NFTs are the new 'green'.

A private opinion article - I am good at private opinions I’ve had them all my life, all by myself.

I loved the Blackadder series, Rowan Atkinson as Edmund Blackadder perpetually incredulous of the naivety and Dunning-Kruger effect displayed by all his fellow characters. One scene epitomises this perfectly.

The Elizabethan Blackadder is short on money. He returns home to be greeted by Lord Percy announcing that he has, ‘after only one hour’s ceaseless attempt at alchemy, discovered gold!’

“Percy, it's green! …I don’t want to be pedantic, but the colour of gold is gold, that’s why it is called gold. What you have discovered, if it has a name, is some ‘green’.” Retorts Blackadder.

Percy, totally unperturbed, now believes he has ownership of an equally valuable, “nugget of purest green”.

As soon as I started reading about NFTs, Non-Fungible Tokens, for art, games and metaverses, this scene sprung immediately to mind.

Non-fungible, if you are not familiar, means unique, cannot be swapped for something of equivalent value. E.g. if you have a 10 CHF note (or even a Bitcoin), and I have one, we can swap them as it makes no difference, their value is and remains identical; they are fungible.

But, if you have a N-F token, it will never be the same as my N-F token. Which at first sounds great. Imagine holding a token which is utterly unique to you, the seller, the transaction, future transactions and whatever is associated with it.

But the, ‘whatever is associated with it‘, its value and its real costs, are where they are currently not great.

If you have bought an NFT, you have bought a token (think, receipt). You have not bought all rights over that cat GIF you so desperately crave; anyone can right-click and copy that for themselves - squeal as much as you like, it will happen.?

Remember, a copied NFTed artwork is identical to the original NFTed artwork, the only difference is you have an expensive token saying you own the original (and hopefully it is the original). A copied NFTed artwork is not like owning a postcard of the Mona-Lisa, its like owning another, identical, Mona-Lisa, just you didn’t pay for it.

And, the copyright may well remain with the original creator, not you. You have simply bought a hyper-linked record on a blockchain (usually Ethereum), saying you are the owner of your beloved cat GIF.

The cat GIF itself is, though, unlikely to be hosted on a blockchain as is your token; but more than likely on a web-server, which could be wiped at any time. So you could easily end up with an expensive NFT and your cat GIF lying on a tip with a lot of other Elektroschrott and some expensive apes. ?

‘404 cat not found‘.

Then, if your NFT came with an Ethereum smart contract, and you try and sell your cat, the original creator automatically gets a cut of your sale. And, if the gas-price - the cost of the sale of tokens on the blockchain - is at that moment high, it can mean you actually have to pay to sell your token, even if your cat has been lost. (The right-click download copies will still exist, #frustrating).

These same principles apply to NTFs for “land”, “clothing” etc. found in games and metaverses. All things that demand you use “air-quotes” to refer to them.

Again, what you have actually bought is a token which says you are the owner of a pixel representation of some fictitious space in a fictitious ‘video-game’ - that’s it, nothing more.

The metaverse in which your “land" sits is not owned by you; but is likely subject to a ‘decentralised autonomous ownership‘ model (DAO), held on a blockchain over which you have some voting rights (aka, smart-contract communism).

Your “land” is wholly generated by software (owned by Microsoft), running on Ethereum servers. Servers managed by so called ‘volunteers‘ loaning their computational services to keep your “land” and everything around it voluntarily live.

You can only see your “land”, if you wear special goggles developed and owned by another third-party most likely Facebook (1). And, it will only remain visible, if it survives: new software releases, bugs, cyber attacks, technological innovation, the whims of your fellow DAO comrades, government interventions, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Last but not least, you can only sell your “land” if you can continue to prove ownership by remembering the password to your crypto wallet - which you, hopefully, did not throw away and is not lying somewhere on a tip in Wales along with the cat GIF you bought.

To paraphrase Blackadder, ‘I don’t want to be pedantic Percy, but land is called land, because it is, well er…land!?’

What you have bought is not land, it is actually not anything at all - it is the new ‘green’.

Social media is currently full of tech influencers‘ promises and predictions about NFTs, with sci-fi inspire graphics and next best thing type posts; where specifics are inversely proportional to the number of hashtags used - Fortunately for us, there is no better scam indicator than hyperventilating influencers’ on social media. Especially ones that own lots of NFTs themselves and have a vested interest in your FOMO.

The NFT marketplace, Opensea, now declares it is worth 13.9B$ just a few weeks after it was embroiled in an NFT insider trading scandal by its own Head of Product. I understand he is now NFT (Not F***ing There)!

Creating and buying your own NFTs to give them a fake sales history is so very easy…getting an online celebrity to buy one with their spare cash takes more planning, but has the same net effect.

Forget the hype about speculating in artworks, or buying skins, metaverse “land”, avatar "trainers", "handbags" and other such pixels pretending to be real things.

NFTs only sound like a good idea if they can be used for items which are in themselves valueless, e.g. tickets for events. A ticket is only a paper, or digital, means to say you have paid an entrance fee. In itself, it is of no value. NFTs would make adding?‘non-transferable‘ or the need to print ID portraits on the ticket unnecessary.

BUT, and there is a SERIOUSLY BIG BUT here.

Energy usage. An average NFT transaction requires 35kWh electricity - that’s about the same as running your fridge for a month!?And that does not include the perpetual costs of maintaining it there. (Nor do NTFs keep your beers cold).

Thus, your cat GIF has an unnecessary and unsustainably large carbon pawprint, just so you can 'flex it' to your followers. (2)

And note, there are no clothes banks for those, now unfashionable, “trainers“ or “handbags“ you so desperately wanted for that metaverse concert. They cannot be recycled, nor passed to another deserving cause. They can only be deleted, and your NTF ‘burned‘ (i.e. deleted). But this will cost you gas too; so you won’t do it, and it will therefore remain on the blockchain continuingly heating the planet…

All not so great, I am sure you will agree.

PS. Whilst you guys ponder all of the above - If you are interested, I have some super rare Tulip bulb JPGs, #totalmania. Got them from some bloke called, Charles Mackay. #YOLO.

(1) This is why Meta (#facebook2.0), wants to become a metaverse company. At the moment Facebook is an app developer; ubiquitous, but still subservient to all the app stores, tools and browser owners, e.g. Apple.?

Metaverses will give them control over the tools, (they have 75% of the goggles market), the platform (Horizons), and the currencies used (Diem).

(2) 'Flexing' is showing off your NFT artwork, often done by using it as your profile picture on your social media accounts. Ideal locations for others to right-click download copy. And goo for keeping you anonymous from the taxman.

Image copyright BBC Studios, watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvspYUhiJDM