– So before we get into today’s episode, I just want to let you all know that my limited timeplushy is finally live. It’s over at makeship.com, link will be easy-peasyright in the description box. I know many of you wereupset that last year, you miss the opportunityto get the very first one. So here is the second one. This year, the pyramidsgot a little bit of blush.She’s a little bit cuter, and she’s got a big 3d tea cup so that she can help youhang out and spill the tea every time a new episode is uploaded. This plushy is only available for, I believe it’s threeweeks, and then it’s done. It’s a limited time release. Then Makeship goes into production. It takes them a couplemonths to fulfill the orders, and then they ship them out. So you’ve got right nowfor the next couple weeks to purchase one if you want it. If not, they’re gone forever. So make sure check them out at Makeship, link is in the description. (dramatic electronic music) Using technology originally intended for encrypting data securely, non-fungible tokens arethe latest permutation of the ongoing craze for cryptocurrency. Everyone’s making them. Everyone’s buying them. No one has the faintest clue what they are or why anyone is doing this.Today, we’re going to breakdown what those words mean and what exactly are the risks for dipping your toes into NFTs. So hello and welcomeback to another episode. I’m Blair, and today, we’reinvestigating the crypto-craze in NFTs, but what is an NFT? Well, it stands for a non-fungible token, which means it’s a tokenrepresenting an asset that is not fungible, I.E.not able to be exchanged for an equivalent item. A dollar bill is fungible, because it’s just likeevery other dollar bill, and they’re all worth the same. Your childhood Teddy bear,Mr. Cuddles, is not fungible, because even if I offered youan identical one in trade, you would probably not value it as highly as the one you actually had as a baby. So look, this stuff isobviously complicated.Every single concept inthis episode requires me to explain three more concepts, all of which will takeeven more explanation, and at that point, the episodewill be nearly 10 hours long, and I’ll have to giveyou course credit for it, but before we can talk about NFTs, we have to talk aboutcryptocurrency and the blockchain, and to do that, here’s what we’re gonnaneed to understand. Essentially, everythingthat exists online is built with code, and code reducesto numbers and letters. Hashing is a term for scrambling code for encryption purposes by running it through a complicated math algorithm. The goal is for any size inputto be outputted as a hash, a collection of symbols of thesame size as every other hash with the additional requirementthat the hash look close to random while still being deterministic.In other words, you shouldalways get the same hash from every output, but you shouldn’t beable to easily figure out what the input was by looking at the hash. That means that smallchanges in the initial input should result in a verydifferent hash output, and that it should beas close to impossible, as you can manage anyway, for two random inputs to generate the same hash. Lastly, it should be impossibleto reverse the process and enter the hash into an algorithm to get the unscrambled data. Hashing is often usedfor securing messaging and verification, which is why when big companies get hacked, and it turns out they storedtheir user data in plain text, everyone in information security yells and throws things up them.- Please, God damn it! I hate this hacker crap! – [Blair] You can easilysave a password, for example, as a hash. When a user wants to enter a password, you just run it through thealgorithm again on your end, and if the hash matchesthe one you’ve saved, you’ll know you’ve enteredthe correct password. That way if your server getshacked and your data stolen, all the thieves get is ahashed version of information, which is functionallyimpossible to decrypt into the plain text version. Now, that’s not to say it can’t be done, because it can, theoretically, but the only real plausible way is through pure brute force randomchecking, which takes time and a lot of computing power. This stuff gets complicated quickly, and any actual mathematicor cryptographic experts in the audience arealready screaming at me and shaking theircomputer monitors because of how badly I’ve oversimplified it, but we’re going to have toleave it there, because now, we need to talk about thenext portion of things, the blockchain.