John Cleese Sells Brooklyn Bridge NFT, as Craze Sparks Stunts and Culture Wars (vanityfair.com) 96
Monty Python alumnus John Cleese "is going to be selling an illustration of the Brooklyn Bridge he did on his iPad as an NFT," reports Nick Bilton in Vanity Fair.
So far the highest offer is $50,000, though Cleese's "buy it now" price has been set higher — at $69,346,250.50. But marveling at the wild popularity of NFTs, Bilton muses (hyperbolically?) that "The crazy thing is, he actually might get it..." The rapper Ja Rule recently launched an NFT platform on which he's selling a painting from the disastrous Fyre Festival with a starting bid of $600,000. Collectible NBA trading cards called "Top Shots," which are essentially digital trading cards of basketball players, are selling (and people are buying them) for as much as $240,000 ($208,000 is the highest price sold so far). And Beeple, a 39-year-old man from Charleston, South Carolina, whom you had never heard of until three weeks ago but who is now all anyone can talk about, a guy who makes dark and atramentous memeified "works of art," including pieces featuring a naked Elon Musk riding a Dogecoin dog and an image of a postcoital Santa Claus after — one assumes? — he's just cheated on Mrs. Claus, managed to sell a random pixelated artwork to another cryptocurrency investor at auction this month for $69,346,250 — exactly 50 cents less than John Cleese, I mean the Unnamed Artist, hopes to sell the Brooklyn Bridge for...
[T]hese odd things called NFTs have done the miraculous and created scarcity in a digital world where there is, by default, no such thing. As such, like any collectible or limited number of artworks, people have gone crazy to get a slice of this new fortune. The insanity around NFTs, and what is now for sale as an NFT, has whiplashed from obscurity to frenetic hysteria in just a matter of weeks. While Ja Rule and trading cards and Beeple's "artwork" are often talked about with perplexity, there are countless NFTs hitting the specialized trading markets almost hourly.
Some are stunts, some are pitched as real art, and there's everything in between. A company that specializes in blockchain technology, for example, purchased a real, physical print by the artist Banksy for $95,000, then lit the print on fire until it was destroyed, and then sold a digital version of it as an NFT for almost $400,000. Grimes, the musician, sold about $6 million worth of music-and-video NFTs last month. Jack Dorsey's first tweet is currently at auction with a high bid of $2.5 million. A poker player is selling his most famous quotes as NFTs. The TV show American Gods is shilling trading cards of the show's characters as NFTs. The website Quartz is offering a news article about NFTs as an NFT itself. There's an NFT house for sale, nudes of the actor Katie Cassidy at auction as NFTs, and there are all sorts of digital collectibles ranging from pixelated punks to impish kitty cats with wings. Now an Unnamed Artist has a bridge to sell you...
It's almost like we're living in a simulation that has sped up and no one knows where the pause button is. But that, sadly, is by design. Bitcoin, which is only a little over a decade old, was first adopted by the video game culture: nerds who thought it was cool to mine on their computers and collect these odd little coins, but who are now Bitcoin billionaires. They are using that money, like Monopoly money that turned real overnight, to dictate what is considered art culturally. In doing so, they are — some believe — destroying the culture.
So far the highest offer is $50,000, though Cleese's "buy it now" price has been set higher — at $69,346,250.50. But marveling at the wild popularity of NFTs, Bilton muses (hyperbolically?) that "The crazy thing is, he actually might get it..." The rapper Ja Rule recently launched an NFT platform on which he's selling a painting from the disastrous Fyre Festival with a starting bid of $600,000. Collectible NBA trading cards called "Top Shots," which are essentially digital trading cards of basketball players, are selling (and people are buying them) for as much as $240,000 ($208,000 is the highest price sold so far). And Beeple, a 39-year-old man from Charleston, South Carolina, whom you had never heard of until three weeks ago but who is now all anyone can talk about, a guy who makes dark and atramentous memeified "works of art," including pieces featuring a naked Elon Musk riding a Dogecoin dog and an image of a postcoital Santa Claus after — one assumes? — he's just cheated on Mrs. Claus, managed to sell a random pixelated artwork to another cryptocurrency investor at auction this month for $69,346,250 — exactly 50 cents less than John Cleese, I mean the Unnamed Artist, hopes to sell the Brooklyn Bridge for...
