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A movie just launched 91,000 NFTs to pro– nope, I'm not doing this...

Digital artists getting paid thanks to NFTs is great. Movies and companies creating NFTs to score some free promotional value suck.

Seamus Byrne
Seamus Byrne
1 min read
A movie just launched 91,000 NFTs to pro– nope, I'm not doing this...

There is a future for NFTs. Lets be clear on that. A smart technical solution for selling digital goods in a way that verifies ownership that also credits and automatically ensures ongoing payment to the original creator throughout the life of the work? That's a positive.

Right now crypto and blockchain is a messy place because the race to win 'free' currency has led to an arms race of logarithmic proportions, chewing up precious energy and spitting it out in the hunt for a few digital coins.

I hold no grudge against digital artists who have struggled for years to score a win with their work who have been getting exactly that through this first big wave of NFT auctions. These individuals have often scraped by on commercial work projects while hoping their art could be more than just something that gets shared a million times for free on socials.

Good for them. Seeing some earn enough Ether over recent months to build some security for their futures is wonderful. They are not to blame for the energy disaster Bitcoin, in particular, is tied up in.

But as more and more NFTs appear tied into 'exciting promotions' for mega Hollywood movies, or Twitter itself, where terms and conditions also often place restrictions on how freely distributable the NFT really is – or that you might 'win' it but you don't really get to 'own' it for resale or redistribution? They're definitely taking the fun out of fungible.

And in that light, minting 91,000 tokens for a gimmick promotion sucks. Spending around $5M minting those tokens sucks. The energy required to make and distribute those tokens sucks.

No free promos here for wasteful promotional NFTs.

If you replaced NFT with 'trinkets in boxes of cereal' would you think it was newsworthy?

CryptoTechnologyMovies

Seamus Byrne Twitter

Founder and Head of Content at Byteside.


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