Recently, artists on Twitter have begun seeing replies to their tweets that say that their tweets have been tokenized and are up for auction. Meanwhile, Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey is planning to sell his first tweet as an NFT auction, with the highest bid currently being $2.5 million. Many are criticizing cryptoart for making money off the work of other artists and generating an unreasonable amount of energy, destroying the environment.
If none of these sentences made any sense to you, let me explain.
Cryptocurrency is a digital currency where transactions and records are maintained by a decentralized system. It uses cryptography, a secure communication technique, to prevent counterfeiting or double-spending. Many use blockchain, a type of database, which is also decentralized. All users have control and all transactions are permanently recorded and viewable to everyone.
In order to keep the system running, many computers are needed to run the technology, which uses a large amount of energy. For example, a single transaction using the cryptocurrency Ethereum uses enough energy to power the average American household for a little over two days. The carbon footprint is the same as the carbon footprint you would create from watching 4,820 hours of YouTube. (Yes, using the internet creates a carbon footprint.)
Some people use Ethereum to buy cryptoart. Cryptoart is a piece of metadata (for example, a tweeted image and all the information that comes with it) which is attached to a token (which has monetary value) and stored in a blockchain. Individual pieces of cryptoart are called NFTs, or Non-Fungible Tokens. Fungibility is “the ability of a good or asset to be interchanged with other individual goods or assets of the same type”, according to Investopedia. “Non-Fungible” means that the tokens are unique. The values of NFTs fluctuate with the price of Ethereum, which is currently worth (as of 9 p.m. March 16) around $1,778 for one Ethereum.
An NFT can be anything digital, including drawings or music. A 50-second video by Grimes sold for $390,000, while a GIF of a ghost covered in the Gucci logo sold for $3,600. In the same manner, a tweet can be sold through something as simple as a Twitter bot. By replying to a tweet with a specific code and a tag to the right account, a tweet can be tokenized and becomes an NFT, which can then be sold. However, the poster of the original tweet does not need to consent for their tweet to be tokenized; any schmuck can make money off your tweet in a heartbeat. Scrolling through the replies the account @tokenizedtweets has posted reveals that any sort of tweet can be tokenized, and some users are tokenizing brand posts or copyrighted material.
Many Twitter artists have resorted to locking their accounts to keep their original work from being tokenized and sold. But locking an account on Twitter means that only the people who follow you can see your tweets, meaning no room for their audiences to grow. Blocking the token bots only solves part of the problem, as anyone can tokenize a tweet. Turning off replies to only followers works as long as none of your followers decide to tokenize your work. It’s a hellish situation.
Some artists have begun tokenizing their own work to prevent someone else from making money off their work, which is a short-term solution. But any use of the system contributes to the energy I mentioned earlier, which contributes to the carbon footprint Ethereum leaves behind. Maybe the only way to win is not to play, but that only works if everyone stops playing. In the meantime, if you see art you like? Commission the artist. Give them the money they deserve in a legitimate way.
Categories: Opinion
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