"Just give me the money and I’ll send you a picture of the drugs” (There’s never even the promise of the thing itself here, after all.)
This reminds me that game publisher Ubisoft, against the wishes of most of its developers, has been pushing NFTs. Apparently, to celebrate a post-release milestone for a game, instead of giving the developers commemorative t-shirts or hats (as would be usual), they gave them NFTs with pictures of commemorative hats.
His example of selling NFTs for the work of a cancer victim without authorization isn’t even close to the worst example I’m aware of:
The phrase “Beanie Baby ghosts” is definitely sticking with me.
Damn you for putting that up, I got sucked into hours of explanation. But it’s an excellent overall explainer of crypto, NFT’s, and the underlying failure and scams involved.
I was rather fond of this one.
I’ll just quote the young fella in the movie and say “well that’s just incredibly depressing”.
a(Will they make NFTs of this also?)
I can’t wait to see Antiques Road Show 30 - 50 years from now.
I always feel bad when the appraiser has to explain that great grandma’s civil war bayonet is just a letter opener from 1979.
Now they have to explain that great grandpa was an idiot.
Somewhere, Magritte inhales on his pipe and chuckles knowingly.
Or even “Just give me the money, and I’ll put your name next to this picture of drugs that I tore out of an old newspaper and posted on the bulletin board next to the coffee machine.”
And the price tag is made of that thermal receipt printer paper that blotches and fades over time.
That’s how I plan to refer to NFTs if they come up in conversation. I like the phrase so much, that I’d be willing to buy the NFT of it set in a “Ty” style font.
I prefer the ghost fart in the Cracked video about Rogecoin. Nailed it.
What’s the monetized value of all the views of YouTube videos mocking or explaining NFTs and cryptocurrencies?
Not sorry at all 
glad you enjoyed it
a lasting (blockchain) association to an ephemeral link to a shared image of something of highly disputed value. (“But what if i’m not in on the ground floor of the Ponzi scheme!?” eh, another one will be along shortly)
A beautiful explainer there from Seán. I came across his work when he performed with Eleanor Morton and Michael Fry (all 3 brilliant dramatic actors) in this heart-warming romcom:
I see someone else is a Friend of Laphroaig!
My favourite definition of NFTs comes from Matt Levine’s column from Bloomberg:
"As far as I can tell the way most non-fungible tokens work is:
There is some normal commercial transaction. A band writes and records a song, which a record label releases, and the band and label receive royalty payments from Spotify. A professional basketball player does a good basketball thing at his job playing basketball; this good basketball thing is captured on camera and aired on a television network that pays the National Basketball Association zillions of dollars for the rights to show basketball. The New York Times publishes an article to its paying subscribers, serving up ads alongside the article. Jack Dorsey tweets a tweet on Twitter, the social network that he founded and that has made him a billionaire.
Someone - perhaps a party to the original commercial transaction (the band, the record label, the NBA, the broadcast network, the Times, Jack Dorsey, Twitter), perhaps not - “mints” an “NFT,” that is, they create a unique and immutable digital record, preserved on a blockchain, pointing to the commercial transaction and saying “boy howdy that commercial transaction sure did happen.”
Then the person who minted the NFT sells it to someone else for a lot of money.
The person who buys the NFT now owns a string of numbers on a blockchain that says “huh that other transaction occurred.”
The buyer generally owns nothing else: not the copyright to the basketball highlight, not the ability to go into Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account and delete his tweet, nothing.
I mean. Yeah."
The assumption that anything in the digital realm is real or unique has always baffled me. Second only to functioning as high-powered calculators, computers are extremely efficient copying machines, and that’s about it.
