The artist Mike Winkelmann, also known as Beeple, has just sold an NFT at a record-breaking $69.3 million, the third-highest price achieved by a living artist. The sale, at Christie’s, for the purely digital work was the strongest indication yet that NFTs, or “nonfungible tokens, ” have taken the art market by storm, making the leap from specialist websites to premier auction houses. Beeple, a newcomer to the fine-art world who first heard about NFTs five months ago, is the most high-profile artist to profit off the huge boom in sales of these much hyped but poorly understood commodities.
An NFT is an asset verified using blockchain technology, in which a network of computers records transactions and gives buyers proof of authenticity and ownership. The current boom is mostly for digital assets, including images, GIFs, songs or videos. Most importantly, NFTs make digital artworks unique, and therefore sellable.
Now, artists, musicians, influencers and sports franchises are using NFTs to monetize digital goods that have previously been cheap or free. The technology also responds to the art world’s need for authentication and provenance in an increasingly digital world, permanently linking a digital file to its creator.
Vipseen May 2017 By Vipseen
The technology for NFTs has been around since the mid-2010s but hit the mainstream in late 2017 with CryptoKitties, a site that allowed people to buy and “breed” limited-edition digital cats with cryptocurrency.
Listen to ‘The Daily’: Cryptocurrency’s Newest FrontierThe craze for digital artworks known as NFTs exploded in the past year. Why are some people shelling out millions of dollars for them?
Listen to ‘The Daily’: Cryptocurrency’s Newest FrontierHosted by Sabrina Tavernise; produced by Stella Tan, Rachelle Bonja and Neena Pathak; edited by Paige Cowett and Rachel Quester; and engineered by Chris Wood.The craze for digital artworks known as NFTs exploded in the past year. Why are some people shelling out millions of dollars for them?
Will Nfts Transform The Art World? Are They Even Art?
Now to the latest trend that’s sweeping the internet, the skyrocketing prices for digital art sold as NFTs. NFT, and that stands for nonfungible token.
My colleague Sabrina Tavernise speaks with columnist Kevin Roose about digital currencies newest frontier, his unexpected role in it, and why it actually matters.
So Kevin, I realized how little I understood about your world when I saw this headline of yours in the paper. And I’m going to read it to you right now. So it says, why did someone pay $560, 000 for a picture of my column? So tell me about that.
Digital Art (world Of Art)
Well, actually, that is a little outdated because the exchange rates have fluctuated since I published that column. So someone actually paid $725, 000 for a picture of my column.
Yeah, I mean, I would like to think that all my columns are worth at least $725, 000. But that might have been an anomaly. But that is the world of NFTs for you.
So the story of NFTs really starts with the story of cryptocurrencies and, in particular, with Bitcoin, which began all the way back in 2008. During the financial crisis, there was a mortgage meltdown. The Federal Reserve was bailing out banks and printing all this money, trying to stabilize the economy. And in the middle of all this, this mysterious paper appeared on a cryptography email listserv. And it was written by someone calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto. And it proposed this new form of digital money called Bitcoin. And the technology that sort of powered Bitcoin, the infrastructure that allows Bitcoin to work becomes known as the blockchain.
Lessons Taught And Learned Through The Art Of Drag
OK, you know how money, regular money, is controlled by a central bank. The Federal Reserve manages the United States dollar. And the Federal Reserve basically has free reign to do whatever it wants with the dollar. It can decide how many dollars there should be, like whether we should print more money or not, based on how much they think the dollar should be worth. So it’s this very centralized system where the government, politicians and institutions have a lot of control over money, this thing that affects all of us. So what Satoshi Nakamoto proposed was a totally decentralized system. And in this system, there are a finite number of units. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoins, and no more can ever be created. So everyone knows exactly how many there are, how many there will be. And people can just buy them with regular money and spend them anywhere that accepts Bitcoin. And instead of the supply and the value of bitcoins being controlled by a central bank or a government, Bitcoin is controlled by a piece of software called a blockchain. And at a very simple level, a blockchain is a network of computers all over the world, thousands of them. And they keep track of every Bitcoin transaction ever made. So every time a Bitcoin is bought or sold, that transaction gets recorded in this shared global database, kind of like a Google spreadsheet or something. And anyone with an internet connection can go back and see every change that’s ever been made to this database in a very public, and transparent, and permanent way. So no one person or institution controls this thing. It’s just this permission-less, distributed computer network that people who are into Bitcoin think is actually more trustworthy than banks that can be manipulated by politicians and governments.
