lol, lmao

excited to see all the creative code/generative art people who enthusiastically jumped on this stuff try to walk it back (i mean i won't because i unfollowed them, but)

the wild part to me is that it's not at all a new revelation. this has been known and repeatedly publicised for the entire lifetime of the nft craze. but it's impossible to counter that level of cult behavior with mere reality.

amazing the marketing you can do when you're willing to totally ignore anything inconvenient to your pitch

I remember being blocked by some artists who bought into the hype a bit late-ish for bringing this up lol

it gets better: because the exchanges that let you bypass royalties are explicitly doing so with the goal of avoiding the regulations put in place by mainstream exchanges, your odds of being scammed dramatically increase when using them. absolutely no one wins, except for, as always, the grifters

Yeah the "secondary royalties" was always, at best, the equivalent of a note written on the back of the artwork saying "If you sell this, please send some of the money to..."

Largely I think it go overshadowed because by the time it was becoming an issue, there were bigger issues like people continuing to mint new copies of "exclusive limited edition" NFTs or simply burning collections to re-mint and leaving the original buyers in a lurch etc.

Everything in the NFT space hinged entirely on the willingness of the users NOT to abuse the system, while incentivizing them to abuse the system.

NFTs do almost nothing on the chain because coding for the Ethereum "virtual machine" is nightmarish, and hugely expensive in terms of "gas" to pay for computation. They don't even store the images themselves on the chain, all that gets stored is a location, typically on a traditional web server, because even small JPEGs are too large to keep in the blockchain itself. There's no mechanism in most NFT systems to enforce royalties on resales because there's almost no mechanisms there at all.

"Line Goes Up" goes into this to a degree. There's a ebook version of the script for it that Olson made available to Patreon subscribers (while telling folks to go ahead and share it as widely as they feel like so google for it if you want), and here's some cut-and-pasting from it:

Even the argument that artists could make passive revenue off secondary sales turned out to have a lot of caveats attached.

One, the smart contract for the token needs to have a function that defines royalties, so anyone who minted a token based off of hype making it sound like an inherent function of the system was out of luck.

And, two, the token doesn’t know what a sale is and can’t differentiate between being sold and being transferred, so it’s actually the marketplace that informs the token “you’re being sold” and collects the royalties.

End result, royalties are easily bypassed simply by using a marketplace that doesn’t collect royalties or uses a different format of royalty collection that’s incompatible with the function the token uses.

This did get some brief coverage in Dan Olson's video about Crypto/NFTs back in January. Specifically, mentioning how some artists found that it wasn't automatically built into the NFT system, and how some marketplaces just never bothered to use the contract calls to execute the royalties, or that there competing APIs for contracts that different marketplaces supported.

But it may not have completely penetrated into the general knowledge, even as highly viewed as that video was, it was extremely information dense.

I assumed this was true from the start. Entire thing is vaporware of a bad idea within a bad ideology