(calm electronic music) So once you have this basic hashing idea, you can use it to verify that someone gave you the sameinformation as someone else without any of the three of you having to personally trust each other or even know what’s happening. The innovation of blockchainingis taking the hash from one record, adding more data, and then hashing it again. The resulting hash thuscontains both the new data and the old hash. Then, you can do it againand again and again. In other words, making a chainout of these blocks of data. As long as each new link in the chain contains the previous links, you have a verifiablerecord of transactions. This has a lot of potentiallyuseful applications, such as for sensitive data transfers or managing a supply chain, essentially supply chains involving, say, high-end machine partsor medical supplies. In other words, productsthat are very expensive but can be replaced with cheap knockoffs without anyone noticinguntil it’s too late. The use that everyone hasbeen talking about it, though, is when it deals with cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is the amazing new money that no one understands,but everybody wants.So the way that this works is, okay, so you have hashing, right? And then you have blockchains now. So the brainwave here, andthe fine idea in principle, no shade, is that you setup a big distributed network of peer-to-peer connectionsand use that to store records of a particular blockchain. The first transaction recordedwithin each block is special, a coin with a requirement that, for each new block to beapproved and added to the chain, it needs to have a certainnumber of zero bits to appear in front of it. Remember that hashing acts like a random number generator, right? So that means that trying todeliberately get the algorithm to output a specific number is impossible unless you attempt to brute force it, and you’re checking over itagain and again and again until you get a hashthat meets that criteria. Each new block requiresmore and more zero bits in front of it, whichmeans that as time goes on, the amount of computerprocessing power required to generate a new coingets bigger and bigger.So even as computers get faster and faster and more people start mining, the number of new coinsstays fairly limited. Scarcity makes value, and there, you have the basis ofwhat’s going on here, and now, after rushing throughway too much way too fast and delving into the actualnitty gritty and not at all, we are finally ready to talk about NFTs. (whimsical electronic music) Non-fungible tokens, NFTs,use blockchain technology, but unlike coins, whichare designed to be traded at the same value, regardlessof whose coin it is or where it came from originally, an NFT uses blockchain to logthe data for a specific piece, usually of digital art.This makes it a tokenrepresenting ownership of that artwork, whetherit’s a music video, a dance, a specified image of a particularcaramel macchiato taken at a certain time, place, day, the possibilities are endless. In principle, NFTs workalong similar lines as limited edition prints. The artist makes acertain number of prints at a certain time, maybe, signs them or does something elseto mark them as special and then sells them forconsiderably more than what you would pay for a posterthat has the same art on it at a museum gift shop, or think of stamp collecting. The stamps that are reallyvaluable are the ones that are the rarest, whichtend to be extremely old or from runs that havesome unique misprint that no other versionof that stamp will have. This practice dates back to the beginnings of photography and printing.When it started to become possible to reproduce a nearlylimitless number of copies of a given work. Art has always beenvaluable most not because of what it’s made of oreven how nice it looks. I’ve seen some really lovelypictures in hotel rooms that I’m sure were bought by the truckload or for a few bucks each, butthat’s because of what it is. The art was made bythis person at this time and in this place isirreplaceable and it’s unique. Printing and photography,particularly analog photography, because the film negative is the source of all prints made of any given image, needed a way to make thatscarcity feel real again, or else art would become valueless, and everyone would have to selltheir cameras or something.Of course, within art,everything is totally subjective and made up anyway. – [Cameraman] Why delete? – Why delete?- Yes. – Why paint? Why leave? Why die? – [Blair] What makes a pieceof art valuable is the fact that it’s perceived as valuable, mostly determined by who bought it and what they were willing to pay for it. If a piece of artsuddenly becomes unpopular for whatever reason, it abruptlyplummets wildly in worth. So NFTs, digital art madeAnsil Adams headaches seem like a mere pinprick. Suddenly, not only could theartist make a huge number of copies of a givenartwork, but anyone could, and not just a few prints might have their own little imperceptibleflaws but perfect copies, infinite, perfect clones,a nightmare of art, and to be fair, the nightmareof art under capitalism, since I’m sure a lot ofartists would be quite happy if literally everyone in the world could enjoy their art at onceas long as they got three hots and a cot out of it.