Got it. So this is ultimately about trust and transparency coming off the distrust people developed after the 2008 financial crisis. And that felt like institutions were manipulating things behind the scenes. Whereas here, there’s no wizard behind the curtain, no shadowy figures, no politicians, as you say doing, the manipulating. It’s just a bunch of computers that no one controls.
Yeah. It’s essentially taking this giant financial system that is based on human decisions, and political considerations, and global economies and it’s just replacing it all with computer code.
What Are Nfts, Anyway? One Just Sold For $69 Million.
OK, so Kevin, Nakamoto creates this whole new system of buying and selling and tracking those sales. But so then what happens? What do people do with it?
Yeah. So this paper appears on this obscure cryptographic listserv. And then Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever he, or she, or they are, disappears. And people sort of take this idea of Bitcoin and they run it.
Early on this is sort of an experimental weird community of people who are really into this new form of money. And they’re just playing around with it. I mean, they’re testing out the technology. And Bitcoin, at the time, is worth basically nothing. I mean, each Bitcoin is worth a tiny fraction of a cent. So they’re doing things like buying pizza.
Shantell Martin — News: Lacma's First Ever Nft Acquisition & The May Room Extended
So there was this programer in Florida who sort of famously bought two pizzas from Papa John’s for 10, 000 Bitcoin, which, at the time, was worth about $25.
I just told people I wanted a pizza and I want to pay with Bitcoin. I didn’t want a gift card. I didn’t want some weird exchange. I want to give you Bitcoin and you give me pizza.
People start developing new ways to spend Bitcoin. People are sending it to each other instead of sending a Venmo payment or a PayPal payment. Some people are buying clothes with it. Some websites start accepting it as a form of payment. It becomes this viral phenomenon that people are very excited about.
Digital Art Exhibit “eternal”, Inspired By Japanese Culture And The Concept Of Time, Was Exhibited At Haneda Airport
And the reason why the price of Bitcoin keeps going up and up is because there are a finite number of bitcoins, so people are willing to pay more and more to acquire the limited number of them.
Exactly. And so as that’s happening, people are starting to create other different cryptocurrencies. Some of them are very serious, like Ethereum is a new one that pops up. But there are also joke coins. And people call them shit-coins sometimes. There’s a Dogecoin, which is like reference to this meme. There’s a Dentacoin, cryptocurrency for dentists. There’s Potcoin, which is the cryptocurrency for cannabis enthusiasts. There’s even Bitcoen, which is the Jewish crypto-token. So all of these start springing up. Most of them are worth absolutely nothing. But then there’s this quieter movement building, of people who are using blockchains as a base technology to build lots of other things, things like tracking the rights to photography online. So like if you’re a photographer and you want to get credit and get paid, when your photos are used, you could attach that information to a blockchain, where it would be permanently and publicly available for people to see. Like, this photo belongs to Sabrina. This one belongs to Kevin. And when these photos get used, they get paid this much.
Yeah, it becomes a way to track the ownership and the ownership history of lots of different kinds of digital goods. And so one big moment for cryptocurrency comes when this other blockchain, Ethereum, allows you to create one of a kind goods, goods that can’t be exchanged for other goods. If you have a Bitcoin, it doesn’t really matter whether you have one Bitcoin or another Bitcoin. It’s all Bitcoin. But what Ethereum allows
0 komentar
Posting Komentar