Found this article from The Verge while I was in the crapper: A key feature of NFTs has completely broken.
One of the big promises of NFTs was that the artist who originally made them could get a cut every time their piece was resold. Unfortunately, that’s not the case anymore.
OpenSea, the biggest NFT marketplace still fully enforcing royalty fees, said today that it plans to stop the mandatory collection of resale fees for artists. Starting March 2024, those fees will essentially be tips — an optional percentage of a sale price that sellers can choose to give the original artist. If the seller doesn’t want to hand over any money, that’ll be their choice.
The NFT ecosystem has been on a race to the bottom when it comes to fees. As the market for NFTs collapsed, marketplaces have lowered their own trading fees and stopped enforcing royalty fees in order to attract sellers. Blur, which has overtaken OpenSea as the biggest NFT marketplace by trading volume, only enforces a 0.5 percent fee on most collections, whereas creators typically set their fees at 5 to 10 percent.
OpenSea will stop enforcing royalty fees on all new NFTs starting August 31st. The marketplace will continue enforcing the fees on certain existing collections until March 2024, at which point they’ll become optional on all sales.
How did the artists who let themselves be conned into participating in NFTs not see this coming? Blockchain, cryptocurrency, “web3”, non-fungible tokens: none of this has ever been anything but bullshit sold by techbros who think they know better than the rest of us because they can implement bubble sort from scratch. How long has Molly White been playing Cassandra, warning us about crypto and pointing out the ever-growing pile of grifts that web3 has become?
And now even OpenSea is no longer going to bother keeping web3’s core promise to artists: that if they issued NFTs of their work they would get paid no matter how often that NFT changed owners. Not only that, but people are finally figuring out that NFTs are worthless. This is the ultimate rugpull, and I am here for it! Maybe those who refused to learn from the history of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, how it’s always been one pump and dump scheme after another, will finally learn from bitter experience.
In the meantime, it’s long past time for people who work in tech to wake up and smell the napalm: when cryptocurrency functions as a currency at all, it is nothing but a privately-issued fiat currency. Bitcoin, Etherium, Monero, etc. are as lacking in inherent worth as the US dollar, the Euro, the ruble, and the yen. They are only of value if they can be used as a medium of exchange in the price and wage systems on which our economies still depend. They are only valuable if they can be used to ration goods and services and place value on the hours of a worker’s life.
However, money does not serve any of us, whether it’s issued by government banks or “mined” in a privately-owned data center. Instead, we are condemned to serve money. Every dollar we exchange is a prayer to Moloch, making it stronger, and it is all but impossible for individuals to opt out while still having their idea of a “decent life”.
Using cryptocurrency instead of government currency will not abolish the wage system. Until we make that happen, an individual’s life will have no inherent value; your value will remain entirely dependent on how much others are willing to pay for your labor in service to their goals.
If you want to see how little an artist’s life matters relative to that of a CEO in our society, you need only compare their annual incomes. NFTs won’t change that. This is a sociopolitical problem not amenable to technological solutions.