- Please, sir, I want some more. – What? – [Blair] How could anyonepossibly create a non-physical artwork that could become asvaluable as an old oil painting or a grand sculpture, but blockchain, recall, inherentlyhas the property that is, in itself, a record ofeverything it’s done. If you make a block thatstarts with some information about a particular piece of art, and then you have a uniqueidentifier that will record every time it istransferred to a new holder. That’s a blockchain of custody. You can buy that block andknow for sure that it was sold to you by Steve, who bought it from Jenny, who bought it from and on and on and on. I think you get the idea. You can trace it all theway back to the person who first made it. No one else can ever own that exact token. It’s as unique as old Mr.Cuddles, the teddy bear. Now we’re talking scarcity,and that means cash.The poster child for the new glory days of NFTs is Mike Winkelmann, AKA Beeple, a digital artist whose work, “Everydays, the First 5,000 Days”, sold as an NFT at a Christie’sauction in February, 2021 for over $69 million. (Mike laughs)Nice. (upbeat electronic music) Whenever large amountsof money get involved, that means scammers, thieves, grifters, and general lunatics areall close following behind. So welcome to the age of the NFT scam. The first problem is one that’s likely to see some improvementvia technological wizardry, but for now, a prettymajor concern is link rot. We’ve all been to websiteswith a link to something that looks cool, and we click it and oops, we got a 404 or worse, it trying to sell you nonfolding umbrellas or a timeshare or just straight infectsyour computer with a virus.Dead links, or linksthat get bought and sold or hosting companiesthat die or change hands, any number of things, can cause a particularwebsite to disappear, and right now, the images thatmost NFTs refer to are hosted on websites. The link to the websitehosting the image is included in the NFT’s original block. What does that mean? Well, it means you can dropa hundred thousand dollars on a unique picture of a pigwearing a propeller beanie, and then a couple years down the road, you go look and oops, the picture’s gone. Poof, no piggy, no beanie. Congratulations on your$100,000 404 error. You still have the picture, of course. You’ve been using itas your Twitter avatar, and you had it tattooed on your thigh, but if you upload it again, it won’t be at the URLthat your NFT points to, and NFTs can’t be edited, and that’s, kind of,the whole point of them.That permanent locked inlink now goes nowhere, and your behated pig is mere bacon. You were planning on selling that bad boy for a cool half a millionand buying a house, but now, you have nothing. Now, since what everyoneagreed was valuable in the first place wasyour unique identifier in the form of an NFT, it’s certainly plausiblethat people will continue to treat the NFT as a token of that art, even if it doesn’t actuallypoint to any image.If that’s just a caseof a server going down, perhaps the problem can beresolved with a few phone calls to hosting companies to getthings back up and running. However, we’re talking aboutpotentially very large sums of money. Do you really want to dependon the generosity and honesty of strangers when it means the difference between someone paying youa fortune or a pittance for your little receipt of ownership? Some NFT minters have taken other steps, like using devices such asinterplanetary file system or IPFS. IPFS is a distributed file sharing network like those old networks thatcollege kids used to swap songs before Napster was invented and then died, and now, I guess, Spotifyor SoundCloud or something, I don’t know. As long as the imagefile is hosted somewhere by someone on IPFS, the NFTwill point to it, in theory.Now, note this doesn’t always work. Some notable NFTs have already had hiccups where they disappeared from view. So far, they’ve all been recovered, but it did take some effort. Another issue that crops up with NFT is good, old fashioned theft. Remember how NFTs have a nifty feature that lets you track all theway back to the originator? Well, unfortunately there’sgenerally little to no oversight to ensure that the person whomints the NFT is the person who actually owns the artthat they used to make it, which, at that point,if you were the artist, and you are rightly peeved that someone else is sellingyour art for hundreds or thousands of dollars, youjust have to deal with it.You can resort to old fashionedintellectual property law, but that’s gonna take a very long time. Consider the sad case of Qing Han, an artist who started to cultivate a truly impressive following for her lovely portraits, and of course, her detailed drawings of popular anime protagonists. She went from 20,000 Twitterfollowers in 2018 to 200,000 in 2020, at which point, she was unexpectedlydiagnosed with cancer. She tragically died at only 29-years-old in February of that year. Later in 2020, Ze