NYC Man Sells Fart For $85, Cashing In On NFT Craze (nypost.com) 62
A Brooklyn-based film director is simultaneously mocking and attempting to profit off the cryptocurrency craze for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) by selling a year's worth of fart audio clips recorded in quarantine. The New York Post reports: "If people are selling digital art and GIFs, why not sell farts?" Alex Ramirez-Mallis, 36, told The Post of his dank addition to the blockchain-based NFT market. His NFT, "One Calendar Year of Recorded Farts," began incubating in March 2020 when, at the beginning of the global coronavirus lockdown, Ramirez-Mallis and four of his friends began sharing recordings of their farts to a group chat on WhatsApp.
On the one-year anniversary of the US's COVID-19 quarantine this month -- by which point Ramirez-Mallis said he could darn near identify members of the group by their farts alone -- Ramirez-Mallis and his fellow farters compiled the recordings into a 52-minute "Master Collection" audio file. Now, the top bid for the file is currently $183. Individual fart recordings are also available for 0.05 Ethereum, or about $85 a pop. The gassy group has so far sold one, to an anonymous buyer.
On the one-year anniversary of the US's COVID-19 quarantine this month -- by which point Ramirez-Mallis said he could darn near identify members of the group by their farts alone -- Ramirez-Mallis and his fellow farters compiled the recordings into a 52-minute "Master Collection" audio file. Now, the top bid for the file is currently $183. Individual fart recordings are also available for 0.05 Ethereum, or about $85 a pop. The gassy group has so far sold one, to an anonymous buyer.
Is he a fart sniffer or a fartsniffer? (Score:5, Funny)
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It's great (Score:3)
What a wonderful era to be alive in!
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Just wait till his kids get their inheritance.
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Just wait till his kids get their inheritance.
I leave to my children hot air (play sound of the fart here).
All my money goes to my pet dog Guano. The real source of the fart sounds.
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A recent episode of Lawful Masses made some interesting points about NFTs.
https://youtu.be/SOKJ77X8v6g [youtu.be]
There is some arsehole who is creating tokens for tweets, mostly those belonging to artists who post their work on Twitter. I guess the idea being that one day someone might like to own the tweet that launched some famous/valuable art. Except that of course he owns the NFT, not the artist.
Which creates an interesting issue. Can you just make an NFT for any random thing and sell it? NFTs are mostly used for
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well that is what I was going to ask about,
is this some sort of new copyright type where having the NFT means it's valid ownership or creation or something ?
I'm not getting it at all.
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Think of an NFT as a copyright registration. Right now, you can register anything you want. I can register this post, for example.
All an NFT does is basically says the holder "owns" that item. The item can be duplicated over and over again, but the registration says the person "owns" the item.
T
Ah F(ucking) Art (Score:2)
Kinda old to be so stupid (Score:2)
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Pathetic.
Yeah, that was the word I wanted to use to describe the majority of stupid shit pulled by popular YouTubers, but then I saw their bank accounts...?!?
Guess some 36-year old Slashdot poster, was kinda jealous of that stupid money.
"to an anonymous buyer" (Score:2)
The gassy group has so far sold one, to an anonymous buyer.
I wonder if that buyer was actually a willing participant to this farts buying process.
If not, they'd be anamused.
"or about $85 a pop" (Score:2)
or about $85 a pop
I thought farts made more of a pffftt noise.
Thankfully not "a poop" (Score:2)
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It's a Heisenberg token (Score:2)
This is sort of a Heisenberg token. It is not possible to observe the fart in the jar and have it still be in the jar.
Either that or it's a Schrödinger token; the fart is both in the jar and not in the jar until it is observed.
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There is no jar. The NFT is an audio recording of farts.
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Oh, that's lame. Without anyone being able to smell it, there's no way to know who dealt it.
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Oh, that's lame. Without anyone being able to smell it, there's no way to know who dealt it.
With sufficient data, a convolutional neural network could be trained to identify the dealer from the audio.
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Huh?
He who smelt it dealt it!
Did you learn nothing in school?
Re: He is a smart fellow... or Fart Smeller... (Score:1)
There's something smelly about this (Score:2)
Well someone had to say it.
Ghandi seems relevant. (Score:3)
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
I don't understand his attitude of:
“The NFT craze is absurd — this idea of putting a value on something inherently intangible,” said Ramírez-Mallis, referencing screenshots of screenshots and the concept of colors which are currently being sold as NFTs. “These NFTs aren’t even farts, they’re just digital alphanumeric strings that represent ownership.”
The guy is a film director.Literally his entire career is based on making intangible IP. Why is he so surprised people place value on intangible goods? By the same token, movies and music aren't visual or audio, they are just digital alphanumeric strings than can be interpreted in a way to create audio and visual.
