Non-fungible tokens: ‘It’s like the Wild West’
If you’re not familiar with NFTs, you soon will be
They’re called non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.
If you’re not familiar with them, you soon will be according to NFT producers, buyers and sellers who believe this unique technology may become as common as the internet. Skeptical? Well, 20 or more years ago, many of us laughed at the futuristic-sounding possibilities of the World Wide Web. It now encompasses much of our lives in countless ways.
NFTs are created to give users authentic digital ownership of practically anything, from artwork and drawings to memes and artificial intelligence. NFTs can be bought and sold in the digital world to represent official proof of ownership for physical or virtual assets. The non-fungible aspect means it’s a noninterchangeable unit of data that’s stored on a digital ledger using “blockchain” technology.
Confused? It’s understandable. It’s also the way of the future, according to
J.J. Weinberg, a veteran artist and NFT producer who’s been immersed in this strange new world since it resurfaced to international popularity earlier this year.
“It’s like the wild West. There’s a gold rush right now for NFTs,” he said.
Last month Weinberg made history in our area and in the digital art world, by selling a digital derivative NFT of one of his paintings at a premier auction house in New York City. His captivating painting of Frederick Douglass — an audiovisual collaboration with hip-hop artist and NFT curator “ARTZ” — is part of Weinberg’s
hard-hitting “Well Regulated Militia” series asking bold questions about the meaning of weapons in our society.
At the same time, Sotheby’s auction house in London sold a set of 107 NFTs representing images of cartoon apes
(yes, cartoon apes) for $24.4 million (yes, million). The images were part of the “Bored Ape Yacht Club” collection of NFTs — a set of 10,000 computer-generated cartoon apes made by Yuga Labs. Another eye-popping sale was for a digital collage titled “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days,” by an artist named Beeple (yes, Beeple), for a record $69.3 million.
This high-profile sale definitely caught my attention, prompting me to again ask, what is an NFT?
“A non-fungible token is a digital asset that’s validated on the blockchain by an interaction with a smart contract,” Weinberg tells viewers on a tutorial YouTube video posted this week. “What’s most important is that it’s backed by a crypto certificate of authenticity.”
Consider the comparison between a NFT for artwork or other digital assets versus a traditional title for a house or a vehicle.
“Five years from now, those purchases may be made with non-fungible titles, similar to NFTs,” Weinberg predicts. “Instead of going through a title company, you’ll be able to title it digitally through an NFT.”
Here’s another example from TheVerge.com: “A bitcoin is fungible — trade one for another bitcoin and you’ll have exactly the same thing. A one-of-a-kind trading card, however, is non-fungible. If you traded it for a different card, you’d have something completely different.”
For content creators, having this traceable digital contract allows them to receive a portion of its resale amount, up to 10%, at least potentially. This is a huge draw for starving artists like Weinberg, deep-pocketed business people, and profit-seeking corporations that want to capitalize on this booming market. The latest popularity of NFTs is evolving through the collection of digitized fine art and pop art.
Earlier this month, Weinberg attended the 14th annual George Lopez Celebrity Golf Classic in Toluca Lake, California, which helps fund kidney families in need of living essentials. Weinberg has been a fan for many years of Lopez, who received a kidney transplant in 2005.
“When you make George Lopez cry, you know you did it right,” Weinberg wrote on his Facebook page after showing Lopez a painting he created titled, “From the Rough.” It’s based on Lopez’s early life when he couldn’t afford golf balls so he would pull lemons from a tree to practice teeing off.
Lopez told Weinberg, “You’ve just restored my faith that people actually listen. This is the power of art. You got me. I literally stood and stared at it for 10
He testified at the hearing that he met with Choate “numerous” times, advising him of his rights and options, including a jury trial. The public defender’s office went over the evidence with him.
The enhancement — for prior 1991 and 1998 felony auto theft convictions — were properly applied following the law at the time, which allowed felonies over a decade old to be considered, Sullivan wrote.
Choate and the boy’s stepmother, Kimberly Kubina, were charged in the case. She pleaded guilty to neglect of a dependent and was sentenced to 35 years in February 2013.
In March 2007, Choate and Kubina withdrew Christian Choate from Iddings Elementary School in Merrillville under the guise that they would home-school him, but the child did not receive any meaningful education at home, court documents said.
After Choate saw his son and another boy in a room together not wearing pants and learning that Christian had told the boy they had to play the “hump game” to be brothers, Choate began “forcefully physically disciplining” Christian. Initially Choate would slap Christian, but the abuse progressed to lifting the boy and throwing him onto a couch. Around the same time, Choate and Kubina began confining Christian to his room for increasing periods of time and cutting back his food intake.
In mid-2008, the family moved to the Colfax Mobile Home Park in Gary, where they failed to enroll Christian’s older sister, in school. Choate pleaded guilty to neglect for depriving the girl of an education.
Christian was locked in a bathroom, then in Choate’s bedroom until late 2008 when he escaped and ran away to a nearby Walgreens, documents said. After he was found, the child was locked in a dog cage, from which he was released only to eat and use the bathroom. His sister was directed to remove her brother from the cage for short periods of time to do limited exercises after Kubina observed Christian to have developed circulatory problems from the confinement, documents said. When the boy began urinating and defecating in the cage, Kubina required him to wear diapers originally purchased for the youngest child in the house.
The boy was fed Ramen noodles for breakfast and lunch and leftovers from the family dinner. At the time of his death, Christian Choate wore size 6 clothes.
Kubina tried to address the swelling and bruising on Christian Choate’s body by instructing his sister to give him ice cold water baths.
For at least two weeks before Christian’s death, his father physically disciplined him to the point where he showed signs of lethargy, confusion and an altered mental state, but neither Choate nor Kubina obtained medical care for the boy, who died on April 2, 2009.
Kubina put the boy’s body inside a plastic tote and stored it in Kubina’s grandmother’s mobile home across the street. Later, Choate and Kubina dug a 2- to 3-foot deep hole under the grandmother’s shed. Kubina put a Bible and a cross on Christian’s body, and Choate covered the body with lime, concrete and dirt before replacing the floor of the shed.
Christian’s body was unearthed May 4, 2011.