Free NFTs! Art project website releases thousands of NFTs

In what he described as an art project that was designed to show how ridiculous the new fad is, an Australian man has made thousands of NFTs free on a website. Non-fungible tokens are unique digital units that use blockchain technology to give proof of ownership to digital assets, including easily copyable things like photos and videos. Enthusiasts view NFTs as a new way to gain rights to collectables online.

But critics like software developer Geoff Huntly point out that these digital assets that NFT buyers can pay small fortunes for can easily be saved and reproduced online for free, which is exactly what he’s done. His website NFT Bay – named after the infamous Pirate Bay, the longtime hub for pirated media – collected thousands of NFTs that were created on the Solana and Ethereum blockchains and made them available for free.

Huntly says his 17-terabyte online collection represents a billion dollars people have spent on NFTs despite the ease in which someone can access the same media for free online. He points out that many times all that’s hosted on the blockchain collectors purchase is a link to where to view and download the image online.

But collectors believe the fact that the NFTs themselves are unique signatures, even if the artwork itself can be widely circulated for free, makes them scarce and valuable collector’s items. A recent sale of a collection of cartoons of apes sold for a total of US $16.5 million.

Critics of NFTs have taken up the right-click as a symbol of their disdain for the digital assets, as that click opens a contextual menu that allows you to save the image contained in an NFT for free and share it openly. A previous anti-NFT art project used a collection of 10,000 images from an NFT collection called Lazy Lions and used them to make a photo mosaic collage of a hand right-clicking on a mouse.

For his part, Huntly does see some use for NFTs, but not in the world of collectable art. Rather, he believes it could be used for authentication purposes like verified social media accounts, but he points out that blockchain technology isn’t needed for that purpose.

SOURCE: Bangkok Post