32: NFTs

This week Matt and Steven, like every podcast host, are talking about NFTs. For those of you who have successfully managed to avoid the NFT discourse of the last few weeks, Non Fungible Tokens are a way to assign value to digital creations. The most famous example from the last few weeks was Beeple’s work Everydays - The First 5000 Days which sold for an eye watering sum of $69 million bucks. The strange thing is, we can just go on to the web, screenshot Beeple’s work, and paste it into MSPaint for our own free masterpiece. So why is the original worth so much money? And while we’re at it, why is the original Mona Lisa worth so much money? Turns out there are some very clever people in the art world who are more than capable of telling a story and making a bit of cash while they’re at it. It’s just a shame that the environmental impact of crypto art is so egregious. References: https://everestpipkin.medium.com/but-the-environmental-issues-with-cryptoart-1128ef72e6a3 - Everest Pipkin’s piece on the environmental impact of crypto art Cryptoart.wtf - calculate the carbon cost of a piece of crypto artwork