Han, Qing’s brother, who was handling her estate,discovered that an NFT of her work, “Birdcage”, had been minted and sold on Twinsie. She contacted Twinsie, andthe particular NFT was frozen and removed with a DMCA takedown, but in the process, hefound a handful more NFTs of his sister’s work beingsold with the possibility of new ones popping up at any moment. Or what about the anonymousUnited Kingdom man who goes by Pranksy online.A big fan of the famous and famously unpredictablegraffiti artist, Banksy, Pranksy spotted an NFT ofone of Banksy’s works on sale on Banksy’s website with atime limited auction to buy it in August, 2021. Being apparently just abig old captain moneybag, our dude ponied up about 244,000 pounds in Ethereum cryptocurrencyto snag the token only to discover afterwards that it was a scam. Banksy’s representatives saidBanksy had not minted any NFTs or sold any on his site. It seemed that someonehad hacked the site, put up an auction, and givenit an air of legitimacy.After Pranksy made a fuss on Twitter, he unexpectedly got his200,000 pounds back, less the 5,000 poundsthat the transaction had to cost to perform. This is known in Ethereum circles as gas. No one had any idea what happened, and honestly, it might aswell have all been Banksy, and I mean, literallyevery person involved, possibly including me, noone has any idea ultimately. (inquisitive orchestra music)Speaking of people who seem to be constantly pullingweird gags on everyone, there’s Monsieur Personne, or Mr. Nobody, a self-proclaimed white hathacker and his NF theft project. He has reportedly developeda technique he calls, “Sleep mining”, a play on sleepwalking, in which he can use the normalEthereum contract software, how you initiatetransactions with Ethereum, to cause a given artist to mint a new NFT in their own wallet andtransfer it into the wallet of Personne’s choice, allwithout anyone realizing what has happened.If the artist catches onlater and makes a stink, the blockchain will showthat the NFT originated in their own personal wallet, just as if they’ve made it deliberately. To demonstrate the weakness he uncovered, he minted a second editionof Beeple’s “Everydays”, the $69 million NFT we mentioned earlier. Beeple’s wallet then sold thesecond edition for a pittance to the account named Arsene Lupin, which then sold it ontothe market normally, where it caused quite a stir. He also claimed that he’snot behind the Lupin account, but you know, the firstbuyer for Frenchie McFrench, Mr. Nobody, is a Frenchname who is also the name of one of the most famousgentlemen burglars of all time, it’s got prank vibes. Analysis of the EthereumPersonne used was of little help, but it was considerably bulkierthan the normal contract with over 4,000 lines of code, and the transaction it initiated took over 12 times the normal amount of gas that an Ethereum transferusually requires.So it’s clearly doing something. Artnet journalist, Tim Schneider, contracted Monsieur Personne via email, and Personne told Schneider that he would reveal his secrettechnique only later after he felt he hadgarnered sufficient attention to the issue of securityaround NFT minting. Personne also claimed to bea strong supporter of NFTs, and cryptocurrency andblockchain generally, attributing his attention and desire to improve the infrastructure. He also believed to thinkthat his counterfeit NFTs were totally legal and fine, but given that he hassold what was not his, it seems to be fraud, right? Plus, he didn’t do anytransformative work.He just downloaded theimage from the artist’s site and uploaded it to his NFT to point. So I don’t know. It just seems like regularvanilla copyright infringement to me. It seems like we can be fairly consistent that Personne has discoveredsome kind of vulnerability in the massively complicated software, but I guess I’m saying Iwouldn’t recommend going to him for legal advice, either. (rhythmic electronic music) A famous gray hat hacker who worked for several US intelligence agencies once wrote a book describinghow he pulled off some of his most famous hacks,cracks, and heists. He did not delve into technical arcana or show off some overclocked pc. He would just call the frontdesk and ask for, say, John, a name he pulled offthe company’s website. Once he got John’s number, he’d call and ask for someoneelse, then called them, and say he’d spoken withJohn and so on and so on with all the employeeshelpfully providing assistance until he had enough informationto call someone serious, then, he would pretend to be an employee with an important job andconvince them to send files to an email or provide him with door codes so we could simply walkin the front with a suit and a briefcase.Hacking, in other words, is social skill, and these old fashionedconfidence games still work just as well as they ever have. For example, AndrewWang at The Verge spoke with an anonymous man whohad a problem accessing