The creation of NFTs has been almost universally criticised online. As a power-hungry, planet-destroying way of selling usually crap pieces of cryptoart, many artists and environmentalists have turned against it. In a form of protest, this has led to the creation of The NFT Bay.
What is The NFT Bay?
Created in protest of NFTs, The NFT Bay is a criticism of the technology's claims of ownership. For example, NFT customers claim they are the definitive owners of the cryptoart they buy. However, anyone can download the file they own and freely share it without issue. This is because NFT customers only truly own access to the link of the item they buy.
Inspired by The Pirate Bay, the website collects every NFT and allows users to download them at the click of a button. The website includes every NFT held on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains.
Every file is part of one huge 15GB torrent called “The Billion Dollar Torrent”. Once unpacked, the colossal cryptoart collection weighs in at almost 20GB in size. As reported by TorrentFreak, the cryptoart criticism has been described by its creator as an “art project”.
Read More: Mars colonists will inevitably turn against Earth, says new study
We destroyed our planet for this?
NFT Bay creator Geoffrey Huntley explained that the project is designed as a wake up call for cryptobros. Often compared to pyramid schemes, NFTs are sold on the belief that they'll be around forever and make investors tonnes of money. However, everything is finite, and NFT’s aren't as protected as many believe.
“Did you know that a NFT is just a hyperlink to an image that’s usually hosted on Google Drive or another web2.0 webhost?” Huntley writes. “People are dropping millions on instructions on how to download images. That's why you can right click save-as because they are standard images. The image is not stored in the blockchain contract.
“As web2.0 webhosts are known to go offline (404 errors) this handy torrent contains all of the NFT's so that future generations can study this generations tulip mania and collectively go, ‘WTF? We destroyed our planet for THIS?!’”
Read More: We’re Living In The Most Boring Cyberpunk World Imaginable