(last updated Aug. 2021)
I do not give out financial advice, and the following URI’s & links I’ve collected in this post, may or may not resolve in the future after time of publishing.
I think the following online content have been produced & published online by people who have invested way more time than me in trying to understand NFT’s (non-fungible tokens), so far.
I reserve the right to, at some later time, form my own narrative & normative position on what NFT’s are. And why (or why not) should NFT’s be of any value. Update, Jan 2022: Here’s some further thoughts.
Some early notes & thoughts though:
• NFTs have been in development for several years now, since early 2015.
• The NFT’s — that is, the tokens — are not the objects with value. Just like how “the map is not the territory”…
• Think ‘smart contracts’…
And so, in the mean time, in no particular order, there are these:
• Colin & Samir podcast (Mar. 1, 2021):
How Logan Paul Made Millions Selling Air (NFT’s)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg9hKz-AjIA
• Waveform Podcast with MKBHD (Feb. 19, 2021):
NFTs Explained with (DeviantArt’s) Justin Maller!
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4B4EYfkQO6e4np7qxUIKrf?si=bd458542e1bf4b88
• Artnet News (Feb. 26, 2021):
‘It’s All Happening’: As an NFT Artwork by Beeple Sells for $6.6 Million, Market Observers Are Torn Between Jubilation and Alarm
https://news.artnet.com/market/observers-ask-wtf-as-ntfs-soar-into-the-seven-figures-1947275
• CNBC (Feb. 25, 2021):
Crypto collectibles are selling for thousands — and celebrities like Mark Cuban are cashing in
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/25/nfts-why-digital-art-and-sports-collectibles-are-suddenly-so-popular.html
• Business Insider (Feb. 25, 2021):
What you need to know about NFTs, the collectible digital tokens that are selling for millions of USD online
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-does-nft-mean-crytpo-non-fungible-tokens-art-explained-2021-2
• Platformer – Casey Newton (Mar. 2, 2021):
The difference between what Facebook/Twitter are doing with cryptocurrency (boring) and what the NFT maniacs are doing (exciting):
Notably, though, these efforts (by Twitter & Facebook -ed.) are not focused on helping creators. In Twitter’s case, decentralization represents an effort to devolve power and offload moderation responsibilities and regulatory pressure; for Facebook, it’s a bid to create a global payments network.
While the incumbents spin their wheels, new marketplaces for NFTs are opening up all the time. (Meet Mirror, Zora, Nifty Gateway, and Foundation.) The technology opens up possibilities that seem strange today, but we may taken for granted soon. For example, here’s Jarrod Dicker writing about the potential for blog posts to be minted as NFTs, generating long-term royalties for the writer as fans collect and trade fractional shares of their favorite essays.
Try doing that with a TikTok.
https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1366554892035219462
•Brad Colbow: What are NFTs and Crypto Art? (March 2, 2021) – Brad is a professional illustrator & drawing tools review YouTuber.
• Tim Maughan (Feb. 19):
a tweetstorm drawing parallels between NFT speculation and art-gallery speculation:
apparently the future of art is making imaginary things for rich ppl to get richer off investing in and speculating on, so basically like the history of art, but faster and worse and on a scale nobody can control, cool
im sure it’ll work out fine
it’s good that young artists are making money of of this, so they can do more art, I just hope they realise that the young artists of the next decade are going to curse their names for not standing up to a hellscape where they’re constantly ranked and traded and pumped and dumped
‘but art has always been like that’ yes and it’s bad, and this is going to be bigger and faster and worse
https://twitter.com/timmaughan/status/1362503110292369410
• everest pipkin (March 4th, 2021)
Here is the article you can send to people when they say, “But the environmental issues with cryptoart will be solved soon, right?”
I am so mad I had to write this, the world’s most self-evident take: but here is the article you can send to people when they say “but the environmental issues with cryptoart will be solved soon, right?”
Several artists have written about the specific environmental costs associated with cryptoart. Numbers vary, but minting artwork on the blockchain uses somewhere between weeks, months, years, (and in rare instances decades) of an average EU or US citizen’s energy consumption. (You can see the energy usage and emissions of individual NFTs at cryptoart.wtf.)
During unprecedented temperature increases, sea level rise, the total loss of permanent sea ice, widespread species extinction, countless severe weather events, and all the other hallmarks of total climate collapse, this kind of gleeful wastefulness is, and I am not being hyperbolic, a crime against humanity.
https://everestpipkin.medium.com/but-the-environmental-issues-with-cryptoart-1128ef72e6a3
• George Ruiz (March 9, 2021)
Buyer Beware: NFTs and Intellectual Property
“Imagine buying a Basquiat painting, but as a condition of ‘owning’ it you could only display it at your home or at the seller’s auction house, and at any time, and for any reason, the seller could rescind your access to the artwork…”
https://georgeruiz.medium.com/buyer-beware-nfts-and-intellectual-property-rights-9f45b3812e28
• Bloomberg (Mar. 13, 2021):
Crytpo whale in Singapore is buyer of $69 million Beeple NFT.
Metakovan, the anonymous founder of NFT investment fund Metapurse, was confirmed by Christie’s as the buyer.
A digital asset investor who goes by the handle Metakovan and refuses to give his full name, announced that he is the buyer of the record-breaking $69.3 million digital artwork that sold Thursday. Christie’s auction house, which hosted the sale, confirmed his statement, also declining to reveal his legal name.
Metakovan is the chief financier behind Metapurse, a crytpo-based fund that acquires NFTs and other virtual properties; it claims to be the largest NFT fund in the world. In January, the company released a statement saying that, excluding works by Beeple, it had acquired a portfolio of $3.2 million worth of NFTs.
Security researcher digs into the technicalities of how NFT tokens work. They conclude that NFTs are “bullshit pointers” (his opinion, not mine).
From The Verge: Let’s say I rip off your painting and sell it as an NFT. I haven’t actually sold your painting, I’ve sold a URL on a blockchain pointing to a jpeg that might not be there. So is that copyright infringement? Gonna take cash and a court case to find out, sorry artists
NFT mania is here, and so are the scammers – The Verge
“The NFT craze, and the blockchains underlying it, lay bare the philosophical questions around why we treasure things beyond any tangible worth to us.” – Jonathan Zittrain and Will Marks, of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University
NFTs Show the Value of Owning the Unownable – The Atlantic
NFT’s Explained – Johnny Harris, YouTube video, April 27th
“[The dotCom rise] peaked in March of 2000, and then the bubble burst, and a lot of these [Internet companies] either went under, or completely lost all of [their] excitement valuation. […] But, did that mean that the Internet went away? Did that mean that Internet businesses didn’t come back? No, companies went on to reshape our world.
“Right now I think we are probably in that stage of NFTs. It’s hype, it’s novel, it’s exciting, but what it’s doing is it’s pushing our minds to think differently about how we validate and verify things. (How we validate & verify transactions -ed.)”
Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s web source code NFT sells for $5.4 million – The Verge, June 30, 2021
The Mind-Dumpster 
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