Are NFTs the sign of the end times?
Recently, a fellow was released from jail in Iran and tried to sell his "NFT" that he paid nearly three million dollars for. He was asking $45 million for it, but the "best offer" so far is $6000 or so.
What is it an NFT of? The first tweet ever made. Well, you don't actually own the Tweet or the Copyright or anything. Indeed, if a Tweet is even copyrightable (generally, short phrases are not) then it would probably belong to Twitter under their ToS. What an NFT does, is, well, give you a record of ownership rights to... nothing, really.
People can still cut-and-paste the image if they want to, and odds are, you aren't going to do anything about it, as the Courts and the Copyright Office don't recognize "NFTs" as being a valid recordation of ownership rights. If you have copyrightable material, it is probably a better bet to register it with the Library of Congress and if you want to sell it, record the sale as well (and have a notarized assignment of rights).
But an NFT? Well, since no one is really sure what they are or what they mean, trying to enforce your "rights" to a badly-made picture of a monkey (that is similar, but not exactly like, 1000 other bad pictures of monkeys) is going to be hard to do. And it raises the question, why would anyone want to copy a bad picture of a monkey anyway?
The owner of this million-dollar tweet NFT claims it is the "Mona Lisa" of NFTs as it was the "first Tweet". But again, "owning" the NFT of this (the image or the text or both or neither?) doesn't really give you much in the way of rights or a way of collecting royalties. Yes, the "Happy Birthday to You!" people tried to collect royalties on the "Birthday Song" - and for a while, they did. They at least had a recorded assignment to the song and a registration with the Library of Congress. Without those things you could still sue under "common law" Copyright claims. But here's the irony - in order to sue someone for copyright infringement you don't need to own the NFT, just the underlying art.
If a news organization wanted to reproduce the "first tweet" as part of a Twitter retrospective, they could do so under fair use. Or indeed, "I am setting up my Twitter" is probably not copyrightable as short phrases are not subject to copyright (as many a clever t-shirt sloganeer has found out to their dismay). So what does this give you rights to? Again, nothing, other than to sell these imaginary rights to someone else.
In other words, these things are worthless. And the guy trying to sell this NFT, having just been released from Iranian jail, might have worse things to contemplate than the value of his NFT. In fact, one wonders why, if one had millions of dollars to throw at "crypto" why one wouldn't simply move away from Iran and live happily ever after on a tropical beach. The last thing in the world I would want to do is go back to Iran, a country known for its hostage diplomacy.
I guess he thought he could make even more money on crypto or something. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.
So what is going to happen to this NFT nonsense? Well, to me, these "stunt buys" of million-dollar NFTs were just staged events designed to get the plebes all riled up, so they would throw a few hundred or a few thousand at some ugly monkey pix. Hey, it worked for Crypto, right? It worked for "Stonks" - right? You can sell "the apes" anything, it seems.
Until they run out of money. Or end up in Iranian jail.
In a way, NFTs expose how nonsensical the whole "crypto" universe is - it is based entirely on an unwritten agreement that these things are worth something because they are. And some argue that any "fiat currency" is the same way - we worship the dollar because we think it is worth something. And in a way, they are right. The problem with "crypto" however, is that a very few people think it is worth anything, and anytime someone wants to "spend" their crypto, they convert it into dollars, first. That pretty much tells you everything you want to know right there.
Are NFTs sign of the end times? Perhaps. When grocery clerks start "investing" in "hot tips" then you know the market is saturated. It is tulip bulbs, railroad stocks, gold bubbles, silver bubbles and 1929 rolled into one. It is a bubble about nothing - the Seinfeld of bubbles.
You're not "too stupid" to understand NFTs - you're too smart to be taken in by hype!
NOTE: The above comic sums it up nicely and throws in a "Poochie" reference from the Simpsons, as well!
