(2021-04-02) Dash NFTs Weren't Supposed To End Like This

Anil Dash: NFTs Weren’t Supposed to End Like This. When we invented non-fungible tokens, we were trying to protect artists. But tech-world opportunism has struck again.

Back in May 2014, I was paired up with the artist Kevin McCoy at Seven on Seven, an annual event in New York City designed to spark new ideas by connecting technologists and artists.

At the time, I was working as a consultant to auction houses and media companies — a role that had me obsessively thinking about the provenance, ownership, distribution, and control of artworks

Kevin had been thinking a lot about the potential of the then-nascent blockchain — essentially an indelible ledger of digital transactions — to offer artists a way to support and protect their creations.

McCoy used a blockchain called Namecoin to register a video clip that his wife had previously made, and I bought it with the four bucks in my wallet.

The system of verifiably unique digital artworks that we demonstrated that day in 2014 is now making headlines in the form of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs

McCoy has just put up for sale the very first NFT we created while building our system. Capturing an animation called Quantum, it could go for $7 million or more, Axios reports.

By devising the technology specifically for artistic use, McCoy and I hoped we might prevent it from becoming yet another method of exploiting creative professionals. But nothing went the way it was supposed to. Our dream of empowering artists hasn’t yet come true, but it has yielded a lot of commercially exploitable hype.

once you leave aside the technical details of NFTs, putting artworks on the blockchain is like listing them in an auction catalog. It adds a measure of certainty about the work being considered

But the NFT prototype we created in a one-night hackathon had some shortcomings. You couldn’t store the actual digital artwork in a blockchain

We took that shortcut because we were running out of time. Seven years later, all of today’s popular NFT platforms still use the same shortcut.

Meanwhile, most of the start-ups and platforms used to sell NFTs today are no more innovative than any random website selling posters. Many of the works being sold as NFTs aren’t digital artworks at all; they’re just digital pictures of works created in conventional media.

But the situation gets worse. Over the past decade, the blockchain has become a refuge for people who need another place to rest their assets. For global tycoons

One major challenge is that the blockchain has, at present, approximately zero uses for the typical consumer

There’s only one exception to the lack of interest in blockchain apps today: apps for trading cryptocurrencies themselves. What results is an almost hermetically sealed economy, whose currencies exist only to be traded and become derivatives of themselves. If you squint, it looks like an absurd art project.

the people who have made those bets can’t cash in their chips anywhere. They can’t buy real estate with cryptocurrency. They can’t buy yachts with it. So the only rich-person hobby they can partake in with their cryptowealth is buying art. And in this art market, no one is obligated to have any taste or judgment about art itself

The most common criticism of NFTs is that they’re wildly environmentally irresponsible

No evidence suggests that cryptotraders will make more money by embracing green NFTs.

In the meantime, the current NFT market is drawing an extraordinary range of grifters and spammers.

McCoy still believes that blockchain technologies can help artists sustain their work. But in my work as a technologist, my optimism has been dashed many times by opportunists who rushed in after a technology took off.

the advent of MP3s and new distribution systems was supposed to allow artists to sell directly to fans.

companies made blogging technologies with the promise that writers would be able to communicate directly with their readers.

But these changes left creators at the mercy of companies far more powerful, far more ruthless, and far less accountable than the record labels and publishers they’d disrupted.

Artists were the original gig economy.