is complicated and made of tons of issues. The overall tone you’re detecting is a combination of resentment of all these bullet points.