Digital artists and digital art collectors have been having a bit of a field day with an innocuous tweet that went a bit viral.
“I have stolen over 4 terabytes of NFTs via the little known hacker technique known as ‘right click -> save as’. My collection has a net estimated value of over 8 trillion dollars,” says Lauren L. Walker, some baseball podcaster.
Presumably she just heard of NFL NFT-ing and maybe they missed the 2018 story of Dodgers giving out some crypto tokens, but she received a reply that maybe speaks of our times:
$5k for a reply, Oct 2021
The reply has of course been NFT-ed and someone is willing to pay more than $5k for it. The NFT is a screenshot of course, but it clearly becomes something else when it is tokenized.
What is that something? Well fundamentally an NFT is proof of originality. We have here a pretty original moment, and all of us can screenshot it, even NFT it, but almost all of us will not bother.
This guy did bother, and if we knew we’d get $5k for it, we’d all bother. But, we don’t think we’re gone get anything for it now, so almost none of us will bother.
Thus this NFT, although plentiful technically, practically is rare and that applies to pretty much all art, including digital art, as time and effort as well as skill necessarily impose scarcity.
Bitcoin miner NFT on Decentraland, Oct 2021
If we travel say 20 years in time thus, and we want to brag to our children or we want to tell the story of how we saved art, a clown pepe making a witty comment at a moment when the world – including many cryptonians themselves – are grappling with whether these are a thing, the ‘I deleted your job’ NFT in a way it can be proved it was made in that moment 20 years ago and has been unchanged since, is perhaps one picture in that story of early digital art history.
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