one of his NFTs on OpenSea,an NFT hosting service, and posted about it publicly. At that point, someonenamed Nate contacted him, invited him to a discordserver named OpenSea and told him this was wherethey did customer service work. A handful of very helpfulpeople came and went trying to assist this user until finallysomeone suggested he share his screen with them, at which point, the scammers who had beenimpersonating helpful staff promptly took all his account information and transferred half amillion dollars in NFTs out and away into the wild.Now, because of thenature of the blockchain, these NFTs were easy to locate, but by the time they’d been tracked down, they’d been sold again,and their new owners were not aware they’dbought stolen property. Blockchain transactions,remember, cannot be reversed. So the only way for our dupeto get his property back was to offer to buy the NFTsfrom the current owners. Some of the new holders werehappy to help, but others, particularly those holdingNFTs that had spiked in value, were not thrilled at the idea. The very traits that make NFTs desirable and useful were a serious impediment once they’d been snatched in this way. Now speaking of Nate and OpenSea, the Nate that thosescammers were impersonating was probably meant to be Nate Chastain, who was OpenSea’s Head ofProduct up until September, and that’s when he wascaught buying up NFTs just before they were to appear or be promoted on OpenSea’s front pageand then selling them for considerably moreimmediately afterwards.This behavior is no different than the sort of corruption seen in wall street fat cats orunderhanded congresspersons, insider trading plain and simple. After a public outcry,Chastain got canned, but the whole NFT space isstill a bit of the wild west, little in the way ofspecific laws or regulations. So there’s no guaranteethat any further incidents will be handled even as wellas OpenSea’s managed this one. Now, before we continue on to talk about theenvironmental impact of NFTs, this is where I’m gonnaplace today’s sponsors. The holiday season is foreating and enjoying time with friends and family, not spending time in the grocery store. 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So if you want to get Hello Fresh, get some amazing fooddelivered to your door, get some soups going to fulfill your life, go to hellofresh.com/mlm14and use code: MLM14 for up to 14 free mealsand three free gifts, and that’s up to 14 freemeals and three free gifts at hellofresh.com/mlm14and use code: MLM14. And this episode is alsosponsored by NordVPN, because just becausethe holidays are here, and you’re spending,maybe, time with family, time out on the roadtraveling if you have to, whatever, whatever, you need to make sure you’re keeping yourself safe, and NordVPN is easy to use. Connect with one clickor enable auto-connect for zero click protection.They have over 5,100servers in 60 countries. So it’s easy to find a servernear you for a better speed or in a faraway location for more content, and you can access it from anywhere. So you don’t have to missyour favorite content. Even when you’re traveling abroad, you can stay at home virtually. It takes just a click, open the map, click on a location, andyou’ll be connected in seconds. It’s just that easy. You can unblock your favorite games and geo restricted servers. Don’t let that locationlimit where you can play. So this year’s holiday season deal is really straightforward. Go to NordVPN.com/iilluminaughtii to get a two year planplus one additional month with a huge discount. Again, go to NordVPN.com/iilluminaughtii to get a two year planplus one additional month with a huge discount. (upbeat electronic music) – It is unequivocal that humanactivities are responsible for climate change. (TV static buzzing) – [Blair] In addition to the risks of your personal financial wellbeing, blockchain technology has a significant environmental impact.Every transaction requires aproof of work to be accepted into the chain, which meansbasically recalculating all those hashes, whichtakes both time and energy. Then, recall that newcryptocurrency coins, which includes NFTs, aredeliberately designed to become harder andharder to make requiring even more egregiousamounts of computing power. Remember last year, wheneveryone sold out a video cards, basically, like, foreverwhen all the new 3070s, 80s and 90s came out? That was because cryptominerswere buying them up to use in their quest to calculate new coins. Worse, as their popularity rises, so does the computationalcost of mining and trading, which means that the coins individually become more valuable, thusattracting even more miners, and ultimately, it meansI will never be able to get my hands on a 3080 TI.No matter how much I begit is gonna be overpriced by a thousand dollars, andI’m just not gonna do it. Energy obviously is not free. It has to come from somewhere, and right now for most of the world, it means burning fossil fuels. You may have heard aboutclimate change, right? So now we’re burning someastounding amounts of electricity and not even getting a cheeseburger or a trip to Spain out of it.