A website referred to as The NFT Bay has debuted to make “all of the NFT’s [sic] on the Ethereum & Solana blockchains” out there to obtain by way of the customer’s torrent shopper of alternative.
The concept behind non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is that somebody should purchase a piece of digital artwork — which incorporates something from a portrait to the World Wide Web’s source code — utilizing the identical blockchain expertise as cryptocurrency transactions. That manner the artist can receives a commission for his or her work and the customer has proof they personal the NFT.
This is the issue: The art work related to an NFT is simply a file. There’s nothing stopping anybody with a net browser from right-clicking on the NFT and downloading a copy of that artwork to their system. Now individuals will not even have to do the right-clicking themselves; all they’ve to do is torrent a bunch of artwork from The NFT Bay.
💀OMG WHO RIGHT CLICKED ALL OF THE #NFTs?☠️🛳🏴☠️ https://t.co/o0YRK78AkL 🏴☠️🛳👀 pic.twitter.com/g74TFqzX0nNovember 18, 2021
Shopping for an NFT is like buying bottled water though a fountain gives the very same water free of charge. The purchaser is spending cash they do not want to spend (and, as a result of minting an NFT requires compute energy, inflicting more damage on the environment) in change for nothing however theoretical possession over that water.
Or as The NFT Bay creator Geoffrey Huntley explains within the website’s description: “As web2.0 webhosts are identified to go offline (404 errors) this useful torrent comprises all the NFT’s [sic] in order that future generations can research this generations [sic] tulip mania and collectively go… ‘WTF? We destroyed our planet for THIS?!'”
The website in any other case seems to be a devoted, NFT-themed duplicate of The Pirate Bay, a web site that we at Tom’s {Hardware} have solely glimpsed in screenshots. It purports to comprise 14.9 TiB and 4.2 TiB of NFTs taken from the Ethereum and Solana blockchains, respectively, however we have not verified the authenticity of the recordsdata.