The Gentle Art of Columning Buy in New York
The Shift
Purchase This Column on the Blockchain!
Why can't a journalist join the NFT party, too?
Credit... Alvaro Dominguez; Getty Images
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Normally, I'grand not allowed to make sales pitches in my columns.
But this fourth dimension is an exception, considering what'due south for sale is the column itself.
That'due south because I've decided to enter the freewheeling earth of nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, the newest frontier in the cryptocurrency gilt blitz. This is my first experiment — a column about NFTs that is, itself, being turned into an NFT and put upwards for sale.
An NFT, in layman's terms, is a new kind of digital collectible item that is stamped with a unique bit of code that serves as a permanent record of its actuality and is stored on a blockchain, the distributed ledger system that underlies Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. These collectibles can be bought and sold like trading cards, and the nature of blockchain technology ways that once a token is created, it can't be deleted or counterfeited. That makes it useful for artists, musicians and others who want to create limited edition digital goods.
The NFT market is exploding right now, as early adopters and cryptocurrency enthusiasts try to cash in on the trend. Recently, Mike Winkelmann, a digital artist from South Carolina who goes by the name Beeple, sold "Everydays: The Start 5000 Days," a tokenized collection of his fine art, at an online sale at Christie's for more than than $69 million. NFTs representing other pieces of internet art — like an analogy of Homer Simpson as Pepe the Frog — accept sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. NBA Top Shot, a partnership between the Northward.B.A. and the blockchain company Dapper Labs that turns basketball highlight videos into unique cryptocollectibles, has $230 million in sales since 2019. Even well-known musical acts similar Kings of Leon are getting in on the NFT activeness, selling millions of dollars' worth of music in the class of digital tokens.
As I watched these riches change hands, I thought to myself: Why should celebrities, athletes and artists take all the fun? Why can't a journalist join the NFT party, too?
So I decided to plow this cavalcade into an NFT and sell it on the open market. Whatever I make from it volition get to The New York Times's Neediest Cases Fund, a 110-twelvemonth-one-time effort started by the one-time Times publisher Adolph S. Ochs that supports charitable causes in New York and across. (Administrative notation: Since the Neediest Cases Fund doesn't accept direct cryptocurrency transfers, I'll have to convert the gain to dollars start, meaning that this is not a tax-deductible gift for the heir-apparent.)
The first pace in making my own NFT was setting up a digital "wallet" that would exist used to hold my token, likewise equally any cryptocurrency I made from selling it. I used a browser extension called MetaMask and ready an empty wallet for Ethereum, the cryptocurrency network of pick for NFT collectors.
Then I had to find a place to hold the auction. I chose an NFT market chosen Foundation, which hosted the sale of the famous "Nyan Cat" graphic this year for nearly $600,000.
Once I joined Foundation and linked my account to my Ethereum wallet, I had to upload an image of my column to a decentralized storage service called InterPlanetary File Organisation, or IPFS. I then had to mint a token mapped to that file — essentially, generating a unique cryptographic signature that would alive on the Ethereum blockchain, marking the file I uploaded as the real one.
Foundation makes minting an NFT easy, but adding it to the Ethereum blockchain tin be expensive. It requires paying a "gas fee" — a kind of congestion revenue enhancement that is based on how busy the network is — and listing my token required two transactions: i to mint the token and another to generate the code that runs the sale. These days, gas fees to create a single NFT can exceed $100, although many are closer to $50.
The next footstep was to list my new NFT for sale. I set the minimum acceptable price of the auction at 0.v Ether, or about $850 at today'due south exchange rate. The auction will run for 24 hours later on the reserve price is met, though more than time gets added if people bid in the last 15 minutes. After a winner is named, the token volition exist automatically transferred to that person's Ethereum wallet. I volition transfer the proceeds to the Neediest Cases Fund (minus the 15 percentage cut that Foundation takes and whatever costs associated with the donation).
In addition to selling the token, many NFT sellers add together perks. Kings of Leon, for instance, are sending a limited-edition vinyl album to people who buy their NFTs, and giving buyers of a special "golden ticket" NFT gratuitous concert tickets for life.