[T]hese odd things called NFTs have done the miraculous and created scarcity in a digital world where there is, by default, no such thing. As such, like any collectible or limited number of artworks, people have gone crazy to get a slice of this new fortune. The insanity around NFTs, and what is now for sale as an NFT, has whiplashed from obscurity to frenetic hysteria in just a matter of weeks. While Ja Rule and trading cards and Beeple's "artwork" are often talked about with perplexity, there are countless NFTs hitting the specialized trading markets almost hourly.
Some are stunts, some are pitched as real art, and there's everything in between. A company that specializes in blockchain technology, for example, purchased a real, physical print by the artist Banksy for $95,000, then lit the print on fire until it was destroyed, and then sold a digital version of it as an NFT for almost $400,000. Grimes, the musician, sold about $6 million worth of music-and-video NFTs last month. Jack Dorsey's first tweet is currently at auction with a high bid of $2.5 million. A poker player is selling his most famous quotes as NFTs. The TV show American Gods is shilling trading cards of the show's characters as NFTs. The website Quartz is offering a news article about NFTs as an NFT itself. There's an NFT house for sale, nudes of the actor Katie Cassidy at auction as NFTs, and there are all sorts of digital collectibles ranging from pixelated punks to impish kitty cats with wings. Now an Unnamed Artist has a bridge to sell you...
It's almost like we're living in a simulation that has sped up and no one knows where the pause button is. But that, sadly, is by design. Bitcoin, which is only a little over a decade old, was first adopted by the video game culture: nerds who thought it was cool to mine on their computers and collect these odd little coins, but who are now Bitcoin billionaires. They are using that money, like Monopoly money that turned real overnight, to dictate what is considered art culturally. In doing so, they are — some believe — destroying the culture.
Remove the hype... (Score:5, Insightful)
And you'll discover nothing of substance is left.
Somebody has certainly been working extremely hard to push these crypto stories the past couple of months.
Re:Remove the hype... (Score:5, Interesting)
About the only value of it I see is proving the chain of ownership of something. So sure, if you take a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge then generate an NFT and it's verified by some trusted entity at that time, then you can verify ownership of the picture reliably. I don't really get how the verification of the ownership of something essentially worthless has any value, but hey - I don't give a shit how stupid people spend their money.
What's going to be really stupid and peak zeitgeist of idiocy is when some 18 year old woman decides to jump on the bandwagon and get her virginity verified on an NFT and offers to sell it to some dumb shit who doesn't realize she could just go get boned and never update the NFT. Then some fucking lowlife can buy it and brag to his buddies "turr hurr, I bought this hot girl's virginity, turr hurr, and it's on the blockchain! I'm cyber!".
People have always been this stupid, throughout history - it's just that we haven't been as readily exposed to one another's stupidity.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
A lot of the NFT movement is wash trading and money laundering to prop up an artificial market.
A lot of the Art World is just simple money laundering.
Excessive fiat printing of course exacerbates the situation.
https://twitter.com/FinanceOpt... [twitter.com]
Re: Remove the hype... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I only correct you because your version changes the meaning significantly.
Re: Remove the hype... (Score:2)
Re: Remove the hype... (Score:2)
Re: Remove the hype... (Score:3)
This is already happening.
People are "selling their tweets" via NFT. All the token is is a digitally signed URL that points at the tweet... Which could be changed or deleted any time.
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NFTs aren't verified by a trusted entity, they use a blockchain. That's the main problem with them.
The NFT belongs to whoever creates it first. Once it's created nobody else can create one for the same content on that blockchain. There can be multiple blockchains, but like there can be multiple crypto currencies only a few of them actually matter.
What is happening right now is that people are making NFTs for stuff they don't own, like in this case a bridge. There are people on Twitter doing them for other p
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This is virtually identical to proving my "ownership" of the asteroid AR-48951B, my name is in the ledger at the Institute of Astronomy and I paid $50 for it.
Except you paid $50 to the Astrologer's Society for the same thing.
It's either laundering or dumbfucks who still think you can own an idea.
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Apply this to ticket sales for example with the contract that you can't resell the NFT. Scalpers can be eliminated and fans can see the concert or ballgame at its original face value.
Much of what we are seeing is hype and bandwa
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And you'll discover nothing of substance is left.
Which is the same as with any art.
Why is an original painting worth so much more than a reproduction that looks the same, and from which you would presumably get the same enjoyment? Because of its magical "originalness".
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Yes, my special unique electrons are waaaay more valuable than all those other special unique electrons.
Re: Remove the hype... (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
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Yes, my special unique electrons are waaaay more valuable than all those other special unique electrons.
