Read on Twitter
I have spent days trying to give the NFT artist community the benefit of the doubt, reading their twitter feeds and blogs and the way they speak to one another and come to the simple conclusion that they absolutely have no idea what an NFT is beyond "magic pay-me box"
"NFT" also gets used liberally as an aesthetic shorthand to describe short, abstract animations. Many of the artists are simply excited that literally anyone is paying attention to these types of artworks in the first place.
And to a degree the willingness to ignore the details is understandable. The details of NFTs, how they function, what they really are, is boring AF and deeply stupid. Short, abstract animation is basically impossible to monetize outside of direct patronage.
There's an incentive structure in place to make it really easy to focus on the pitch: this is a channel to sell your otherwise intangible art. There is an incentive to ignore that you are surrounded by scammers and your buyers are all talking about your art as an "asset class."
And, of course, once you've bought in, since you need to buy crypto to mint your pieces in the first place, there's a HUGE incentive to overlook the flaws, to ignore the possibility that this is all just a scheme to pump the value of crypto by making it spendable on something.
It's also worth noting that there's two other significantly identifiable clusters: public figures like Edward Snowden using NFT as an abstract fundraising channel, and people who went viral in Reddit memes ten years ago.
Where it starts to get *really* funky is when you realize that a bunch of the high profile "capitalize on your meme status" stories from recent days are all the doing of one guy, Farzin Fardin Fard, who has spent tens of thousands of Eth on hundreds of NFTs.
So, like, I don't want to say definitively there's a bubble being pumped entirely by a few stakeholders who stand to make more by cashing out their holdings in a gold rush, but, you know, it deffo looks that way.
Oh, and also if you browse Foundation you can pretty easily find transactions that, come on, that's money laundering, right? Like, we can see you. You didn't spend $115,000 on Trollface to give your buddy an Etherium hash as a birthday present.
(For clarity: this isn't a sleight on 'Disaster Girl'. Farzin Fardin Fard was the $500,000 purchaser of the NFT in addition to NFTs attached to Overly Attached Girlfriend, Creepy Chan, and Nyan Cat.) https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/1387958961618358272?s=20
