On the week of March 7 through the 13th, the term “NFT” touched an all-time record high in terms of popular search queries according to Google Trends (GT). The highest score is 100 and this week, GT shows interest has dwindled a hair down to 97. Meanwhile, while the NFT hype affects the cryptocurrency and blockchain community, not everyone is thrilled with this technology. Some critics think NFT tech needs to be more robust in order for collectibles to last more than a decade without them disappearing.
The Rift Between NFT Hype and NFT Criticism
Over the last few weeks, the NFT craze has jumped to new levels as people have sold artwork for millions of dollars, unique audio recordings of farts have been tokenized, and even blockchain-backed signature dance moves are NFTs. And of course, by now everyone has heard about Beeple, the digital artist who sold an NFT via Christie’s auction house for a whopping $69 million. This sale propelled NFT mania to new heights, and Christie’s auction invoked Sotheby’s to partner with an artist named Pak.
The mysterious digital artist Pak was selling an NFT on Makersplace called “Metarift.” An NFT art collector named “888” placed a bid on Metarift for $888,888 on March 19. The following day, the bid had been upped to $904,413 by a bidder named “Danny.” The auction ended on Pak’s latest NFT artwork sale on Saturday at 12:30 p.m. (PST) with Danny’s winning bid.
Despite all the mega-auctions and all the celebrities joining in on the fun, non-fungible token (NFT) assets have come under a lot of criticism. Bitcoin.com’s newsdesk discussed the topic of NFT immutability which has been the industry’s biggest weak point so far. In that editorial tokenized NFT tweets were deleted and artwork was replaced with other images.
On March 17, the Twitter user Jonty Wareing told his 6,932 followers how non-fungible tokens reference the media people are purchasing today. His first tweet went viral with more than 27,000 likes and close to 10,000 retweets.
Out of curiosity I dug into how NFT’s actually reference the media you’re “buying” and my eyebrows are now orbiting the moon
— Jonty Wareing (@jonty) March 17, 2021
File Vanishes from the Host ‘Your Token Is Now Worthless’
He discussed a sale of an original Beeple sold on Nifty Gateway, and detailed how the Beeple JSON file was hosted on Nifty Gateway’s servers. Wareing then explained how the NFT is also hosted on Cloudinary. “So if Nifty goes bust, your token is now worthless,” Wareing said. “It refers to nothing. This can’t be changed,” he added. Then Wareing also talked about files that are using the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) as well. In this tweet, he specifically discussed the Beeple sold by…
Read more:NFT Criticism Heightens: Skeptic Calls Tech a ‘House of Cards,’ Claims NFTs Will be
