Holy 💩!!! You just failed crypto 101.
Bitcoin has been forked into several coins and each fork rewards holders with the same number of coins in each new forked chain. That’s literal duplication.
Bitcoin’s source code repository has also been cloned and had some minor parameters changed to create a joke like of new 💩 coins like Litecoin etc
If I want I can take the bitcoin source code right now and start the whole thing over again from scratch without forking. All I need is a few computers to host the nodes and miners.
There are also still double spend bugs in most of these chains that are always being fixed.
How come blockchain blockhead defenders don’t know how this stuff works? 😝😂😂😂😂
ANYTHING digital can be and is often duplicated.
And if you people really were interested in artists, you would find one and commission them or hire them or find jobs for them. But no crypto people weren’t interested in doing that for 11 years. They don’t give one F about artists. It’s just a fat scam by the 1 percent because they are always creating new schemes to get rich off everyone else.
Let's actually attend crypto 101, shall we?
Let's say you opened a pack of baseball cards in the 60's, and you got a rare, sought after card that people assign value to. Can you duplicate that today? I mean, you could expertly photograph it, and attempt to print it and make it look just like the original card, but of course any expert would be able to tell it's a fake, and there will be no value assigned to it. Keep that in mind for a bit.
Sure, Bitcoin has been hard forked, but it's not as simple as you make it sound, and it's not literal duplication. Hard forks occur when updates are applied to a chain. Some miners may choose to mine the original coin with updates applied, at which point a fork occurs (which is the most common scenario). Some might say "Sorry, no, we don't support this, and we will continue to mine the chain before the update was applied." Depending on whether there is enough mining support to actually keep that chain running, it does or doesn't. Assuming it does, yeah, you have two sets of coins now. Are the additional coins you now own literal duplicates of what you owned before? No, because the same value is not assigned. This has happened with many chains, including Bitcoin and Ethereum. Ethereum and Ethereum Classic are different chains at this point. 1ETH is currently worth ~$2,100. 1ETC is currently worth $~19. So it's not 1:1 if you consider value, and technical capabilities.
And yeah, most blockchains are based on open source code, and yeah, you could repuprose that code and launch your own copycat coin if you wanted to. But would you really have any mining support to properly secure the chain? Would you actually be a properly decentralized chain that people value? Would your coin be worth anything? Or would you essentially have a forged baseball card that nobody cares about?
One of the key features of an immutable blockchain is that it can't simply be duplicated. It is not possible to take a Bitcoin I own and duplicate it on the same chain so that you now have an extra coin that's also worth ~$60k. You simply can't do it. If you say you can, then do it now. I'll give you my Bitcoin address. Please, duplicate the coins in my wallet. I want to see you do it. Of course you can't, and you know that, so sadly we won't get to see you do this.
On to the topic of NFT's, sure, there's some ridiculous stuff happening at the moment. People selling the rights to animated gifs, or images, etc, but who cares? I don't concern myself with things that don't interest me. If someone else wants to pay an insane amount of money for animated gif that you could duplicate and keep on your own machine, that's not really my business. And yeah, you might also have the gif, but you don't own the rights. You don't have ownership. That ownership is unique, exists on an immutable blockchain, and can be bought and sold as owners and buyers see fit. It's a lot easier to understand NFT's if you think about that baseball example I gave above, or even more specifically if you think of digital versions of Pokemon cards, or Magic the Gathering cards. If you purchase a digital pack of cards, where the cards exist on a blockchain, and you control and can prove ownership, those become collectables that people can choose to assign value to if they like, and ownership can be transferred. Just like a physical pokemon or MTG card. Sure, you could screenshot the card, but you don't actually own it, and you couldn't choose to transfer ownership to someone else with your screenshot. Because you don't own the actual card. You couldn't use your screenshot card in a digital version of the game online, nor could you hack a card you want into existence, or steal someone else's card and take control of that ownership, unless you had their private keys.
Lastly, I have no idea why you keep going on about this 1% thing in regards to crypto, or acting like "Crypto people" don't care about artists. To your first point, about the 1%.. nobody knows who created Bitcoin, and it certainly doesn't seem as though it was created by the 1%. If it was, it would have been distributed to those types of folks, but it wasn't. Early adopters, primarily tech enthusiasts were the ones who got rich off of it. Only recently have institutional investors started to warm to crypto, and Bitcoin specifically, and sure, they've made money off it, but the promise of crypto is that it's really open to everyone. Things like DeFi level the financial playing field and make financial services available to absolutely everyone, where in traditional markets, those services are only available to accredited investors, or "the 1%" To your second point about crypto people not caring about artists.. I don't even see the connection. Crypto wasn't created to be a support platform for artists. In the case of Bitcoin, it was created to be a peer to peer digital cash. Because of its decentralized nature, developers have been unable to agree on technical improvements that would allow it to function in that way still, so it's morphed into more of a store of value, due to it's limited nature. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins. Not more. It's essentially digital gold now. But there are other chains that are living up to Bitcoin's original use case, and more. Look into Ethereum. Smart contracts have enabled all sort of interesting ideas, namely DeFi, and now NFT's also.
It's clear you have a dislike for crypto, and that's fine, that's certainly your right to your own opinion, but why you're on a public crusade against it, and spreading mis/disinformation to make a point that isn't there, is less clear. If you don't understand what you're talking about, that's fine, but don't pretend that you do.