[imagesource: Kevin Roose /New York Times]

This whole NFT business is getting out of hand.

Ever since the artist known as Beeple lined his pockets with a cool $69 million, after selling a nonfungible token online, all anyone wants to do is create bizarre media and try their hand at auctioning it off to the highest bidder.

Our fascination with it likely stems from the equal-opportunity nature of the game. Unlike material visual arts, it doesn’t require much skill to make something and put it out there. And, because of the hype, if it sells you could walk away with some serious cash.

This is also its downfall. So far there doesn’t seem to be any info on what makes an NFT worth collecting. People are just buying them up using cryptocurrency and storing them on hard drives (I assume – maybe there’s a digital gallery I don’t know about).

To test just how easy it is to make and sell one of these things, New York Times journalist Kevin Roose decided to create an NFT of his column about NFTs and put it up for auction.

Image: New York Times

That’s almost as meta as Elon Musk’s NFT techno track about NFTs.

In the column, where Roose writes about his intention to sell the column, he says that the money from the sale, if there is a sale, will go to The New York Times’s Neediest Cases Fund that supports charitable causes in New York and beyond.

He goes into detail about how he created his NFT. If you’re keen to find out how that process works, or make your own, we covered that at length on Wednesday.

He remarks, that if the NFT is snapped up, the buyer will own “a piece of history [as] this is the first article in the almost 170-year history of The Times to be distributed as an NFT”.

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 be worthless.

Time will tell, because according to a follow-up article in The New York Times, an NFT collector who goes by the handle @3fmusic, placed a last-minute winning bid of 350 ether, a digital currency, which translated to roughly $560 000 at Wednesday’s exchange rates.

That’s around R8,4 million.

Also in @3fmusic’s collection, you’ll find an image of a sad Kermit the Frog, and a picture of a cartoon toadstool sitting on a log.

Enough, now.

[sources:nytimes&nytimes]