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What value does crypto bring to you that a artist running a shopify store does not? It sounds like the NFT is entirely irrelevant in this transaction other than

What value does crypto bring to you that a artist running a shopify store does not? It sounds like the NFT is entirely irrelevant in this transaction other than possibly providing a socially acceptable route that is better than a PayPal donate button.

mattdesl 5y ago
I am an artist running a Shopify store (prints), and also have been selling via NFTs on Tezos and Ethereum for the last few months. If NFT continues to be profitable in the long term (even a fraction of what it is currently), there will be no need for me to continue using Shopify. Consider the fees alone: I pay monthly fees for Shopify, for art printing and shipping, pens and physical materials, hosting my domain name and studio email, and so on. Not to mention the cost of my time (replying to emails, customer support, editing my store's website, etc). All of this to enable revenue on my primarily digital art. I do enjoy making physical art prints, but I mostly work with software and code, and the art I make is better experienced digitally. Before NFTs, there was no established mechanism to earn revenue on digital art (primarily because there was no established mechanism to 'own' digital art), so I was forced to adopt physical printing and e-commerce despite it's high costs, annoyances, and generally poor return on investment. In contrast, I can mint an art token on Hicetnunc for less than 25c USD. These fees do not go to a central platform like Shopify, but to the blockchain that helps maintain the provenance and permanence of the tokens I am distributing. There are many other benefits of blockchain in this digital art space, I have written about it extensively[1]. [1] - https://mattdesl.substack.com/p/subscapes-part-1-preface https://mattdesl.substack.com/p/subscapes-part-1-preface
- detaro 5y ago
  > and the art I make is better experienced digitally. That's where it breaks down when buying stuff for me personally. Prints admittedly run into the issue of "walls get full", but I have not figured out a way to regularly enjoy digital art, especially since everything comes in different sizes and scales. Plenty artists I follow (you included ;)) now are on HEN, but that has kept me from getting into any of it, even though I get the limitations of prints. There have been combinations of screen + digital art "subscription" in the past, which I never liked because of their closed nature, but maybe some amount of standardization/embedded display hints/... towards a more open variant of that will develop.
- Traster 5y ago
  Sorry I meant specifically, you could just sell digital copies of your artwork on shopify, along with a little pdf from you saying "Mattdesl hereby certifies this artwork as edition N of M". What value is the NFT providing? As far as I can tell the only value is that people are willing to trade in NFTs but are less willing ot accept the shopify solution. But they're both equal measures of ownership. Once you've minted your NFT on Hicetnunc you still have to sell it, and that's likely to go via a crypto exchange in exactly the same way that your credit card transaction goes via shopify?
  - mattdesl 5y ago
    I answered in other threads here, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27770605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27770605 Largely this question comes back to decentralization, trust, and a novel paradigm of digital ownership that is enabled by elliptic curve cryptography and blockchain tech. The blockchain acts as a social consensus mechanism - we can all agree that "X public key owns Y unique token" - which is not the case with a centralized database record that can be mutated, or a file that can be easily copied/edited and shared.

mattdesl 5y ago

I am an artist running a Shopify store (prints), and also have been selling via NFTs on Tezos and Ethereum for the last few months. If NFT continues to be profitable in the long term (even a fraction of what it is currently), there will be no need for me to continue using Shopify. Consider the fees alone: I pay monthly fees for Shopify, for art printing and shipping, pens and physical materials, hosting my domain name and studio email, and so on. Not to mention the cost of my time (replying to emails, customer support, editing my store's website, etc). All of this to enable revenue on my primarily digital art. I do enjoy making physical art prints, but I mostly work with software and code, and the art I make is better experienced digitally. Before NFTs, there was no established mechanism to earn revenue on digital art (primarily because there was no established mechanism to 'own' digital art), so I was forced to adopt physical printing and e-commerce despite it's high costs, annoyances, and generally poor return on investment. In contrast, I can mint an art token on Hicetnunc for less than 25c USD. These fees do not go to a central platform like Shopify, but to the blockchain that helps maintain the provenance and permanence of the tokens I am distributing. There are many other benefits of blockchain in this digital art space, I have written about it extensively[1]. [1] - https://mattdesl.substack.com/p/subscapes-part-1-preface https://mattdesl.substack.com/p/subscapes-part-1-preface

detaro 5y ago
> and the art I make is better experienced digitally. That's where it breaks down when buying stuff for me personally. Prints admittedly run into the issue of "walls get full", but I have not figured out a way to regularly enjoy digital art, especially since everything comes in different sizes and scales. Plenty artists I follow (you included ;)) now are on HEN, but that has kept me from getting into any of it, even though I get the limitations of prints. There have been combinations of screen + digital art "subscription" in the past, which I never liked because of their closed nature, but maybe some amount of standardization/embedded display hints/... towards a more open variant of that will develop.
Traster 5y ago
Sorry I meant specifically, you could just sell digital copies of your artwork on shopify, along with a little pdf from you saying "Mattdesl hereby certifies this artwork as edition N of M". What value is the NFT providing? As far as I can tell the only value is that people are willing to trade in NFTs but are less willing ot accept the shopify solution. But they're both equal measures of ownership. Once you've minted your NFT on Hicetnunc you still have to sell it, and that's likely to go via a crypto exchange in exactly the same way that your credit card transaction goes via shopify?
- mattdesl 5y ago
  I answered in other threads here, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27770605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27770605 Largely this question comes back to decentralization, trust, and a novel paradigm of digital ownership that is enabled by elliptic curve cryptography and blockchain tech. The blockchain acts as a social consensus mechanism - we can all agree that "X public key owns Y unique token" - which is not the case with a centralized database record that can be mutated, or a file that can be easily copied/edited and shared.