Australian "steals" all NFTs - is "the NFT Bay" performance art?

Crypto currencies such as Bitcoin have long since become everyday life and in addition to the video game industry, the art market also moves suddenly in the direction of Blockchain and NFTS .

Was all crypto art stolen? What happened?

Geoffrey Huntley now wanted to prove how unsafe all this is by downloading the pictures of all NFTs - and visibly raised to a website for all public.

With this campaign, he not only "stole" every existing NFT crypto art that was created Ethereum and Solana The NFT Bay -a direct tribute to the now closed pirated copy website The Pirate Bay .

A total of 17.96 terabytes to NFTS, also called non-fungable tokens, can now be found there.

Huntley's motif is according to its own performance art and education:

Basically, I hope that the people understand the NFT Bay what they get when they buy NFT art. At the moment, these are nothing more than instructions on how to access or download it. There is currently a gap between buyers and sellers who are used to exploiting people. "

However, it must be mentioned at this point that it not the NFTS itself . The property rights of the pictures uploaded there, the receipt quasi and the image stored on the blockchain, whose possession is associated with sometimes absurd money sums, cannot be found on The NFT Bay .

So it is only digital copies of the images, which everyone can download somewhere else with a click of the mouse.

Huntley still wants to set a clear statement and hopes that the collection of people around the world will be viewed and reflected on in order to deal more with the "tulip mania of this generation" (also called tulipomania, tulip craze, tulip bladder, tulip fever or tulip hysteria - based on a period in the golden age Netherlands , in which tulip onions became a speculation object, the prices were pushed to dizzying heights in order to then collapse again).

Further information and background about Huntley's performance art coup can be found on his own FAQ page .

An important piece of performance art at the right time?

In one of the perhaps best performance works of this year, Australian Geoffrey Huntley created a website with The NFT Bay that promises full-bodied that you can pull all the NFTs off the blockchain with a few clicks.

As a replica of a torrent site, she also seems to do exactly what it promises. While the property rights are not downloaded, this campaign can trigger an interesting discussion as a statement about what it can mean if we want to use the ownership of virtual, generally accessible and available things on the Internet.

Quite every link on the website finally leads you to the description page . There is an actual download link. If you click on it, you will receive the torrent with which you can download a file called "Preview.jpg" that shows a number of bored APE images, as well as zip files that allegedly contain all NFTS from the Ethereum and Solana blockchains.

All in all, the download is almost 20 TB. These are a lot of image files and if you are like me, your laptop does not have enough SSD memory on board 😉

Important arguments in the discussion show in the answers to Huntley's announcement tweet . NFT opponents describe it as a triumph that proves that NFTS have no value of their own. On the other side of the front, committed crypto fans to demonstrate how untouched they are of this action by answering in droves that proof of ownership and not the picture itself gives the NFTs their value. And this proof of ownership cannot be stolen after their reasoning.

What are we in the middle of the discussion? And shouldn't good art trigger exactly these controversy and debates?

For his part, Huntley explains that part of his motivation for the creation was that NFTs very often do not store any media itself in the blockchain, but only refer to a version that is stored on a potentially fragile web server.

At the same time, he leads the absurdity of the whole to the glowing NFT supporters and the market woven with hot knitting needles around it in a smug manner by taking it through the word and making fun of the concept. "You want to claim property on something online ," he asks provocatively. "On the Internet, this means that someone pirated it."

If you want to learn more and want to follow the discussions further, visit the FAQ area of ​​Geoffrey Huntley and subscribe to the Twitter channel from The NFT Bay.

Joachim Rodriguez y Romero

Owner and managing director of Kunstplaza. Publicist, editor and passionate blogger in the field of art, design and creativity since 2011. Successful conclusion in web design as part of a university degree (2008). Further development of creativity techniques through courses in free drawing, expression painting and theatre/acting. Profound knowledge of the art market through many years of journalistic research and numerous collaborations with actors/institutions from art and culture.

www.kunstplaza.de/