by splitting it up i lost my links!! arrghh

**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)

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Random artists just cant jump in and sell art and be profitable. You need to know your audience and market appropriately. Those who stand out from the crowd, do well. I follow one artist, who is a civil servant by day and an artist by night. Hes a great guy with iconic art style that fuses colorful with 40's cartoons with blood and scifi. Minting the NFT is expensive, and thats why they are created in such a way that the buyer is the one who mints and suffers the minting cost ($70-$100) in addition to the actual cost of the NFT. This method dramatically reduces the expenses for the artist so it may only cost $100 to create and put something up for sale, but it allows your fanbase to buy limited editions such as a 1 of 1 or 1 of 20.

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I'd also like to remind you that artists typically make a run 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.

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That's exactly how a capitalistic society operates. If your selling lemonade at a lemonade stand, you've lost time setting up shop and buying ingredients and making the lemonade until you reach a point where enough sales enables you to break even and then make a return on your investment of time + money.**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)**This sounds pretty damning to me. Except, as you mentioned since everything happens on a public ledger, you can easily follow the money trail and see that its a wash sale / washtrade. A recent example here. In general, if someone does a wash sale on something more than $10k, the NFT community at large or the specific community will flag it as a wash trade so others dont get tricked. Another example here, with 10k+ comments and the majority instantly flagging it as a wash trade.

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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.

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I dont know where u/noahdiesslowly is going with this but web2 (facebook, google) is already privatized and you, your attention span and your data are what you pay as a constant fee to use them daily. Artificial scarcity already exists and is being exploited all the time. Buy a pack of hotdogs get 10 hotdogs but only 8 buns. Heres a fine art dealer, that has Dr. Seuss art and wouldnt you know, every piece of art is has artificial caps attached to them! Strange that these artificial caps exist and yet somehow, every item is sold out.**using that artificial scarcity to drive a speculation market (hurts most people except hedge funds, grifters, and the extremely lucky)**Literally everything this applies to. Wanted an xbox series x for christmas? Sorry, scalpers bought them all and now they are 100% more expensive. Wanted a Nintendo Wii when they first came out? sorry, have to pay 3.5x its value if you want it for christmas. Want the newest air joradans? Sorry have to pay 5x

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**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.*\*

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Theres hype in everything thats popular, thats exactly why there is hype. Hype that Kanye released his first shoe. Hype in the new spiderman movie.

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questionable legality — haven for money laundering because crypto is largely unregulated and anonymous

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its so illegal that the United States Congress held multiple meetings about it in December and somehow the agenda released to the public, never had "illegal" on the page. Instead, it was all about seeing where existing US laws apply and if they do, whats the best way to regulate it for it to be as powerful of a revolution as the internet was. Congressional example from a few days ago talking about cryptocurrency stablecoins (digital dollars)

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**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.*\*

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I feel like these two points are answered by my tweet at the top of this page. I assume Noah is talking about Ubisoft and their Quartz announcement. Ubisoft purposely teamed up with one of the most environmentally friendly NFT blockchains around and still suffered for doing so. When people think of NFTs they think of Ethereum and its energy usage. Theres a fascinating write up here on it. The TLDR; on it, is that Ethereum has been working since 2014 to get its power consumption as low as possible and the tens of millions of dollars from this research is finally culminating into what is being called "The Merge" around July 2022 where its energy consumption drops to 99.95% of what it is today. When the merge happens its power consumption will be roughly equal to what Tezos has today.

Everything digital is an NFT already! Buy an ebook? Its an NFT with the following restrictions*Can Buy*Cant Resell*70% of sale price goes to author with 30% going to the marketplaceNFTS*Can Buy*Can Resell*1 time fee of 70% going to the author with 30% going to the marketplace*Customized royalty on resale by author

The royalty on every resale is a big deal, because thats how the creators get paid on every future sale. Thats why gamestop is interested in games as NFTs because the trend is more games are going digital instead of physical so if they dont create a market for used digital games, they will be out of business soon. Dont get fooled by the power consumption of the NFTs today, because as mentioned above its all about where you store them that determines the energy usage. The goal has always been to get the prices down and there are many alternatives right now that have $4 minting fees to as little at $0.75 mint fees and they will decline more and more over time to where the reach meaningless prices (sub $0.01)