Would you spend $69.4m on digital art that anyone can copy?

Would you spend $69.4m on one piece of digital art that anyone else can copy – and you can’t even touch or hang on your wall?

Well someone has. And it’s been done through none other than one of the world’s most well established auction houses – Christie’s. 

Last week someone (I presume it’s an actual human and not a bot or an algorithm) purchased the work ‘Everydays: The First 5,000 Days’ by Mike Winkelmann, who is a digital artist known as Beeple. 

To be clear, this wealthy art connoisseur didn’t actually buy the art work – they bought something known as a ‘non-fungible token’. A token for almost 70 million actual dollars.

A non-fungible token (an NFT) sounds like a cross between something for athlete’s foot and something I’d trade on the Xbox. 
But NFTs are not anti-fungals or a way of buying extra lives – they’re a new cryptocurrency. 

They’re like bitcoin but show that something online is real by recording it as a blockchain (like a ledger). 
My cranium is now convulsing as it tries to compute this.

I have so many questions. So many. 

There’s always been the question about the value of art anyway – before this buying-digital-art-for-millions-and all-you-get-is-a-token-thing – a bit like the old I went on holiday and all i got was this lousy T-Shirt thing. Now it’s the value of digital art via a currency you’ll never hold for a thing you’ll never hold. 

NFTs themselves are crazy to get your head round – once one is created it can be traced forever – so that part makes sense. 

But anyone can make them. Anyone. A-N-Y-O-N-E. As there’s no official control on who creates them. 

So would you really buy this fancy token that could have been created by anyone – but sort of probably proves you own the digital art?
I’m not sure I would. 

But then I wasn’t sure the iPad would catch on – surely it’s just a big iPhone, I remember stupidly saying. How wrong I was. 

So hit me up with the NFT and let me at that digital art.