My point exactly. A physical painting is just made of electrons (and protons, and neutrons) too. There isn't any objective reason to value an original over a reproduction.
These digital whatevers only make it more obvious how stupid the whole thing is. But it's really the same thing, physical or digital.
Re: Remove the hype... (Score:3)
In this case, you're not buying the art. You're buying a digitally signed unmodifiable file that has a URL. The art may or may not actually be at that URL in the future.
Re: Remove the hype... (Score:2)
Re: Remove the hype... (Score:2)
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It's super easy to duplicate digital works though. They are perfect replicas in every way, except the ownership part, and for most people that's enough. It's indistinguishable in almost every other way that matters.
Not so much with fake paintings or physical artworks. Sure, you can get a fake Mona Lisa, but it's never as perfect as a copy of a digital work.
This NFT thing only matter if people care about the proof of ownership, and for digital goods, I don't think people do. Except these crazy investors.
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly.
I think this whole thing is idiotic, but that doesn't mean there aren't enough suckers- errr, I mean "investors" out there to make this a thing.
It's so ridiculous it might just succeed in spite of itself.
A year or two from Sotheby's will be auctioning this shit off to a room full of millionaires and "the bidding will be spirited", as they say.
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Exactly.
I think this whole thing is idiotic, but that doesn't mean there aren't enough suckers- errr, I mean "investors" out there to make this a thing.
Almost everything involving blockchain technology can be summed up as "I missed out on Bitcoin, so here's my own take on attempting to separate suckers from their money."
Bitcoin is the only decentralized system! (Score:1)
The decentralization is not software related. The decentralization is a consequence of incentives. If you fail the decentralization, the project is pointless.
Altcoins have leaders, premine, paid shills, perpetual software updates... everything leads to more centralization. In other words, Altcoins are not designed to be decentralized.
Re: Remove the hype... (Score:2)
So
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And you'll discover nothing of substance is left.
That's what we all said (me included) about Bitcoin. All I can think of now is, "dammit! I wish I had gotten in early instead of complaining about how a fool and his money are soon parted." WE were the fools. Those who mined coins early are sitting on huge piles of freedom. Those who espoused the wisdom of Slashdot are still clocking in and out.
If I could figure out how to use NFT's for my own enrichment, I would do it in a heartbeat (as would all of us). Everyone who is ridiculing NFT's is just jealous of
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But you could say the same thing about Benie Babies - if you bought and sold at the right time you might have found yourself sitting on a huge pile of freedom, if you waited a bit to long you might have had a room full useful oddly colored stuffed animals you can't sell for their 1994 MSRP.
The same WILL happen with Bitcoin. Its fundamentally flawed, its shit for transaction volume, transaction cost, and offers less privacy than a traditional credit card without a effort a laundering. Basically it delivers
It's money laundering (Score:2)
Re:It's money laundering (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe this time they said no.
Re: It's money laundering (Score:2)
Mod this up please (Score:2)
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I thought it was a pretty cool picture actually.
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only america called it the genesis - yet make it out like the world calls it that...
much like the video game crash of 1983 was only a thing in the US...
Asia, europe and Australia / NZ - yea nothing happened.
but listen to anyone in the US - the world had a video game crash in 1983..
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If all the cheap copies of that retro game get snatched up, a collector's only option will be spending that $100 if they really want it as part of their collection. That's what those sellers are counting on. Real scarcity is in play with physical objects, because if no one is willing to sell you one, you're SOL.
This NFT "craze" is just moronic, because there's no good reason to care whether the rest of the world knows you're the registered owner of a specific digital thing that otherwise can be freely cop
Re: It's money laundering (Score:2)
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1. Buy or create worthless tat.
2. Shady business partner buys the tat with that $100,000.
3. Grudgingly pay income tax.
4. Buy car.
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You sell your nearly-worthless copy of the game to an anonymous collector for $100. Now you have $100 of legitimate income to spend toward a car purchase. Repeat or otherwise scale up, until you have the car's total price.
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If you can officially demonstrate that something worth $1 is somehow worth $100,001 dollars then you can buy the item for $1, pretend to sell it for $100,001 and suddenly have a $100,000 money hole. Fill the hole with $100,000 of dirty money and bada-boom, bada-bing - clean money.
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I was thinking that surely there must be some sort of scam going on. I remember years ago with classic cars, that there was a rumour going around that certain people were "selling" rare collectable cars among themselves, regularly upping the price, all in order to lift the market and get an outsider to eventually cough up. I can't help but wonder if these NFT's are a similar thing, where there's the claim of a high price, but whether actual money or anything of equivalent value truly is exchanged, is anothe
He sold it (Score:4, Funny)
To Incontinentia Buttocks and her husband Biggus Dickus.
