? A Former User
1 Aug 2022, 04:55

@mrsdion

I have strong opinions of this, and I would strongly advise AGAINST artists jumping onto the NFT bandwagon just because of the hype. Also, I have a technical (software) background and am able to understand and critique the technology itself + the surrounding phenomenon from a technical perspective. There have been many other good critiques made by technical writers that I will link to throughout this post.

The whole field abounds with severe technical and ethical problems.

First of all, the concept of an NFT, a non-fungible token, while a totally valid and useful thing to digital artists, does not need to be tied to blockchain technologies at all. In fact, the whole point of an NFT is to verify the uniqueness of a digital asset, and this inherently requires a trusted central authority to come in and validate identity and uniqueness, which is totally contra to the "decentralization and anonymity" hype that surrounds blockchain circles. So why on earth were NFTs as we know it designed to be stored on the blockchain? I don't know the specifics of what the original NFT founders were thinking (but I do know that what the NFT ecosystem turned out to be, rife with grifts and scams and art theft, mostly to the detriment of artists, was not what they had in mind), but there's a reason that NFT's boomed, and that's because it, much like most of crypto, was (and is) a speculative venture that mainly attracted/attracts people who were/are keen to make a quick buck more than they were/are keen about art or supporting artists in any real way.

What do I mean by "NFTs never needed to exist on the blockchain"? Others have written more detailed essays on this, such as this one by Molly White: https://blog.mollywhite.net/digital-artists-post-bubble-hopes-for-nfts-dont-need-a-blockchain/, which I do recommend anyone interested enough in the idea to read. But to summarize, we've had the technologies available to enable the concept of an NFT way before blockchain was ever invented and hyped. The question of how to represent and verify unique identities digitally was something that has been tackled and solved even before the dot-com bubble, using something called public-key infrastructure (PKI), which continues to be used in software systems to this day. (For example, the national digital identities of countries like Singapore and Estonia are backed by public-key infrastructure).

Certifying unique digital identities sounds awfully similar to certifying ownership of a unique digital asset, and at the end of the day it pretty much is the same. With some tweaks you could use the same basic concept as PKI to build an NFT ecosystem - totally sans blockchain, whose oft-hyped properties of decentralization and anonymity actually create more trouble for artists who are creating NFTs for the sake of tying their identities to their works, not for remaining anonymous.

At the end of the day, just like in PKI, you need a chain of trust leading back to a centralized authority that everyone trusts. When such an authority issues a certificate of ownership to you , people trust your certificate of ownership because they trust the authority that issued it (like how people trust fiat money because they trust the government). When you sell a piece of art to someone else, the centralized authority, which could be an art-dealing platform, can revoke your original certificate of ownership and issue a new one to the new owner with whatever transaction metadata required. And et voila, you have an NFT, free of blockchain.

I hope this is enough to convince you that NFTs as we know it today are, just from technical first principles, highly problematic and unnecessarily complex.

And moving on to the other ethical problems:

  1. The entire cryptocurrency and blockchain ecosystem is highly environmentally destructive. Do we really need to be burning mostly fossil-fuelled compute to solve useless “mathematical problems" for blockchain transactions in the midst of impending climate disaster? Even if Ethereum's Proof-of-Stake algorithm is more energy-efficient than the original Proof-of-Work, you're still burning energy to do useless work, and the planet pays for it. As much as possible I want my art to be a force for good in the world, not a force for destruction.
  2. The user experience is unnecessarily complex and confusing...largely because of the totally unnecessary use of blockchain (as already outlined above). If you are someone who has no interest or experience in crypto and blockchain and is just jumping in because everyone else is, I can guarantee you'll feel the headache (https://blog.mollywhite.net/the-nft-creation-user-journey/)
  3. The whole area, unfortunately much like the rest of crypto, is rife with grifts and scams. Instead of benefiting artists, there are many artists who have found their works that they posted online getting stolen and sold as NFTs on platforms like OpenSea (https://www.davidrevoy.com/article864/dream-cats-nfts-don-t-buy-them). In the meantime scammers and thieves and speculators profit from flipping the tokens down to the next level of the Ponzi pyramid - yes, the most barefaced statement one can make about much of the current NFT scene is - it's basically a Ponzi scheme (though of course you will find many crypto-bro articles online attempting to "debunk" this "myth"). Speculators are in it to make a quick buck and exit, leaving behind suckers who will bear the cost when the bubble bursts, as has already happened! (https://www.businessofbusiness.com/articles/the-backlash-against-nfts-one-artist-says-theyre-a-classic-ponzi-scheme-fraud-theft-crypto/)

More links: