NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) are the latest in a series of cryptocurrency-based scams, meant to steal money from artists and make a select few richer while impoverishing the majority. If you endorse them, take part in them, or (god forbid) create them, you probably suck, and I don't want you near my website.
“BUT THEY’RE HELPING ARTISTS!”
In its heyday, NFTs were advertised as a way for artists to make bank off their creations and keep a ‘receipt’ of who they sold their art to for legal purposes. Both of these are false claims. NFTs require buying into a form of cryptocurrency to create, which usually entails a fee (for example, Ethereum gas) and often have a wildly fluctuating value. An NFT sold for the equivalent of $50 USD may be only worth $0.01 USD the next day. And that’s assuming you can even sell it. Almost all large NFT sales are pre-arranged scams, created to drive up the price of someone’s work artificially. The receipt concept is a scam too. NFTs are effectively a link to an artwork, nothing more. If the service hosting that link closes shop, the link goes with it. Funnily enough, there’s already a system for tracking ownership that works really well! It’s called normal receipts.
“BUT THEY MADE MY FRIEND RICH!”
Making a select few earn money is a common tactic in scams and ponzi schemes. The rare huge cashout (often pre-arranged) is designed to make it seem like NFTs are where you can make it big and earn a huge profit. Instead, by the time you’ve heard about the cashouts, you’re already far too late.
“THEY’RE NOT BAD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT!”
Crypto creates as much pollution as a small country, for absolutely no purpose and with immense amounts of waste. Since NFTs are dependant on the scam of crypto to exist, they are inherently complicit in the rampant destruction of the environment. Also, any crypto that runs strictly on green energy is using up a finite resource that could be better used for purposes that actually benefit real people in tangible ways, in stead of passing numbers around to make a line go up.
NFTs are really just one stepping stone in the long-winded scam of crypto. Any artist that falls for its glamourous claims is doomed to be meat for the grinder, and any layman who thinks they can be one of the lucky few to cash out is a mark.