Brew: You may have heard of NFTs
but do you know what they are?
Talk of “crypto” this and “blockchain” that have been
filling the airwaves and screens for a while now, and you
may have even heard bubbles and art theft thrown around.
So what are NFTs, and, more importantly, how did
Logan Paul sell them for Pokemon cards of all things?
Howard: Acquisition complete!
Rue this day, meatbags.
You and your pathetic, entertainment-addicted
squishy processors will bow to me.
Your entertainment is mine.
Your lives are mine.
Brew: Hey Howard.
What’s going on?
Howard: You see, I have purchased your Luke Worm!
Now if you want any more of your asinine
animation, you will have to do my bidding.
Brew: Hmmm… That may be Luke Worm, but that
doesn’t mean you have any control over it.
Howard: What?
But- the blockchain-!
Brew: Gave you something worth about as much
as a trading card, for better, and for worse.
Howard: Curses.
Brew: But what exactly are NFTs?
Well, let’s start with the name itself.
NFT is short for “Non-Fungible Token”,
which doesn’t really help much either.
Fungible here is a fancy word that means “capable
of mutual substitution” which in turn is a
fancy phrase that here means “replaceable”.
So, by definition, something that is “non-fungible” would
therefore be a fancy way of saying that something is “unique”.
Think of it like an original painting.
Sure I can buy a print of Botticelli’s The Birth of
Venus for about twenty bucks - and I have - but I can’t
put a price on the original Birth of Venus since it’s...
priceless.
As for the “Token” part, well, NFTs are
a sort of proof that you “own” something.
Quiz: Why did that sound like there
were ‘’air quotes’’ around that?
Brew: Because there were.
When you purchase a piece of tangible art from a big name
artist, you’ll receive a certificate of ownership showing
that you’ve purchased it legitimately and own the painting.
You don’t get any control over the painting
or its copyright - not unless you’ve made
a really good deal with the rights holder.
Unlike conventional certificates though, an NFT is tracked via
blockchain technology—a network of devices that track and log
transactions and store these logs across multiple locations.
That way, there’s a ledger with each new sale.
Which is one of the major draws for
artists because the original artist can get
royalties with each new resale of the NFT.
For example, Beeple created a nude artwork piece that
featured presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
After the first sale, the NFT attached to it gave
Beeple a 10% royalty on every successive sale.
And when the going price is over 6.6 million
dollars… that’s a pretty big royalty.
Beeple isn’t the only artist to jump on the trend though.
Quiz: Not by a long shot.
The NBA has sold over $230 million in digital
highlight clips called “NBA Top Shots” in $9 packs.
Think digital basketball trading cards, down
to the shocking price tags, like a Lebron
James clip which was sold for $200 thousand.
Brew: That would buy a lot of coffee!
Quiz: NBA specifically teamed up with the Canadian-based
Dapper Labs, creators of the NFT-based cat trading
and breeding game, Crypto Kitties - they’re so cute!
Did you know a Cryptokitty named Dragon was
sold for over $170,000 in September 2018?
Or that you can have a cat wearing
a little scarf and mittens!?
Brew: William Shatner, the Star
Trek star also got in on the fun!
Creating a series of NFT-based trading cards that featured
him throughout his career, like my favourite, him hugging
his co-star Leonard Nimoy, famous for playing Spock; also
known for narrating the smash hit Sega Dreamcast game Seaman!
The card packs were hosted by crypto-company WAX
and all 10,000 of them sold out within nine minutes.
Quiz: There are even actual big
names selling content via NFTs.
Brew: You mean “other big names”, right?
Quiz: Sure thing, old man.
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey sold an NFT of his first
tweet “Just setting up my twitter” for $2.9 million.
Infamous Youtuber Logan Paul has also embraced
the cryptocurrency space with a series of NFTs
related to one of his other loves: Pokemon cards.
Brew: The controversial influencer sold two series
of NFTs related to his first-edition Pokemon card
unboxing stream in honor of Pokemon’s 25th anniversary.
First, virtual trading cards of himself, in
boxing gear, laid out like a Pokemon trading
card, ranging in price from $370 to $38,500.
Then second, with NFTs of highlight clips from the
stream, ranging in price from $5,000 to $20,000.
All in all, Paul made over $5 million in sales of these NFTs.
Quiz: Which is a million dollars less than what
the musician known as Grimes made selling digital
artwork — short animated videos set to original music.
Some of the art she sold was one of a kind,
while others - like the pieces “earth”
and “mars” - had thousands of copies sell.
Brew: Beeple got involved again and sold an art collage
of his work through renowned auction house Christie’s.
The final sale price was $69 million, paid
by early cryptocurrency adopter Vignesh
Sundaresan, also known as MetaKovan.
Honestly?
It just reminds me of the million dollar homepage.
Quiz: Isn’t that the image drawing thing reddit did one year?
Brew: No, it’s the million dollar homepage.
It was a million pixel page that sold for a
dollar a pixel back during the early days of
the internet - also known as the dot com bubble.
Which is also what some critics, including Beeple himself,
have been calling all this NFT-business, a bubble.
According to the artist,
“This is for people who are looking to take some risks,
because a lot of this stuff will absolutely go to zero,”
“If you just look at art historically,
blue chip stuff does pretty well over time.
But most of it goes to zero.
That’s just how it is.
And I believe NFTs will be no different.
And I believe it’s absolutely in an irrational
exuberance bubble that is – we’re there.”
That being said, bubble or no, NFTs
have come under fire by other artists.
Namely because of a little thing called art theft…
Quiz: Ugh, art thieves are the worst.
Brew: Digital artist Derek Laufman woke up one morning
to emails and DMs asking him about his new series
of NFTs that had gone up for sale on Rarible.com.
