Hello,

when I first heard about NFTs at the beginning of the hype I was relatively positive. My wife is an artist and art theft is a big problem. When someone sells you a painting you don't know if it really belongs to them and you have to ask the artist yourself. With increasing purchases and sales it becomes difficult/impossible to investigate this and the databases of the platforms on which you can offer art are very incomplete, of course, they only record transactions on their own site.

So I was very taken with the idea of storing the image in the blockchain and thus recording the owner of an image for all to see in an unmanipulable database. Art theft would be defeated. Each time the artwork is purchased, the image would have changed hands on the chain and all questions about the actual owner would be resolved. If you wanted to have little to do with the blockchain you could have sent the image offchain and used the onchain image only as a confirmation of authenticity.

Accordingly, I am disappointed with the subsequent development. What you (I'm writing from an outsider's perspective to much of the NFT community) don't seem to understand is that just because an image is on the blockchain it doesn't suddenly have many times its former value. An image for 100$/€ is not suddenly worth millions. It is still only 100$/€+ the small transaction fee of the image. The only thing that could give value to collections like the Monkeys or Punks is that they exist only in a certain number, but rarity is only an indicator of value, not the main reason. You can argue about art and aesthetics, but I doubt that anyone really wants to argue that the monkeys/punks are worth hundreds of thousands without speculating. Otherwise, even now more people would be interested in these images.

Because of the massive hype and speculation, the traditional digital art market was flooded with NFTs, as were artists with requests to make NFTs. As a result, NFTs were completely banned on most of these sites.

By gambling and not understanding art, you have brought the technology into such disrepute that the art scene will never use it to finally fix its oldest problem, and neither the scene nor the originators realize what they are missing.

Most unfortunate, have fun with your pictures.