This is a departure for our usual time together exploring the Pacific.
Buck’s NFT is being auctioned now. There is already a bid of 105 ETH which is great. But if it goes for enough money I’ll finally be able to buy Sealand in the English Channel and Peter Thiel and I will declare independence and then plant some palm trees which this place sorely needs. Just imagine. My own country!
Here’s the full experience of the NFT, a 3-minute video tour, and the link to the OpenSea auction site.
Dollhouse view
So what is an NFT? Many of you have heard the term which means Non Fungible Token. Most folks think that it’s some modern scam along the lines of a Banksy performance. A Banksy piece called Morons was purchased for 100k and was then burned and the video of the burning art piece was then sold as an NFT for $380,000.
Burned Banksy
Sure all this seems nuts but there are several aspects to this. Take the Billy The Kid photo which was sold for 2.1 million in 2011. Now there are only two authentic photos of the guy in existence. Someone was willing to pay 2.1m for the original print even though there are many high resolution copies online or available as art prints. Now imagine the original is a digital piece of art and, using the secure blockchain, certify it and you have an original you can invest in even if there are unlimited digital copies.
Second from left and who knows? It could be a grift. Looks fake to me (and I should know).
Art is often as a store of monetary value. In 2004 one of the 34 Vermeers was sold at auction. The previous Vermeer was sold 80 years ago. At the Christie’s the audience looked appreciatively when the picture was brought out and placed in the easel. But when the hammer fell the room exploded into applause. They didn’t clap for the art or the history. They were clapping for the money.
With NFT’s we are clapping for the money. Good or bad you decide. Real or a passing fad? This we don’t know; we have to let some time pass.
So come explore
But one thing we can be fairly certain of is that virtual worlds are here to stay. We have been heading this direction since our ancestors told campfire stories and danced around in animal skins as the stone-agers painted the rock walls. This evolved to writing, books, and filmmaking. And, eventually. “Here’s looking at you kid.”
Now we have 3D worlds and with the Buck’s NFT we have a highly immersive experience of a real place. It isn’t a video nor is it a still photo. You can fly through, stop, go back r dive deeper into the stories, articles and videos.
Once the auction closes on Aug 19th the NFT will go private though the 3-minute video tour will be on the buckswoodside.com site. The owner may choose to make the experience public or just own it.
We shall see.
I might buy this and sell it to Mark Zukerberg, It’s a perfect fit for Facebook’s “immersive future” vision, A digital time capsule. Brilliant!
Learn something new every day. I thought NFT was Not a F*****g Thing! 😉