Reducto ad absurdum

COURTESY OF BEEPLE/CHRISTIE'S

A cool 68 mil guarantying access to a digital image defies logic to yours truly, especially when said image, in its totality, can be readily seen in this BRT blurb. Seems NFT's, aka, “a non-fungible token,”, an entity using secure block chain tech to enable one to see work, now has a price tag people are willing to pay for.

Bitcoin blockchain structure

IT STARTED WITH CryptoKitties. In December 2017, the dopey-looking cartoon cats, created by Canadian company Dapper Labs, debuted as tradable collectibles, like Pokémon cards for the bitcoin era. Each image was associated with a unique string of digits—a cryptocurrency “non-fungible token,” or NFT—that could be traded on the Ethereum blockchain platform as a title deed granting the holder ownership of a particular kitty.

Ownership via access to bits, right? Taken to the extreme, encrypted bits are now nominally equivalent to written words or compositions of music, thus creating a market of things with no physicality, a notion that didn't exist just three years ago. Question, does the person actually own the art or only access to it, along the lines of code, whereby one does not own the software in question, only the right to use it.

If all of this sounds bizarre, that’s because it is. The idea of paying for the symbolic ownership of a digital image that lives somewhere on the web and can be captured on a screenshot or right-click-download within seconds, is so alien it seems either idiotic or ironic. Yet NFT proponents purport to be solving exactly that problem: the near-impossibility of monetizing digital artworks. “As a mechanism, NFTs make it possible to assign value to digital art, which opens the door to a sea of possibility for a medium that is unbridled by physical limitations,” says Noah Davis, a specialist in postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s.

Sounds like snake oil to me. Question, how much would BRT be worth as said blog has been around for 12 years containing quite a bit of information, something people may pay for if said blog gets encrypted via blockchain tech. Something to consider, right? :)

If it sounds too good to be true, it is.

Addendum

A digital display device featuring Beeple’s artwork that was sold via Christie’s auction house. 

Photo: mundissima (Shutterstock)

Too good to be true/rev 1.

Nifty Gateway—an NFT marketplace that was bought out by the Winklevoss twins back in 2019—announced on Monday morning some of its users were swept up in a small-scale hack that saw their accounts and credit cards compromised.

In both cases, the alleged MO seemed to be the same: 

• A person’s account gets hacked.
• The hacker transfers the victim’s personal collection of NFT art into an account that’s owned by the hacker.
• That hacker also uses the victim’s credit card to buy items that are up for auction and then transfers those purchased items into another account owned by the hacker.
• Hacker then sells their ill-gotten gains on a third-party platform for profit.

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, IN NO EVENT WILL NIFTY GATEWAY BE LIABLE TO YOU OR ANY THIRD PARTY FOR ANY LOST PROFIT OR ANY INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES ARISING FROM THIS AGREEMENT, THE SITE, PRODUCTS OR THIRD PARTY SITES AND PRODUCTS, OR FOR ANY DAMAGES RELATED TO LOSS OF REVENUE, LOSS OF PROFITS, LOSS OF BUSINESS OR ANTICIPATED SAVINGS, LOSS OF USE, LOSS OF GOODWILL, OR LOSS OF DATA, AND WHETHER CAUSED BY TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), BREACH OF CONTRACT, OR OTHERWISE, EVEN IF FORESEEABLE AND EVEN IF NIFTY GATEWAY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

In other words: it’s not their problem.

Tulips crashed in Holland, could this be true for NFTs? One never knows do one? - Fats Waller