iThink
NFTs: scam or art?
NFTs: SCAM OR ART? KIRAN BACCHUS (UPPER SIXTH) Two million, nine hundred and fifteen thousand, eight hundred and thirty-five dollars and forty-seven cents ($2,915,835.47). That's the amount of money the first tweet ever in the history of Twitter was sold for by Jack Dorsey, former CEO of Twitter.
Transactions like these spark up the debate over NFTs, and whether they are the equivalent of a rising hot air balloon filled with pure speculation and excitement carrying the upper class, primed to eventually burst, or whether there is some aura of legitimate art behind the crypto-craze. But first, what actually is an NFT? NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token. Non-Fungible means non-replaceable, which is a key feature of most esteemed artworks, such as the Mona Lisa. Before explaining Token, it might be useful to explain the ‘blockchain,’ which, simply put, is a public record, powered by thousands of computers, tracking every transaction made between two users (getting rid of the so-called ‘middleman’ function of banks which already do this).
So, if Person A wanted to purchase Person B’s tweet for close to three million dollars, the blockchain would only care to see if Person A actually had close to three million dollars in cryptocurrency to buy that tweet, or to buy that ‘token,’ resulting in the transfer of an NFT.
Of course, the biggest elephant in the room about NFTs is: what's the point? After all, NFTs and digital art are not truly non-fungible in the modern age, where a simple click of the ‘save image as’ button renders any potential rarity null. However, if NFTs were truly null and void, how is it possible that they sell for so much? One potential, and arguably cynical, answer is that it is just pure speculation. Finance and business content creator Coffeezilla claims that the "endless speculation on what’s gonna be the next NFT [is] where the scam is." One way in which this speculation manifests itself is by two or more people buying each other’s NFTs to increase their perceived values.
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2022