(“Burn, Baby Burn”) (record scratches) It’s hard to assess exactlyhow much the carbon footprint of a given cryptotransaction is. There are some siteswho have tried to do so, but the whole thing is anexercise in relativity. Try to calculate thecarbon footprint of, say, one person flying on a jet. It depends on how manyother people are on board, how heavy the luggage is, and then you have to considerthat if enough people want to fly on a particular jet, the airline company will addmore flights along that route.How much did one person wantingto go to Bermuda contribute to all that? And how much blame can weaccept for participating? The good news for NFTs, especially, is that they make up a tiny percentage of total cryptocurrency transactions, and there are currentlyresearchers looking into ways to mitigate or reduce the costof individual transactions. For example, using a secondlayer to do transactions offline and bringing them back intothe blockchain afterwards, although this really only mitigates it for high-frequency traders whodo a lot of back and forth, or there are some cryptobrokerswho have centralized and made their blockchains private, enabling them to allowtransactions of coins and NFTs to occur only with proof ofstake rather than proof of work, and remember, to add a block to the chain, you have to prove your workby doing all this math again and adding your data to the end. For proof of stake, you handthe central organization a percentage or portion ofyour crypto as collateral, and then you trade on your platform without all the proof of work, but this comes with an understanding that your stake is forfeitif you try anything shady.Proof of stake lowersthe barrier for entry, not only allowing moreindividuals to participate in the blockchain, butalso decreasing the total computational power needed exponentially. Cryptocurrency was all about getting away from centralized banks. So reinventing the concept of banks gets a pretty lukewarmwelcome from the majority of the most dedicated fans, and of course, there arecrusaders wanting to mine and trade cryptocurrency usingclean solar and wind power, but we can’t even get regular people to use enough clean energy yet. So if we have all this clean power, wouldn’t it be better touse it to transport people and grow food instead ofpowering a gigantic pile of servers so they can calculaterandom numbers really hard? Maybe once we solve the wholeclimate driven extinction of large animal lifeon the planet problem, maybe then we can circleback to the crypto stuff.Now there is another byproductof cryptocurrency and NFTs, one more toxic and corrosive than even the foulest coal plant runoff. All this talk about freedom,individuality, and no banks, and infinite money justby owning a computer. It’s catnip. Not only that, but it’s catnip to a particular personality type, and they have thoroughlyinfested the grounds by now. This is a significant problem,because here in its infancy, the NFT industry is mostlybuilt on communities and trust with art fans wanting to showsome truly special pieces made by their favorite artist.Into this gossamer web ofintersectional connections comes, well to put it bluntly, rare Pepes. Okay, so basically, Pepe,the Frog, is a whimsical and harmless cartoonfrog that used the urinal with his pants all theway down to his ankles, like that’s apparently howthis whole thing started, and yeah, you can find tonsof photos of him everywhere. He’s the common reaction image, and there’s even emoteservers and discords dedicated just to Pepe. So yeah, that’s the briefestoverview in the whole world. On 4chan, there were repeated jokes about collecting rare Pepes,drawings of Pepe, the Frog, that no one else owned with the joke being that once you posted them,everyone had them by default. As far as jokes involving Pepe, this is about as lighthearted and harmless as it’s gonnaget, but now with NFTs, there actually can be rarePepes, and so there are. At a 2016 Sotheby’s auction,an NFT of Pepe, the Frog, in a business suitentitled, “Pepenopolis”, sold for $3.6 million.Two other rare Pepessold at the same event, though for only tens of thousands each. NFTs of horrifying, offensive, or plain bigoted materialare also commonplace. Given that the type ofperson who thinks it’s funny or clever to do that sort ofthing has a strong overlap with the type of person willing to spend time and resources on counter-culturaltechnological financial fads. Here in the soul blasting,mind shriveling wasteland of 2021, aggressiveproponents of NFTs have taken to decrying the right-click mindset, which is what they callpeople who point out that they have bought something that is technically worthless.Remember that what you payfor