Can I ask you something?
How much would you pay for me, to buy this video?
Like- if it was up for sale, and you could own it…
– I would give you some fancy certificate, saying that you are the SOLE owner of this
YouTube video made by me, Laszlo of Dantier and Balogh talking about crypto Art.
Oh it would still be here though – I wouldn’t take it off of YouTube – people would still
be able to watch it here, share it, comment under it, whatever they want - and not gonna
lie, most of these viewers wouldn’t even know that the video is yours…
So how much…20 dollars? 200?
Who knows in 10-15 years’ time I could be some famous artist, and then you could resell
this video for like 20 thousand dollars!
Doesn’t that sound good?
what’s that?
No no I cant promise it will worth that much – it might be worthless – you gotta risk
it - that’s kind of the whole point – So …. What do you say?
Pupupupppp DANTIER N BALOGH Hey Guys!
Welcome to our channel, the No 1 place for people who love Design, Art and everything
Creative!
You are watching Dantier and Balogh’s channel, my name is Laszlo and, in this video, im going
to attempt to explain everything you need to know about crypto art, NFTs, all these
new buzzwords which you might have heard lately - I wanna give you guys the pros and cons
of crypto art, what they are, what do they mean, and generally why should we care about
all of this as creatives.
Let me tell you I have been participating and paying attention to the digital art world
for a little short of 10 years now.
And in my time here I always found that digital artists, as a community, are incredibly warm,
friendly people, who have created ever-so-supporting digital communities wherever they went to
to deviantart, then tumblr, twitter, Instagram and many many other social platforms through
the years.
And it feels like all that union, this FAMILY of artists is NO MORE.
Sound like overreacting but we are genuinely at a turning point for many artists.
And while watching your heroes fight each other can be very entertaining when it happens
in a movie – when this occurs in real life its concerning – to say the least.
– Crypto art, which I will explain in a sec has turned everything upside down, and
split the artists of today into two opposing groups:
- Artists who think crypto art and NFTs are the best thing that ever happened since, the
invention of sliced bread - And artist who think introducing art to
the crypto space is an absolute, literal catastrophe.
Now after all this teasing, let me explain some of this mess!
SO CRYPTO ART; let me try to define it Extremely powerful computers have the ability
to mark a digital file by giving it a unique, complex, CODE – like an ID NUMBER.
This CODE is called the Non-Fungible TOKEN (NFT for short) which is, in the case of a
digital artwork file, is basically serving as proof of authenticity.
It serves as proof, because every Token is different, requires a lot of computer power
to make, cannot be replicated, and for one file you can only create one TOKEN.
These NFTs, once they have been created, are being safely stored and recorded onto this
big database called the blockchain – which is essentially a big old spreadsheet containing
everything there is to know about the validity of your TOKEN, PROOVING that your file assigned
to this NFT is the ORIGINAL FILE.
What is happening right now is people are buying and selling all these CODES within
each other, using crypto currencies, as a new way of art dealing.
– thus, creating the world of crypto art.
DOES ANY OF THAT MAKE SENSE?
? If this was too much, imagine it like this
– if I were to buy a real painting made by a famous artist, I wouldn’t just get
the painting off of the previous owner’s wall, right?
– there is a bunch of paperwork which would come with the piece – certificates of authenticity,
history of previous owners, transaction details, - all of which I would like to see to make
sure im buying a real artwork made by the real artist, and not being tricked into buying
a fake.
Crypto art is basically the same thing, but doing all this digitally.
We basically now have a way to validate digital files by assigning these unique Tokens to
them as a way of making sure that you own the original piece.
That’s not to say that you can stop people copying and pasting duplicates of these files,
which you quote on quote OWN people absolutely can – the very same way the Louvre in Paris
cants stop me to take this picture of the mona lisa, and use it as screen saver on my
phone.
This whole thing is more like – what’s the word - symbolic? – a little something
to yourself if you wanna collect art – or invest in digital art, hoping that you can
resell these tokens for a profit later down the line
Now all this Crypto Art world, as I mentioned has created a great divide between artists
– and I wanna tell you why.
Let’s start with talking about the PROS of crypto art, tho let’s spread some positivity:
- First of all, artists of today absolutely have to diversify their income streams in
order to make a living, and this thing promises hefty profits to a selected few!
- It is also nice to see that digital art maybe for the first time in history being
recognised by the public as a VALID ART FORM that IS WORTH INVESTING INTO.
Honestly just do a little google search n see how much some NFTs are selling for these
days – you will be surprised, I can guarantee that.
- Another huge positive, is royalties! every time someone resells the NFT which has originally
been created by you, you, the artist gets given a little bit of commission!
Which can potentially be a great source of exponential passive income.
