#& it's not like I'm paying for a service on top of the cake or interacting with the baker or anything. I'm just buying the cake

[satanfemme]

generally I'm not the kind of person to complain about "tipping culture" in america, but sometimes. oof. come on.

[wyrmoffastring]

Oh NOW you demand answers, okay, cool. Especially since you closed the thread.

No problem, Jason, I got you:

Purchasing a digital item gives you access to a form of that item that others, who did not purchase said item, do not legally have. Piracy exists, of course, but if you want to obtain something legally, you pay for it. if I want to buy a digital wallpaper, the seller will then provide me with a full resolution of the image, that I could not, legally obtain otherwise.

Now personally I believe piracy can be ethical. I think it is ethical to pirate and distribute media censored by oppressive governments. I think it is ethical to pirate old media that otherwise could be deliberately destroyed by a publisher simply because the publisher's policy is to destroy old stock. Or because the publisher employs a DRM that is destructive to the user hardware or contains malware.

Which leads me onto your second point:

NFT is not the same as DRM.

When you purchase NFT you get bragging rights. You get to say you paid money for an online picture that was not created specifically for you and was made only to be sold as a sort of internet trading card. You're allowed to transfer the link to the image into your own NFT wallet. That's it. Everyone else can see the NFT. Everyone else can right click and save the image. You get to brag you paid money for the image.

DRM limits the way a person can interact with digital media. A DRM will check if your copy of a game was legally purchased and stop you from using it if it detects, well, many things. Often even if your game was bought legally, you don't get to play it (thanks Ubisoft, I really enjoy not being able to play Anno 2070 after I paid full price).

Now, hold up, I hear you cry, but what if you don't pay for a specific quality of an image? What if you just pay for a commission and that commission is then posted to the artist's gallery anyway, for everyone to see? That's exactly how you said paying for an NFT is! Well, as someone who does that type of work, I'm happy to explain.

When you commission an artist, they create a bespoke image for you, that they would not have created otherwise. And often you will get a higher res version compared to what is posted in the artist's gallery, but if you don't, you still didn't just pay for your name to be attached to an image everyone else can access. You paid for the service of the artist creating a digital image that they wouldn't make if you never paid them. You paid for the time they spent creating something that caters specifically to you. Like when you order a custom birthday cake, you don't complain you paid full price for the whole cake, just because you only got to eat a slice, you paid full price because that cake was made for you and would not exist otherwise.

There are of course other ways artists can make money from already created digital content. Prints are a good example, but of course Jason already said how bad that is for the environment compared to XRPL, because oh no, you're using paper and ink! That's a higher carbon footprint than XRPL! So is buying a new sweater that I technically didn't need but I did it anyway because individual people decreasing their own carbon footprint to zero wouldn't be enough to stop, let alone reverse global warming, what we need to do is force the top polluters (corporations) to stop fucking polluting and besides, we've already been thru this, the carbon footprint of the NFT isn't what's actually the most concerning thing about them in this case. You can make prints and zines of your work with small and medium printers that you trust. I know MANY artists that do this, that do not employ print on demand corporations specifically because of their sketchy practices, and they're doing fine. But another option many furry artists are already screaming at me about is selling adopts. You create a character, design them, often even write a whole backstory, and then put them up for sale. It is a digital collector's item that's existed long before crypto. You can then use the character however you like, you gain all rights to the character and can legally roleplay as them, put them in your book, comic, whatever you want. And many people just collect them. And we didn't need NFT for it. But that doesn't allow for a middle man, so I don't think that option would work here, because CoG and Jason want something they can take a percentage off of.

Yes, artists can have other venues of getting money off their old art already. But the way you wrote about it in the thread made it clear you specifically want to be the one facilitating it.

The problem is, Jason, we don't need you to make money. But you need us. You need your authors. CoG will not exist if every writer decides to move to another venue, use twine, RPG maker, or hell, learn Python or HTML and code their own game from scratch. You have no idea how motivating to learn spite is, and what you're doing now is making a lot of people want to show they don't need you and your crypto bullshit simply out of spite.