Is destroying the file and avoiding screens entirely the most radical thing you can do with digital art?

Every work I make begins in code and machine logic, but ends as a single unique hand drawing on paper. When it's finished, I delete everything: the source files, the intermediate states, the whole digital trail. What remains is one signed object that can never be reproduced, re-edited, or minted. People in this space tend to react to that as if I'd burned money.

But I keep wondering if we've got scarcity backwards. We invented elaborate cryptographic machinery to make infinitely copyable files behave like unique objects, while the oldest and simplest form of digital scarcity was sitting right there: destruction. No token, no edition of 50, no artist's proof quietly held back. Just an object with the same relationship to its digital origins that a bronze has to its melted-down mould.

I'm not against editions, and I understand why provenance infrastructure matters. But there's something odd about a culture that celebrates "digital scarcity" as an innovation while treating the actual elimination of the digital as a waste. If the file still exists, is the work really unique, whatever the contract says?

Curious how others here think about this, especially those who work across chain and physical media.