– as people will only sell your stuff if and when is profitable.
And that’s something that doesn’t happen with traditional art dealing.
Once you sold an original artwork of yours, that’s it – You have nothing to do with
it anymore.
- And my last positive is the fact that this crypto world is reasonably inclusive: Anyone
can create an NFT, and there are many websites out there, which are tailored to the kind
of stuff you might wanna trade.
– the process would come with a hefty learning curve, its quite a new thing after all – like
you do need a create a digital wallet where you keep your cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin,
or Ethereum, which the main crypto currency that these websites are accepting.
ANDDD you know what, this is the point where we should talk about the NEGATIVES, as im
SURE some of you are already rolling your eyes as im mentioning things like bitcoin,
and putting your hard earned cash into digital currencies
- Like, yeah that’s already quite a big catch for some, as you need to buy into this,
before you make ANY money.
and Making NFTs is not cheap.
On a supply and demand basis, I don’t think they will be cheap for a WHILE as so many
people are losing their minds over this whole thing at the moment.
Oh yeah and there are purchase fees as well, on top of base art prices, which basically
means that you pay for buying as well as pay for selling.
- Running this whole system, making NFTs is a costly business.
The pricing value of crypto is oftentimes being referred to as GAS, which is very ironic,
because if we can believe the rumours, this whole TOKEN production is using RIDICULOUS,
like barely INCOMPREHENSIBE amounts of energy.
And THIS – this is the biggest catch of the whole system – These super computers
doing the work are burning fossil fuels to such a rate, that is just quite frankly not
worth the price.
I DON’T KNOW IF all these scary statistics, that people are quoting are true, but my guess
is, they can’t be too far from the truth.
And of course all these crypto dealing websites are promising, that they aim to switch to
renewable energy sources in the future - IF you look at the fact that only 11% of the
US energy is being created by renewable sources at the moment, we are nowhere near a time
when this whole crypto thing is justifiable.
THIS is what sparks debates – this is why people are unfollowing their favourite artists
– disagreeing on this issue is what I think has changed the digital artist community as
we knew it.
AAAND yeah this is where people like to point out that we are consuming too much energy
anyway, we are burning fossil fuels by driving our cars, eating meat, using central heating
n all that – VERY TRUE!
But there is a difference between using energy to keep warm n feed your family as opposed
to using it for digital artwork dealing which is STILL very much a luxury item…
Also, why would you justify energy consumption with more energy consumption?
To quote my brother on this, If you get a puncture of your car’s tyre, is it logical,
to get out of the car, go around and slash the other three tyres as well, thinking that
- oh well, we are not going anywhere anyway?
- Of course, there are a number of OTHER negatives in play as well, such as art theft, which
has always been a problem in this industry, to begin with – NFTs are fuel to the fire.
LIKE there isn’t a real way to make sure that the person who created the NFT is the
actual creator of the artwork itself – NONE of these crypto art dealing sites are doing
nearly enough background checks on this, which is very alarming,
- since this whole crypto art world is still ‘relatively new’ there are no proper laws
or regulations in place to protect consumers.
So questions like, what happens if I cant access my digital wallet for some reason?
Or what if the crypto art dealing site im using goes bankrupt-how do this affect the
current copyright laws?
All of these questions are being ignored.
- There are serious holes in the system, and im sure There are people out there who will
take advantage of users who are uninformed - trying to hack the system and see what they
can get away with – we are living through this trial phase, when people out there are
creating nfts for their tweets – or their videos – or burning physical artwork in
favour of keeping its nft instead, flooding the market with junk/low quality artworks
– all of which makes this whole thing akin to BUYING AND SELLING AIR – or do you know
those websites where you can buy and name a STAR….or a little, square meter piece
of land in scotland, granting you the title of a Scottish lord?
.its pretty much the same thing - but yeah that’s just my opinion…
So even if I could look past the environmental issues in question – which as the Dantier
+ balogh Brand, we CANT – for now I would still side with the Nay-sayers.
I know this might make you feel like you are missing out on some easy money here – but
let me ask you this: There is serious money in modern art as well,
selling paintings – have you ever thought of missing out on money there, when you see
a dead-simple paint splat on a canvas – or a banana taped onto a wall being auctioned
for like a trillion dollars?
There is high level of elitism going on in the art world – and this whole crypto thing
is for sure replicating this exclusiveness.
Apart for a very lucky selected few, only the already famous artists will make serious
money with this…
Gosh im sorry, I know its headache material – all of this has been happening for a couple
years now, but lately this whole idea just blew up n I felt like, I just had to talk
about it, get it out of my system in the form of a video.
Hope it helped some way
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Take care guys, and I’ll see you this time next week!
Bye!