https://docseuss.medium.com/look-what-you-made-me-do-a-lot-of-people-have-asked-me-to-make-nft-games-and-i-wont-because-i-m-29c7cfdbbb79
Right, so, you’ve probably read a bunch of great stuff from other people on why NFTs are bad, but I also know how reading things on the internet works, maybe you haven’t. So, here’s the really simple version…
(but first: hey ya’ll, I’m sick! like really sick! I just had a dental surgery the other day, on top of my existing health issues, and I’m trying to keep the pain at bay but it isn’t working. i felt bad not getting an essay out, so here you go. here’s an essay. i got it out. it will be imperfect, but hopefully still useful and well-reasoned. if you like my writing, i will do more if you give me money. you can do so at paypal.me/stompsite or venmo (at)forgetamnesia. i have a ton of medical expenses, like $700 in insurance to pay, so… yeah, it’d be nice to get some help with that. i post all these articles for free in the hope that people find them useful enough to offer me money to keep doing that. i rely on the support of readers like you. thank you to everyone who has helped in the past)
(additionally, I am writing this piece from a largely capitalist perspective, because I am writing this piece for the kind of person who has explicitly told me to make NFT games; I must speak their language. know your audience and all that.)
Long time ago, people came up with an idea for something that already exists: a ledger. Like, I buy from you? It’s recorded. You buy from me? It’s recorded. What happens if the computer burns down? Well, like bittorrent, it’s a peer to peer technology, which means that it’ requires help from every participant’s computer (full disclosure: this is the Explain Like I’m Five version; I am simplifying this). Nothing can happen just because one person says so, because the idea behind cryptocurrency is that it’s about trust, or rather, the lack thereof. It doesn’t have the wikipedia problem of “anyone can edit this.” They call this idea “the blockchain” and they wanted to put a currency on it that’s basically banking-free (because libertarians invented this as a way to get out of being taxed). But still, trust has to come from somewhere.
It’s basically a really inefficient way to solve problems the rest of us already solved with currently existing technologies, but because it’s new, a bunch of people in Silicon Valley rushed to tell everyone how great it was — trying to come up with problems blockchain could fix, rather than solving a problem that exists with the blockchain. A big part of the reason they felt it was great was because it would create a currency that wasn’t backed by the government. Generally, these things don’t work out too well (remember Pullman, Illinois? No? Well, it was a city where a guy paid people not in real money, but in fake money he’d created, so they had to buy stuff in his shops and they couldn’t leave their jobs and had to keep working for him. Bad situation. It got shut down.).
Right, so, fast forward a bit.
Some guy gets mad something gets nerfed in World of Warcraft and creates a new fake currency, this one called “ethereum,” and more recently, some people decide to try to prop up its value by creating… artificial scarcity. More on that later.
Anyways, they come up with this idea for selling digital art: every work of art has a ‘non-fungible token,’ or NFT. This token is the only one of its kind in the world, and it points to your entry of ownership on the ledger, the blockchain, that you are buying this NFT with. An artist I used to follow named Beeple makes a ton of money, so it seems, and a lot of people start to get excited about this idea.
All an NFT does is point you to an entry on a ledger saying “you own this.” The concept is unenforcable and imaginary. It’s not like The Mona Lisa, where if I were to somehow buy it and put it on display in my house, I would be the only one who has it. The Mona Lisa is physical — that’s where scarcity comes from.
I just right clicked and copied this image from wikipedia. Then I pasted it onto this blog. This does not mean I own the Mona Lisa — the real painting is elsewhere on the internet. The painting is not actually in my possession.
This is kind of the nature of digital art — we could get into a whole big thing about Walter Benjamin and his idea of ‘cult value,’ which is the awe we feel when standing in an art museum or in a government monument in front of a big statue (and it accounts for why so many people in, say, the ancient Greek world felt awe when looking at idols and assumed idols possessed some kind of power channeled directly from the Olympian gods).
NFTs are a way to pretend that there’s scarcity to an infinitely reproduceable image, to declare “it has cult value” even though we all know being in the presence of an artwork is very different than viewing it on a screen. Paint has texture, the painting takes up space. It has none of this on a screen. Walter Benjamin was worried that films, which could be shown on any movie screen in the world, would not have scarcity which he assumed gave art its value. He was, of course, wrong.
Sorry, sorry, I’m getting lost in the weeds.
The point is, all an NFT is is this: a link, a url, on the internet, that points you to your spot on a ledger and the copy of the image that resides there and says “yeah this is the owner.” You can sell the link to someone else.
That’s all it is. It’s a convoluted, imaginary way to give property rights to a jpg that anybody can save to their computer and do whatever they want with.
But — and this is a bit more sinister — because it’s not using real, traceable cash, the goal is to obfuscate who the owner is. Remember the CSGO gambling scandal, where a bunch of youtubers pretended to win big on CSGO skin trading websites, encouraging children to pay real money to gamble on various weapon cosmetics? Yeahhhh… about that. Those guys all had stake in the websites in question; they manipulated the back end to make it look like anyone could get lucky without disclosing they profited off the websites they were running. The goal was to trick stupid people into going “oh I can make money here” and then finding out that well, no, no you cannot. NFTs are literally the exact same thing.