Re: He sold it (Score:5, Funny)
Next on the block (Score:1, Funny)
This lovely doodle of a tulip with a windmill in the background, done in MS Paint 2.0...
People be crazy. (Score:3)
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We live in a world where someone can go and buy underwear for a dollar and sell it used for $10.
You clearly haven't kept up with the price of underwear. It's closer to $2 these days for tighty-whities, and goes up from there.
As for resale value, you'd probably have to ask the OnlyFans crowd for that sort of data. That's outside of my pay grade.
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16 billion dollars for Tiffany's underwear? Damn...
Go on, give it a good sniff. I think we're alone now...
Good for them (Score:2)
Re: Good for them (Score:2)
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The reason starving artists are starving is because they lack the exposure and name recognition for their work to be valuable in the first place. Adding some new way for them to sell their wares doesn't change that.
Mostly, this will just be used so already rich folks can scam other already rich folks out of each others' money, like every other thing that passes as an "investment" these days.
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The world only has room for so much art. After a point, when enough art has been created, you could spend your whole life going through that art and need not ever bother seeing what else is out there. Perhaps if your life span were infinite, but alas it is not.
So with that said, of course every artist that's starving just needs to be noticed. It's really not about the talent so much as some how getting your chance. Only some much entertainment slots to be filled.
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The reason starving artists are starving is because they lack the exposure and name recognition...
Also, there is a perennial excess of starving artists willing to give away their work for "exposure" and "name recognition" that somehow never come to pass.
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Historically, and with only a few exceptions, artists only really make money once they're dead.
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Cool! (Score:1)
Another way for celebrities - and nobody else - to make lots of money!
Say what you will about Shitcoin, but at least it offers equality of opportunity to people who aren't already propped up by the insufferable mindless dicklicking pop culture industry.
Re: Cool! (Score:2)
This is the next internet mania of the dotcom boom & bust and bitcoin mania of 2017, maybe with that virtual world video game thrown in. I've been watching cryptocurrency videos for the last year, and I think the rich are preparing something some think will be big as the industrial revolution, the digitization of money. Most transactions are already done without handing over money, so soon they could replace the transfer of cash between banks with cryptocurrency instantaneous transfers. There is a very
Youâ(TM)re buying a URL (Score:4, Interesting)
All of the NFTs currently up for grabs are not even the actual item... they are just digitally signed copies of a URL where you can go get the item.
And if and when that hoster ever stops hosting that URL... youâ(TM)re SOL and your NFT will be useless.
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Why not use an IPFS URL? It might go net-dead, but so long as you have a copy of the file you can easily resurrect it, and it's impossible for the URL to ever point to anything besides the intended art or, at worst, a fixable internal server error.
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IPFS does not solve this problem, because IPFS relies on multiple hosters *CHOOSING* to replicate the data, and keep it online forever.
This isn't theory, there are already a lot of early sold NFT that have broken links - basically the NFT is now useless.
The entire NFT system is broken by design. The only way it works is if the data itself is put into the ledger, or, the data itself is hosted in some kind of distributed permanent storage that is guaranteed to exist forever. Currently, that storage doesn't ex
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IPFS relies on at least one hoster. It performs like crap with just a single source, but with enough retries it does eventually work. Whoever 'owns' the NFT simply needs to keep the file around.
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It's not about buying an item, it's about buying ownership. The items are for most part already in the public anyway, e.g. digital goods, images, video, etc. that everybody can access and copy. But since digital goods are trivial to copy it's normally impossible to own them in the same sense you can own a physical item. That's the problem NFT tries to address.
NFTs are basically a blockchain-based equivalent to copyright, i.e. something the artists owns and can sell. Though the ownership that NFT grands only
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I understand fully what NFT is trying to achieve. Regardless of if you agree with it or not, the technology is fundamentally broken.
The data for the item you are buying, **is not secured on the blockchain**. It's just a hash and link to the data. The hash can be used to validate the data is unchanged, but it can't protect from the data disappearing entirely. The entity hosting it can disappear at any time. IPFS theoretically should help with this, but in practical terms, it doesn't due to how IPFS relies on
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All of the NFTs currently up for grabs are not even the actual item... they are just digitally signed copies of a URL where you can go get the item.
That's not true either. There is no reason a URL needs to be involved, and often times isn't.