I don't accept concert tickets to offering, but I did want to sweeten the bargain. And so here's what you'll go if yous win this NFT auction:
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As with all NFT sales, y'all'll go the token itself — a unique digital collectible that corresponds to an prototype of this cavalcade in PNG format. (Our lawyers want me to annotation that the NFT does non include the copyright to the commodity or any reproduction or syndication rights.)
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You'll besides exist featured in a follow-up article about the sale, forth with your name, your affiliation and a family-friendly image of your choice. (NFT sales don't require identifying yourself by annihilation other than your Ethereum address, then you can stay anonymous if yous'd adopt. Also, my bosses desire me to notation that The Times retains editorial control over the follow-up cavalcade, and reserves the right to decline submissions that don't meet our editorial standards.)
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And as a bonus perk, Michael Barbaro, the host of "The Daily," will send you a short, personalized voice memo congratulating y'all on your purchase.
The biggest perk of all, of course, is owning a piece of history. This is the first article in the almost 170-year history of The Times to be distributed every bit an NFT, and if this technology proves to be equally transformational equally its fans predict, owning it might exist tantamount to owning NBC's showtime TV circulate or AOL's first e-mail address.
Of course, that's far from a guarantee. NFTs could turn out to be a passing fad that is feeding a speculative bubble — the digital equivalent of Beanie Babies — and your investment could turn out to exist worthless.
But if they stick effectually, NFTs could transform the way digital goods are created, consumed and traded online. Some news organizations, including Quartz and The Associated Press, have already experimented with selling NFTs, and YouTubers and other online influencers take begun creating their own lines of cryptomerchandise.
Some of the NFT fizz is shallow hype, no dubiety. The cryptocurrency globe is full of scammers and go-rich-quick hustlers whose projects often end in failure. (Remember the initial coin offering boom?) And critics point out that NFTs and other cryptocurrency-related projects crave enormous amounts of energy and computing power, making them a growing ecology take a chance. There are also legitimate questions well-nigh what, exactly, NFT buyers are getting for their money, and whether these tokens will turn into broken links if the marketplaces and hosting services that store the underlying files disappear.
But there's something real here that is worth taking seriously. For decades, artists, musicians and other creators have struggled with the fact that, on the cyberspace, making copies of any digital artifact is trivially easy. Scarcity — the quality that gives offline art its value — was hard to replicate online, because anyone who downloaded a file could copy and paste it an infinite number of times, with no loss in quality.
Blockchain technology inverse that by making it possible to postage stamp digital appurtenances with a cryptographic marker of authenticity and keep a permanent tape of its ownership. You lot tin re-create the file contained in an NFT all you want, but you lot can't fake the digital signature behind information technology, which gives collectors of rare digital goods some peace of mind. And NFT fans think the technology could exist used to keep track of all kinds of goods in the time to come — titles to houses and cars, business organization contracts and wills.
Creators can even attach a royalty agreement to their NFTs, entitling them to a cut of the profits every time their assets are resold. (I tried to make this NFT royalty-free, but wasn't able to change Foundation's built-in x percent royalty on secondary sales, so I'll be donating whatever future royalties to the Neediest Cases Fund as well.)
It'south easy to be skeptical of NFTs. But I'm cautiously optimistic about them, for the simple reason that they represent a new way for creative people to eke out a living on the internet.
For years, traditional media companies accept resisted new, net-based distribution strategies considering they viewed them — oft correctly — as a threat to their concern models. Well-nigh things on the net were free, and things that weren't gratis could be easily pirated or copied. If y'all wanted to get paid for your creations, your best options were to create a paywall, hire an army of lawyers to enforce your copyright or put yourself at the mercy of a licensing service or a huge social media network, which might share some of its advertising revenue with you, if you were lucky or exceptionally good.
Digital subscriptions are one way for creators to take back control of their own destinies. NFTs could be another. By making it possible for artists and musicians — and, yes, journalists — to plough private works into i-of-a-kind digital collectible items, NFTs could erode the economic dominance of social media middlemen and requite more power dorsum to the people who are producing creative and interesting things.
In any event, it'south worth a try. And then please, check out my NFT auction at foundation.app/kevinroose, and let the bidding brainstorm.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/technology/nft-column-blockchain.html
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