Originally published at: "Charlie bit my finger" NFT sold for $760,000 and will be "deleted" from YouTube, according to family | Boing Boing
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More like “Charlie bitcoined my finger”…
Seriously though, I thought late-stage capitalism was plenty absurd before NFTs became a thing, but now it’s clear there is no limit. I fear whatever comes next.
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sold for $760,000
WTF? People starving the globe over, untold miseries, and that’s what you put $760k into. We are lost as human beings.
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I’m an eternal optimist. Maybe they will take a chunk of that money and donate it to a charity? It’s possible.
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Hey, if I had a legitimate viral video in my past I could sell for 3/4ths of a million, I’d ride this bubbling gravy train right to the top. My house needs WAY more repairs than I can afford right now. I’d also pay off my kid’s college loans for them so they could start life clean. I’m not going to begrudge the video owners cashing in while they can.
But boy, are the people bidding for this stuff suckers.
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I guess I’m just old - I totally don’t understand the appeal of NFTs.
Reminds me of the I Am Rich app from years ago. Pointless flex.
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Since NFTs only point to the media, they don’t contain it, it would be hilarious if the NFT points to the Youtube address. “Hey, now I’m the sole owner of this… nothing, I’ve got nothing!”
Nothing fundamentally new here, though - they’re just digital tulips.
There’s one appeal and one appeal only - the belief that they’ll be worth more in the future.
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The only reason to buy an NFT is to sell it on later for more
Some people are going make huge profits but the vast majority of ‘investors’ will lose, with some losing everything when the bubble inevitably bursts
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Pointless flexes, I understand. $750k for a link that might not even exist in a few years time to a video of an already dated joke? That’s where i’m lost.
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If they’re taking down the official clip from the YouTube, what will the NFT point to?
A video is likely too much data to have actually been directly registered in the blockchain for the NFT so it most likely points to a URL of the video instead - which is one of the incredibly stupid things about NFTs that lots of people don’t realize make NFTs incredibly fragile and short-lived.
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It’s people thinking they’re futuristic and cool but really they’re suffering from a serious failure of imagination to not see that everything changes when scarcity is no longer a thing. Here it is: when stuff is unlimited, you can’t gain self worth by possessing said stuff, even if you have a token to say it’s yours.
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rubes cubed
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Digital Beanie Babies then?
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The transition to a magic-bean-based economy is well under way.
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Aaaaand just downloaded it out of spite.
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I presume that, one way or another, NFTs are a vehicle for money laundering.
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My understanding is that the whole point of NFTs is that they have provenance to the artist. The artist sold it. That’s where it gets its worth from.
Under this reckoning, it could be a hash of the data, a url to the video, or just a sentence that says “Charlie Bit My Finger.” What’s important is merely that the artist sold it.
The NFT doesn’t grant the owner any new rights to the art itself. The art isn’t necessarily even re-creatable from the NFT. They just have a digital “thing” that they say is worth $750k because it somehow represents something that someone made, and someone else can’t own it.
The thing is, of course, pants-on-head crazy, especially since most people seem not to understand this (unless, of course, I’m the one misunderstanding it), and this is perpetuated by doing things like deleting the original YouTube video, as if this somehow makes the owner of the NFT into the owner of the only surviving copy.
But if we see it as simply the artist’s official representation of their work, then I guess even deleting the video adds to the performance art aspect. “This NFT that I bought even made the video get deleted!”
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