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Hot air for 0.05 ether: Fart NFTs
Photo: Screenshot / OpenSea.io
The English words art (art) and fart (fart) differ only in one letter.
The New York documentary filmmaker Alex Ramírez-Mallis and some of his friends have shown how thin this line is by selling flatulence as art for $ 85 each.
Your action is the latest example of the madness surrounding NFTs, non-fungible tokens.
The graphic designer Mike Winkelmann alias Beeple is the star of the NFT scene, at least since the auction of his work "Everydays - The First 5000 Days" as an NFT for 69 million dollars.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is currently auctioning ownership of his very first tweet, with a maximum bid of $ 2.5 million.
Artist Sean Williams used a picture of the hole he accidentally kicked in his wall for an NFT sale.
Purchase price: seven ethers, which corresponds to around 10,000 euros today.
For demonstration purposes, IT security expert Matthew Hickey even tried to auction off malicious code to exploit a publicly unknown security gap (zero-day exploit) as an NFT.
The trading platform OpenSea, on which Ramírez-Mallis and his farting friends also trade, stopped the attempt after a day.
Artists and everyone who thinks they are can turn their digital works into NFTs themselves on online platforms, be it images, music files, codes or recorded intestinal windings.
In doing so, they create a kind of certificate that proves the authenticity of the file as an "original".
This certificate is called a Non-Fungible Token.
That means something like “non-exchangeable token”, because while one euro can be exchanged for any other euro, NFTs are unique.
They are stored in a forgery-proof blockchain, usually the Ethereum blockchain.
Anyone who has the certificate can call themselves the owner of the NFT - and auction or sell it.
The associated work itself remains a file that can be freely circulated on the Internet and copied at will.
You can find out more about this in this self-experiment and in the info box.
glossary
NFTs, Non-Fungible Tokens Arrow up Arrow down
Non-Fungible Token (NFT) means something like "non-exchangeable token".
These are one-time certificates of ownership for digital goods.
They are stored in a forgery-proof wallet on a blockchain.
The certificates refer to the respective original file.
Unlike the certificates, however, these are not copy-protected.
The certified files can be reproduced in the same way as any digital file, but only the NFT owners "own" the respective original.
Ether Up arrow Down arrow
Ether, or ETH for short, is the name of a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin.
The underlying system with its own blockchain is called Ethereum.
It has existed since 2015.
Blockchain Up Arrow Down Arrow
A continuously expandable list of cryptographically linked data blocks.
In other words: a decentralized, i.e. distributed over many computers and thus forgery-proof digital cash book.
Smart Contract Up Arrow Down Arrow
While the Bitcoin blockchain only allows Bitcoin transactions, Ethereum offers the possibility of concluding smart contracts and thus linking transactions to certain conditions.
These are programs that run themselves automatically as soon as the conditions specified in them are met.
You can find out more about this here.
Wallet Up Arrow Down Arrow
The English word for wallet describes a device or program that is used to manage cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ether.
The virtual money itself is not stored in it, however, it is located in the respective blockchain under the public addresses of the owners.
Wallets only contain the cryptographic keys to access them.
Gas Up Arrow Down Arrow
The English word for fuel expresses the computing power that is required for every operation - for example a transaction or the execution of a smart contract - in Ethereum.
Those who provide this computing power are paid with gas.
You can find out more about this here.
Minten Up Arrow Down Arrow
Like euro pieces, NFTs have to be “minted”.
In this case, that means: The smart contract, in which the creators, properties and sales conditions of an NFT are programmed, is written into the blockchain and thus documented in an unchangeable and publicly viewable manner.
Fart for the WhatsApp group
The group around Ramírez-Mallis had originally not planned to enter the market.
A year ago, with the start of the corona-related lockdown, they began to record their pupils and share them in the joint WhatsApp group, as he told the tabloid New York Post.
What you do when you sit at home bored.
But now they have put together a 52-minute "Master Collection" of it, which they are auctioning on OpenSea.
The current highest bid is 0.2 Ether, Ether is the cryptocurrency of Ethereum.
That is a little more than 300 euros.
In addition, the friends sell individual fart NFTs for 0.05 ethers, which is currently around 75 euros.
They have already sold such an NFT to a person who started NFT trading on OpenSea a good three weeks ago.
Alex Ramírez-Mallis himself calls the NFT hype "absurd".
He hoped, he told the New York Post, "that these NFT farts can criticize it, make people laugh and make me rich at the same time."
According to the report, what bothers him most is that those who purchase or trade in NFTs are not concerned with the works of art, but only with possible speculative profits.
In the opinion of critics, however, NFTs also have a completely different disadvantage: Their production and trading consume a lot of energy, due to the computationally intensive verification processes of the Ethereum blockchain.
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