A few months ago I heard about NFT's, and for a week or so, I thought the idea was quite exciting. As an artist, being able to sell my work digitally, to a worldwide audience, and also get a residual cut of subsequent sales sounded great. It still does. But since then, I've learned a lot more about NFT's, and now I just have concerns.

I've seen way too many other artists have their art stolen, minted as NFT's, and sold without their knowledge or consent. There's no authority to watch over who mints what, and minting outfits don't seem interested in policing users eager to help them make a quick buck. Naturally, there's no authority over the underlying cryptocurrency used to buy these illicit NFT's as well, so fraud runs rampant and there doesn't seem to be much anyone can (or will) do about it.

There's also the matter of the ever increasing amounts of energy being wasted to crunch cryptocurrency mining and transactions. Aside from the blatant theft of other people's work, it's one of the worst aspects of all this.

It's a shame because NFT's could be a big deal for digital art in the future. But the problems currently outweighs the benefits, in my opinion - so much so that I'm starting to worry a tiny bit about posting my art online, as I'm afraid it will end up being ripped off and sold without my knowledge.

I've already seen images that I've created and posted appear in random places online, and I can't imagine that situation will improve when there's a buck to be made.

It seems like every other week there's a hot new set of NFT avatars generated by some programmer artist's algorithm, made to have common configurations and rare ones, selling for thousands or millions of dollars.

My question is, if you want to have a rare, unique avatar created by an actual artist, why not just do the old-fashioned thing and commission it?Y

You'll probably pay a lot less - and you won't be participating in the dumpster fire that is the current NFT market.