He was confused, curious, and upset.
The problem?
He hadn’t made any NFTs of his artwork.
Someone else had.
Quiz: Laufman took to twitter, saying, “This is 100% NOT me.
I thought the point of NFT was that the
artwork and artists needed to be verified?
Apparently super easy to scam people.
What a joke that platform is.”
Brew: He wasn’t the only one, either.
Insomniac Games art director Gavin Goulden found his own work
from the hit title Spider Man: Miles Morales up for sale as
NFT trading cards on virtual trading card site, Marble Cards.
Again, the issue here was that Goulden
had never made any Marble Cards NFTs.
He wouldn’t even have the rights to, since
he doesn’t own the rights to the characters.
Instead, an impostor had been verified by
Marble Cards and put the cards up for sale.
Artist Adam Fisher also had art of the Dark Knight
turned into a Marble Card NFT without his permission.
On the other hand there are services that
seem dedicated to making this easier.
The Tokenized Tweets service would respond to mentions
of their twitter bot with a crypto wallet attached
and turn tweets into NFTs which they could then sell.
It’s important to note that there seemed to be no verification
that the original author was the one tokenizing tweets,
resulting in tweeted art being tokenized by other users.
For example, that Jack Dorsey tweet sold as an NFT earlier?
Tokenized Tweets proudly shows how they also made it into an
NFT on their front page for someone other than Jack Dorsey.
However, the twitter account connected to this
service appears to have since been banned.
Tokenized Tweets does offer a takedown form, but as
noted by VICE, the usefulness of this is up for debate.
According to developer “Iamtexture” the code logging
the NFT and ledger tracking it are permanent, but
the image connected to it may not be, explaining that
the image may be taken down, and hosted elsewhere.
Many of the sales are anonymous, so an NFT could be sold
dozens of times before it’s taken down, and if the attached
content is removed a hapless buyer would be left with a string
of code that, to quote VICE’s article, “someone, somewhere,
swears is worth as much as a luxury car due to its tenuous
and likely illegal relationship to someone else's art.”
Video game developer Jason Rohrer also stirred controversy
by creating NFTs of artwork from his game The Castle
Doctrine - without consulting the artists first.
I can’t really speak on the legality of this matter, Rohrer
did have the rights to use the art in his game after all,
but it is considered in some circles to be rather impolite.
When accused of running a scam though, Rohrer tweeted:
“They are kind of a scam, but only kind of.
NFTs provide an unforgible chain of provenance
back to the source, so they can be verified
as being real and owned by a specific wallet.
If that chain points to you, you are the only
owner, and you can prove it to everyone.”
Though when Rohrer says that NFTs are unforgable, that is
only in the sense that someone can’t “forge” the same key
as an existing NFT— not that NFTs cannot be sold illicitly.
Which as marketing and media strategist
Michael Miraflor can attest, they are.
“Someone stole my NFTs today on @niftygateway and
purchased $10K+ worth of today's drop without my knowledge.
NFTs were then transferred to another account.
I encourage EVERYONE to please check their
accounts ASAP.” Miraflor tweeted on March 14th.
And much like how if you lose your crypto wallet
key, you lose your cryptocurrency, in this case there
was nothing else that could be done, per Miraflor.
“Update: looks like I can’t get my NFTs back.
Even though fraud has been confirmed and I know
exactly where my NFTs are sitting at this very moment.
Hacker wins.
Secondary market purchaser wins.
I lose.
Going to explore other options if I can.
Doesn’t sit right with me.”
And then there’s “sleepminting”, a process in which a user
can use an exploit to mint an NFT in another user’s Etherium
wallet, then immediately transfer it to their own account.
This creates a seemingly valid NFT that’s verified
by the block chain despite it being fraudulent.
To demonstrate how dangerous this could be, the
artist who publicized it, one Monsieur Personne [or
Mister Nobody in English], made a “second printing”
of the $69 million Beeple NFT - in Beeple’s wallet.
He then transferred the NFT to himself, before
transferring it again to another account
called Arsene Lupin and putting it up for sale.
And if we look at the transaction history of the NFT, we can
see that it was in fact transferred from Beeple’s wallet.
Other critics have pointed to the ecological cost of NFTs,
with the power consumption used in the creation, verification,
and sales of NFTs alone having used the same power as 77
years worth of an individual’s power usage according to
an article published by Memo Atken in December of 2020.
And of course, if for some reason you’ve purchased
an NFT for content hosted on a website and that
content is taken down, or the network of devices
running a blockchain go down… your NFT is gone.
All that will be left is a broken link, or a 404 page.
And it’s happened already, with NFTs referencing ownership
of an image leading to 404 pages because the image was
never registered to the blockchain in the first place.
At the end of the day, I’m not here
to tell you how to spend your money.
With new technologies come new ways
to invest, over invest and lose out.
Just make sure that if you want to
buy an NFT, you spend responsibly.
Quiz: And maybe don’t buy a stolen piece of art?
Just saying.
Brew: Yeah, don’t ink-personate anyone either.
Quiz: That was actually horrible.
Brew: I know.
Grill: This is identity theft!
Chill: EY my name is Grill, cowards, and I like to burn things~!
ahahaha. Welcome to my Minecraft Let's Play channel,
AY Can't Torch This.
Burning tweets.
Grill: NO.
Give it back, please.
Quiz: Ooh Minecraft, I am so down!
Brew: Sounds fun.
If you'd like to watch us play Minecraft
really well without any issues whatsoever,
check out our latest video over at the On the Hill channel.
Here's a sneak peek:
Grill: Give me all that, and mayybe we're square.
Quiz: This is totally my jam.
Chill: Waffle House!
Grill: Damn right.
xXDied_DeathXx: I can tell you're new so, lemme give you some tips.