NFT Pirating Website Receives More Than A Million Visits Within Hours of Launch
A long-standing issue with digital art is that art items may be replicated endlessly due to their digital nature. As a result, it is difficult for digital artists to commercialize their work. To get around this, blockchain technology may be used to generate a limited number of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which can then be sold to art collectors.
It is vital to note that NFTs do not represent the original artwork. Individual parts can still be mass-copied or, as NFT doubters claim, “right-clicked.” The NFT may be viewed as a digital authenticity certificate signed by the artist that, owing to blockchain technology, cannot be altered or fabricated.
Geoffrey Huntley, a developer, developed a website dedicated to “pirating” NFTs on Thursday. Huntley purposefully designed his website The NFT Bay to resemble The Pirate Bay, the world’s largest Torrent link repository for illegal downloads.
The Australian claimed in a press release on GitHub that he built The NFT Bay as an educational art project, emphasizing that NFT art is now “nothing more than guidelines on how to access or download an image”:
The picture is not saved on the blockchain, and the bulk of photos I’ve seen are housed on web2.0 storage, which is likely to result in a 404, implying that the NFT is even less valuable.
West Coast NFT CEO Steve Mitobe contradicts Huntley’s allegation that most NFTs are centrally stored, stating that decentralized storage systems like IPFS and Arweave are becoming the norm:
The metadata and photos are recoverable or permanent when employing these systems, and they are not reliant on a single point of failure (404 error).
Arweave.News published a story earlier this year commenting on the storage issue, claiming that “NFTs are constructed on an unsteady foundation”:
Almost a third of the links posted on social media are no longer active two years later. Over a period of 20 years, this rises to 98.4 percent. Because of the pace of degradation, collectors may one day own a gallery of 404s.
The first “NFT rug pull” performed by neitherconfirm is also mentioned in the article. On Open Sea, the artist replaced all.jpg files for his NFT collection with photographs of carpets.
All discussions about the value of NFTs are meaningless as long as the token is not inseparable from the artwork itself. pic.twitter.com/iUKoUrWlat
— neitherconfirm (@neitherconfirm) March 9, 2021
