Case Study
Last updated
Last updated
So do people really think this will be the future of collecting?
Many people really hope so — like whoever paid almost $390,000 for a , or the person who paid $6.6 million for . Actually, one of Beeple’s pieces , the famou—
Sorry, I was busy right-clicking on that Beeple video and downloading the same file the person paid millions of dollars for.
But NFTs are designed to give you something that can’t be copied: ownership of the work (though the artist can still retain the copyright and reproduction rights, just like with physical artwork). To put it in terms of physical art collecting: anyone can buy a Monet print. But only one person can own the original.
No shade to Beeple, but the video isn’t really a Monet.
Whoever got that Monet can actually appreciate it as a physical object. With digital art, a copy is literally as good as the original.
So every NFT is unique?
In the boring, technical sense that every NFT is a unique token on the blockchain. But while it could be like a van Gogh, where there’s only one definitive actual version, it could also be like a trading card, where there are 50 or hundreds of numbered copies of the same artwork.
Oh no, you’re about to talk about the apes aren’t you?
Sure am!
I’ve heard there were kittens involved. Tell me about the kittens.
I love kittens.
At one point, people thought that the kittens would be used in games in somewhat interesting ways. However, that glimmer of hope has been decimated by the fact that almost every salesperson in the NFT space promises that their tokens will be part of a game or metaverse.
Could I pull off a museum heist to steal NFTs?
This image is not an NFT. Yet. Image: Wallace and Gromit: The Wrong Trousers
That depends. Part of the allure of blockchain is that it stores a record of each time a transaction takes place, making it harder to steal and flip than, say, a painting hanging in a museum.
Okay, so what’s that you said about pirating?
Real or not, it was an incredible piece of performance art, sparking a conversation (closer to a flame war) about the right-clicker mindset.
Sorry, what on Earth is a right-clicker mindset?
Wow, rude. But yeah, that’s . You can copy a digital file as many times as you want, including the art that’s included with an NFT.
What do you think of ? Also, you didn’t let me finish earlier. That image that Beeple was auctioning off at Christie’s , which, by the way, in 2014.
If you haven’t heard about the Bored Ape Yacht Club, it’s one of the most successful NFT projects, with apes (which are procedurally generated and have unique characteristics) selling for millions of dollars. The company behind the series of NFTs has , for a few hours with how popular one of their sales was, and even . And a reminder: this all happened because people really like saying that they own a picture of a Bored Ape.
People like, for instance, Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton, who discussed their apes on TV in a clip that .
This kind of exclusive club isn’t really a new phenomenon — people have , and now it’s happening with NFTs. It could be argued that one of the earliest NFT projects, CryptoPunks, .
NFTs really became technically possible when the Ethereum blockchain added support for them . Of course, one of the first uses was that allowed users to trade and sell virtual kittens. Thank you, internet.
Not as much as .
When real game developers like Ubisoft and the studio behind STALKER have said they’d integrate NFTs into their games... people reacted VERY negatively. The companies have either had to or severely in their games.
Of course, there have been a few fun experiments in the NFT space (though I’ll admit that at least one of them was ), but... listen, one of the most successful NFT-based games is kind of , and also . So there’s that.
Or at least that’s the theory. In reality, many, many people have gotten their NFTs stolen by attackers using a variety of tactics. To be clear, hackers aren’t always playing 5D chess here. For the ever complicated hack of , there’s a case: '$1.7 million in NFTs stolen in apparent phishing attack on OpenSea users' where someone was they shouldn’t have through run-of-the-mill phishing.
So someone as a sort of art project, where they put up a torrent pointing to a 19TB ZIP file, which they said included every NFT on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. There’s about whether was actually a treasure trove of NFTs (if such a thing could be referred to as "treasure"), but in theory, it’s actually possible to scan the blockchain to find every record of an NFT being minted and download the media it links to.
Ah, sorry. 'Right clicker' is sort of a joking derisive term used by NFT boosters to deride people who just don’t get it. that you’re completely missing the point if you think that just downloading (or pirating) a JPEG will actually get you the valuable part of an NFT.
1) . NFTs, explained. By . Updated Jun 6, 2022, 8:30am EDT
