>Paper receipts don't prevent gallery owners

Yea, but copyrights do. Lots of pro-photographers have lawyers as best friends for this exact reason. The drawback to buying long dead artist art is their copyright ran out. Oh well. We all celebrate public domain day for books even though they're subjugated to the same rules. The NFT, inherently at least, doesn't give you the right to distribute or anything of the sense. It really obfuscates the concept of ownership into some weird hippie mentality that boils down to, "How can you own anything man?" It literally neuters the idea of ownership because what in the hell do you actually own? A string of numbers saying you bought what amounts to a wallpaper background? But at the same time, everyone has access to it anyways without buying it? What bothers me about this "ownership" discussion is just that, what are you even talking about? The idiom possession is nine-tenths of the law refers to this. Not just the law "enforces" possessing something, it refers to defining what that even means and limitations. Copyright and IP lawyers are their own special sector because it's a far more complicated aspect of the law because so many people want to have such a wishy-washy idea of "ownership". Are you allowed to produce, distribute, end of sale, consume and just how much consumption? Within your own home, to a group of people? For how long? Etc. That's just the easy stuff by the way.

Sponsoring the artist is also an extremely weak argument. What's the difference between this and buying a $20 printed tshirt of their art? Or a poster? Or a pdf of their comic? Or their mp3? Except for the fact I get something. This whole thing of, "Yea, but patreon/apple/amazon/paypal/merchantServices/platformX gets a cut out of it."

And?

Because places to purchase/convert crypto and NFT don't exist nor take a cut themselves? When was the last time you mailed a check or cash to someone? Are you going to do that for an artist to buy their stuff? Or is a stamp too much of a "cut"? That and the envelope. Those pesky manufacturers of envelopes. Why do they oppress us by not providing them for free? Just like paypal and patreon not dealing with the debit/credit card companies for free since their data centers and employees are all volunteer anyways! I mean come the fuck on. This is ridiculous. Do you work for free? What do you do? I guarantee the same argument can be applied to your job and you would foam at the mouth about how you deserve to be paid. No one goes into these services stupid. They don't go, "Oh, this is a 100% free services and I make all ze monies." Specialization is such a worshipped concept around here, this is part of it. Someone deals with ease of purchasing and a marketplace so an artist can "art" instead of figuring out how to connect with a merchant services API and the cart to fulfill transactions, let alone all the security required. Yes, they deserve to get paid.

This whole NFT thing feels like some twisted Twilight Zone red herring. It's an immensely complicated way of solving nothing. Concert tickets? What does it do differently? "Verifies ownership". How does it do it differently than the 2 to 3 sets of ID numbers on the ticket and/or putting someone's name on it and verifying by picture ID? A piss poor MySQL db and terrible PHP accomplishes what NFT can do, minus the computational power. That and it's not "the courts" that don't let you scalp tickets. It's the venue. The agreement to buying a ticket either lets you or restricts you from scalping, which was created by the venue or whoever is performing, but normally it's the venue's rules. That's then upheld in court as the agreement is considered a binding contract. Again, the whole "ownership" and legality wannabe work around doesn't work. The restriction was placed by the venue. You think they won't do the same? Or even better, not give a shit about an obscure 3rd party system that grants no value to them or the customer?

Why NFT has ruffled my feathers so much is honestly weird. It has this Twilight Zone feel to it. The question is, wtf is the punchline at the end? I know it's not going to be pretty. Crypto in general led us to this weird new religion of tech. Or maybe it's the worship of "disruption" regardless of purpose or benefit? Disruption for the sake of disruption and regardless of consequences. Could even lead to the same type of pandora's box that the nuke gave us. The biggest difference, crypto tech is energy consuming. Nuclear tech was rapid energy producing. Curious what the fallout from this insanity is going to be.