The idea behind an NFT is that it is a deed from one person to another, only the deed transfer can be verified.
It is little different from me writing in crayon on a napkin that I transfer ownership of X to you.
The only difference is there is a number you have that can be checked and see my ID did in fact transfer that number to your ID on a specific time/date.
"X" doesn't need to be a URL, or a thing at a URL, or a
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The things is, that with a deed, the house and land it points to, actually exists.
With an NFT, that "deed" is pointing to something that is not guaranteed to always exist. This is not theory. In fact, many early sold NFTs are currently pointing at dead URLs. In your analogy - you now have a deed to a piece of property that fell into some kind of dimensional vortex and no longer exists.
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All sorts of useless things have value, like broken fragments of ancient pottery or stamps that can no longer be used to mail anything.
NFTs don't grant ownership of a URL anyway, and the owner will likely keep an archived copy of the work in question for viewing purposes. They are more like a fake deed of ownership stamped by a fake bank that for reasons too stupid to get into people think is worth millions, and even if the bridge gets demolished the novelty value remains.
thanks (Score:2)
Buy my real art! (Score:1)
It's a fungible token of my uniquely nonfungible mental state. Or should I skip the intermediary and just sell my mental states...?
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Just remember (Score:2)
Don't mention the war!
I seem to remember.. (Score:1)
ORLY? (Score:3)
[T]hese odd things called NFTs have done the miraculous and created scarcity in a digital world where there is, by default, no such thing.
Hollywood and the music industry have been doing it for decades. In any other industry, an unlimited supply of something would drive the price to near-zero.
Like (Score:2)
WTF is NFT I ask myself... (Score:4, Insightful)
So I go look it up and CNN business boiled it down to this:
So what are NFTs?
In the simplest terms, NFTs transform digital works of art and other collectibles into one-of-a-kind, verifiable assets that are easy to trade on the blockchain.
So we are "watermarking" our digital asset and then placing it into a blockchain to verify it's the "original" digital asset. Yeah.. okay. I guess this is a better hustle then "real" diamonds over those "fake" lab made ones.
I almost want society to end because look where we've taken ourselves.
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Not quite. The NFT is basically a hash of the content and metadata, so for example with a tweet it would be the text, the name of the account that posted it, the time and date it was posted and the URL it is found at. That is then registered on a blockchain so it can't be duplicated, and can be traded.
The problem is there is no way to prevent any random person making an NFT for any random thing. So you really can just make one for the Brooklyn Bridge and sell it, just like you could make a fake "certificate
Re: WTF is NFT I ask myself... (Score:2)
Look at it this way, perhaps they're just piling up enough cash to get the first out of three arks built...
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Not we, we have not taken our selves anywhere, A very narrow slice of people with more money than brains has found a new and novel way of pissing away said money. In the meantime the rest of humanity continues on mostly oblivious and mostly unintersted.
It's not new, people with more money than brains have been pissing away their fortunes in novel ways since ownership was first conceived of.
China is way ahead of everyone (Score:2)
If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn (Score:5, Informative)
https://nycwalks.com/blog/the-... [nycwalks.com]
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Everyone sees that he's making fun of NFT's. That was almost entirely the point.
Whats next (Score:2)
NFT to a NFT ? (Score:2)
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Wealth Tax (Score:2)
A long time coming (Score:3)
Monty Python alumnus John Cleese (Score:2)
"Monty Python alumnus John Cleese" - that really says it all. He is (perhaps surprisingly) tech savvy enough to realize what a joke NFTs are, and to make fun of them. If he accidentally makes some dosh, by separating fools from their money? More power to him!
People who buy NFTs are on the same level as the guy who sent 10 Bitcoin to "Elon Musk". [slashdot.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Suckers (Score:1)
Stupid people are going to lose their money, whilst the worth of my Bitcoin keeps growing enabling me to retire early.
Alien invasion (Score:2)
My personal theory is that "Satoshi Nakamoto" is a name an alien civilization made up when they posted the first implementation of "the big filter" named Bitcoin on the internets to make us go extinct faster. Somehow the sender could not be empty.
He had a bridge to sell (Score:2)
I love it.
So when "buying" the digital representation of the bridge, will I be registered owner of the hash of the PNG or of the JPG of his drawing?
I'm asking because I'm not sure what version my webbrowser saved in its cache when I looked at the drawing.
tulips are like turtles (Score:2)
Best sense of humor, ever! (Score:2)
This is another great gag from Mr. Cleese, one of the masters of humor. The punchline, as usual, is us.