when you buy an NFT is the token, the receipt of payment, not the physical image or the copyright or anything of that nature. Anyone can still just, well, right click and download the image fortheir personal use if they want, just like any other publicly posted image. If you’re not selling it orpretending to be the person who made it, the law doesn’t really care. However, the people whopopulate the growser parts of the internet really hatethis, because we suspect, we know that these are absurd pieces that are not sustainable. NFTs, as a concept, havesome strong potential utility for art and artists in the long run. NFTs as a fad are justpost-mortem beanie babies. So angered by people who pointout things are real and exist or facts that affect outcomes, the braying NFT mob who has declared war on the right click mindset.Witness, “Right Click Save This”, an NFT minted by VincentVanDough,not his real name but very punny, on November 14th, 2021. It consists of an image of Pepeextending the middle finger over a banner saying “Lawsuitmaterial, call 1-800-Sue-me” superimposed on a backgroundconsisting of 100 images of fursonas, artwork ofalternate selves often used as avatars by membersof the furry community. VanDough did not, of course,obtain permission from any of the artists or usersinvolved in the sale of their images. He admitedly sold this NFTfor approximately 20 Ethereum or $100,000. Once this misappropriationbecame more widely known, several of the artists whoseart had been incorporated into the grotesquery complained. Foundation, where the NFT was minted, and OpenSea, where it was sold, immediately took it downblocking further transfers. This prompted the buyer, KentoInami, to pretend to be angry posting on Twitter, “I politely demand to speakto the Foundation’s CEO “right now, like fucking right now.”I bought a pic of a furry for $100,000, “and I see no furry dueto your incompetence. “Either you give me back my furry, “or I will sue with the best US lawyers.” Once it was explainedto him how to still go and view his image, presumablythrough very small words, he crowed about hissuccess on Twitter writing, “Your move furries”. Meanwhile, VanDough claimeda grand political win saying he’d taken art fromthe loudest critics of him and whatever he imagineshis project to be.Of the artists who addressquestions on this front all say they had no idea who he was and that maybe he postedsome memes making fun of NFTs at some point. VanDough then offered topay $5,000 to the artists if they would mint theirimages as a single print NFT and send it to his Ethereum wallet. Given what we know aboutNFTs and their value and what people will pay to own the libs or whatever the mindset really is, I’m not quite sure whatthey’re going for here, this is patently insulting as an offer, but let’s start to wrap things up on a slightly happier note. (cheery electronic music) NFTs offer a particularlyinteresting option for adult performers,whose best material is, by nature, fairly transitory, but who really thrive ontheir personal relationships with their fan bases. An NFT as a sexy memento isabout the best possible cause, and several adult entertainersand artists have climbed to the top of the bandwagon. These workers make farmore money selling an NFT than a usual from a single image, and they tend to already havethe loyalty of the type of fan who would find the idea ofa unique and personal token from their favoriteartist highly appealing.Jen Stein, an adult artist,had been promoting the idea of NSFW NFTs under the title”Building the Cockchain”, and I have presented this entire slew of confusing information justto tell you that one fact. There are concernsabout the increasing use of NFTs, of course. The lack of regulation, although that’s hardlynew for sex workers, and the fact that several blockchain hosts and generators prohibitinappropriate material for their NFTs with the result, as always, for sexworkers on social media, that content can sometimesabruptly disappear without explanation. Still, “Building the Cockchain”? Like if you’re gonna rememberone thing and nothing else, I hope it’s that,”Building the Cockchain”. So with that being said, I want to thank you fortuning into today’s episode. If you enjoyed it or learn something new, make sure that you’re liking,following, and subscribing. Don’t forget to comment as well, and let me know what you thought. Make sure to go checkout my Linktree link, where you can find my candleshop, Twitch, Twitter, all other forms of social media.You can also check out mypodcast if you want to hear some of this content on the go, and if you’re eveninterested in extra content and more behind the scenes stuff, make sure to check out myPatreon, links, of course, are all below in my Linktree link. So thank you so much fortuning into this episode. I hope you enjoyed it, and I’ll see you in the next one, bye.
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