You can associate images like the infamous Bored Apes, music, artwork, etc, with NFTs which supposedly confers ownership of the assets, allowing you to trade them. Except NFTs have no legal status and copyright doesn't apply to them.
They have little or no longevity either. If you buy an NFT linking to a work of art somewhere on the Internet, and whoever runs that server deletes the file, tough luck. You can copy art associated with NFTs, and the whole shebang is just a libertarian wet dream of speculation.
Despite that, or maybe thanks to that, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, asked the Treasury to mint an NFT. What should be associated with the NFT from the Royal Mint hasn't been decided, but the general idea is that dabbling with that kind of stuff will make Britain a crypto-asset hub.
Not quite on par with the Mother of All Bad Ideas, Brexit, but the Royal Mint NFT and crypto-asset blather are in the same direction.
NFTs use heaps of computing power and frivolously waste somewhere between 50 to 75 kilowatt hour each but the rot is still spreading. Cricket Australia intends to under-arm bowl its way into NFTs with player images and howzat moments and not a week goes by without feverish public relations agency pitches about how the technology is the future because what could possibly go wrong with it?
Quite a bit actually. If anyone tries to sweet-talk you into NFTs as an investment vehicle, take heed of social network Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who made one for his first tweet from 2006.
An automated tweet by @jack, who isn't someone anyone really cares about, but that didn't stop colourful crypto bro Sini Estavi from dropping a cool US$2.9 million ($4.3m) on the NFT last year.
A year later, it was time to sell the NFT and Estavi asked for US$48m as the opening bid. The large asking bid is apparently due to Estavi being in legal hot waters with Iranian authorities over his failed CryptoLand venture.
As of writing, the highest bid is US$29,700, which to be fair is up on the US$270 that was offered before. Estavi has now expressed hopes that billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk who's launched a takeover bid for Twitter will buy the NFT. Elon might, but he'd be even sillier than usual spending millions on it.
That massive drop in value is not a "market cooling off" or "looking for value over hype". It's the grifters riding off with their loot, which is in crypto currencies mostly and could shed all its value in an instant.
We're not necessarily talking real money here of course, as the crypto coin has to be exchanged into a fiat currency before it's usable. While in crypto form, the digital money is in constant jeopardy.
Earlier this month, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation said North Korean hackers purloined US$625m in crypto currency from Axie Infinity which is, uh, a game that has sold some US$4 billion worth of NFTs.
The amount of "rug pulls", frauds and hacks targeting anything crypto-related is mindblowing to say the least. What's more, it shows no sign of stopping either.
Curious about how much shady stuff is going on with NFTs and crypto? I can recommend developer Molly White's Web3isgoinggreat site as a great reference.
In White's words, sceptics point to "an awful lot of web3 projects sound quite a bit like Ponzi or pyramid schemes, and question the lack of regulation, oversight, and taxation that makes fraud, tax evasion, and other criminal behaviour particularly rampant in the space".
Read that penultimate para again before going near NFTs.
