HACKER Q&A
📣 iainctduncan

How to best educate artists and musicians on NFT scams


Hi folks, I am both a programmer/software architect/consultant and a musician/composer/producer. I am growing increasingly concerned with the hype I'm seeing in the music world around NFTs. While I love my non-techy music colleagues, many of them are, to put it bluntly, absolutely perfect marks for scammers and hustlers. They are desperate for ways to make money off their work, have in many cases been very badly hit by the pandemic, and have little understanding of technology, economics, or investing. They are being sold a load of crap about NFTs being the next big thing for artists to sell their work to fans and it's horrifying.

So if you are a fellow NFT skeptic and you wanted to educate people like the above, what would you send them? What are the best resources that: don't depend on highly technical language, don't require solid understanding of finance and economics, are easily digestible, and are good advocacy?

I'm really worried about friends and colleagues wasting their (scarce) money and getting milked for all their worth or badly burned. Any suggestions will be much appreciated.

(And I'm not asking to debate their merits, this is not that thread. If you love them, we can agree to disagree without discussing it here....)


  👤 dropnerd Accepted Answer ✓
premise is incorrect if you're just trying to save them money.

creators don't usually lose money from creating nfts, because the default for most nft platforms is that you don't pay unless your work sells (look into lazy minting).

the main risk for an artist is reputation risk. because nfts are deeply unpopular in many online communities, they may find that their traditional online audiences start ignoring or slandering them.