The New Normal

-Alan Ajith

WHAT ARE NFTs?

A guide to internet art forms

NFTs stand for non-fungible tokens and they're essentially the digital equivalent of trading cards, except only half the effort is required to "make" and "mint" them. To put this in a new light, NFTs can be imagined as the love-child of cryptocurrency and modern art forms. So they're basically more stuff for rich people to waste their money on? Not exactly. The age-old "Charlie Bit My Finger" video was recently sold as an NFT

You see, NFTs can be anything from music to videos and GIFs and can be sold for thousands and even millions of dollars. If you're an aspiring crypto-thief who thinks screenshotting or downloading digital NFTs can make you an overnight millionaire, you're wrong. Stealing, pirating, and forging artwork, movies, songs, or other intellectual property will never send the value of the originals to zero thanks to the blockchain.

However, there were instances of cryptocurrencies being stolen and so NFTs aren't really that great for keeps either. The whole propaganda behind NFTs is that it's quite ironic to see how an ordinary individual can get ahold of digital artwork worth thousands by simply screenshotting a jpeg image while the wealthy and affluent 10% of the world spend thousands just to own its digital certificate and it's their overwhelming onus not to lose it to hackers. ‘Solid Gold’ fur Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT that sold for $2.8m, which I paid 0$ for when I downloaded it