As a person that has worked on a product that did NFTs before they reached mainstream [1]: This is not what we were trying to achieve. And before anyone comes

As a person that has worked on a product that did NFTs before they reached mainstream [1]: This is not what we were trying to achieve. And before anyone comes with the classic HN argument that blockchain is a hammer looking for a nail. Sorry no. In 2015, we did what any other startup would do to create a product and talked to a whole lot of customers and did story elicitation. What customers were interested in was: - being able to prove the existence and hence authorship of their digital artwork upon creation: blockchain anchoring was a good fit - being able to make their art digitally ownable (precursors were e.g. Rafaël Rozendaal's ownable TLDs) - making money from their creations - transferring/consigning/loaning - generating a certificate of authenticity - licensing/copyright claims Many of these things aren't important in today's modern NFTs anymore. But what the author has created is not what artists were looking for in those days and it's not what they're looking for today. If they did, surely they'd do what the author suggests. - [1] https://ascribe.io https://ascribe.io