The NFT Bay, which resembles popular torrenting website “The Pirate Bay,” allows anyone to download converted JPEGs of all of the NFTs on the Solana and Ethereum blockchains, for free. The NFT images range from CryptoPuppies, Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks, Axie Infinity, Farmers World, and other sites.
The website passed 1.2 million visitors within the first 12 hours of its launch.
The creator, Geoffrey Huntley, an Australian software developer, is a former unicyclist who travels in his van, working remotely to create cutting-edge projects, including the 17-terabyte “billion-dollar torrent.”
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Perhaps Huntley is trying to prove the futility of owning an NFT, a digital image that you cannot physically own, but merely see on your screen.
NFT devotees believe that certificates of NFT ownership, inscribed on blockchain, prove the uniqueness and value of the digital art piece. However, skeptics, including Huntley himself, state that NFTs are easy to reproduce, and thereby invalidate.
NFT Bay is an Educational Art Project, Developer Says
“Fundamentally, I hope through http://thenftbay.org people learn to understand what people are buying when purchasing NFT art right now is nothing more than directions on how to access or download an image,”
Huntley wrote.
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He also warned that most of the NFTs could end up as dead web pages:
“There is a gap of understanding between buyer and seller right now that is being used to exploit people. The image is typically not stored on the blockchain and the majority of images I've seen are hosted on web2.0 storage which is likely to end up as 404 meaning the NFT has even less value.”
On The Flipside
- Property rights are an issue in the NFT market.
- NFT Bay depicts the flaws of Web 3.0.
Why You Should Care?
It’s easy to get deceived by the medium, due to the lack of education about what blockchain is and how crypto works. This means that the worth and value of NFTs is still a very controversial topic.