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I don't think we'll be seeing art critics commenting on which is the best fart composition, unlike say a book or a movie.
Re: Ghandi seems relevant. (Score:2)
If nothing else, it will be an artifact used to determine the mindset of people at this point in history.
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If nothing else, it will be an artifact used to determine the mindset of people at this point in history.
FML
Re: Ghandi seems relevant. (Score:4, Funny)
I think this is what people mean by post-capitalism. We're so fucking rich (on average) we have bidding wars over ownership of each others' farts.
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That's an embarrassing thought. I guess I should be used to it though, I grew up in the '70s, my generation is remembered for disco and such classic cars as the Pinto, Vega and Gremlin.
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>If nothing else, it will be an artifact used to determine the mindset of people at this point in history.
Ouch
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I can explain to anyone the value to a consumer of seeing a movie or reading a book. I can explain to some people the value of owning an original Van Gogh. I can explain to far fewer people the value of owning a certificate of authentication that they own the same image that a million other people have bit-by-bit copies of.
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I can explain to far fewer people the value of owning a certificate of authentication that they own the same image that a million other people have bit-by-bit copies of.
And yet people buy CDs, DVDs, and blu-ray every day as well as subscribing to Netflix, even though a million other people have that exact same content via P2P networks.
If anything, multimedia content sales have increased since the advent of bitorrent.
It turns out people like to officially own things.
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As I said, I understand the value of owning a movie. I own some! I can entertain myself whenever I want by watching it even if it's on a streaming service I don't subscribe to.
I understand wanting a particular image saved to your desktop and can explain that to people. I cannot explain "you get a cert. of authority by a third party that your identical copy is special" to many people. That's totally different and you skipped the entire fucking point that they're different
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I'm completely in favour of this madness. We need to encourage and expand it. Think about it: if some schmoe with too much money could "own" every work of art, the rest of us could "have" it for free. Free music, free movies, free software for everybody. Like the schmucks in first class on the airplane: they get to feel special, the rest of us get heavily subsidized airfare.
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His intangible IP has value because of an artificial scarcity: If anyone wants to see it (legally), they have to fork over some money. That gives it value. NFTs don't even have that. Ownership is only good for bragging rights.
It seems to be in the nature of business to create scarcity. You can't have a marketplace without it, so when dealing with digitial goods scarcity must be imposed.
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> ... the nature of business to create scarcity. You can't have a marketplace without it, so when dealing with digitial goods scarcity must be imposed.
1. That's an assumption [wikipedia.org] based upon archaic thinking. One of the business models used by some Open Source projects is: Give away the product, charge for support.
2. IBM buying Red Hat for $34 Billion [redhat.com] is a good counter-example.
In a digital world the value is not ONLY based on artificial scarcity (although that is certainly a major one.) It is indeed possib
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Movies have some artistic merit and provide entertainment. Farts are just a natural bodily process that had no value. Worse still the creation of these tokens requires compute power, i.e. it wastes electricity for no useful purpose.
Chuck Tingle was going to do a book about NFTs but cancelled it due to the environmental impact. At least his books are real value, being the world's greatest living author and all that.
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You also discount the entertainment value that someone may get out of purchasing an NFT. People get some joy out of collecting baseball cards or other types of k
Impending Crash (Score:3, Insightful)
Kidding aside. Yeah, this is a sign of "irrational exuberance". A crash is coming.
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I hope so, but I fear things could still get more stupid before the crash. The only upside is that if we see 0.01%ers paying millions for each other's farts while they won't pay workers a decent wage, it will help reveal the true nature of this economic system.
I'm Gonna Be Rich! (Score:3)
Since I had weight reduction surgery, by guts have been...shall we say, "prolific?" In their production levels? So much so, that I suffered an anal fissure.
Which went Chernobyl and required a sphincterotomy to loosen things enough for the fissure to heal.
Since that time, my orifice has devolved into an eldritch entity in it's own right, on a par with the glubbering openings rupturing the glistening surface of any Lovecraftian horror. It routinely produces utterances that would strike fear into the hearts of Mike Myers and Mel Brooks, creating zones of existential dread where not even a Stephen King or John Carpenter film would dare to tread.
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Damn that post stinks, I stand in awe of your amazing trollishness.
Wow Editors (Score:5, Interesting)
My slightly humorous submission for British Science Week gets marked with a big red SPAM and stuck on my user page, but you just go ahead and publish a fart story. 20-some odd years of faithful service, excellent karma, and yet zero (actually negative) respect. I miss the days when you could correspond with Taco and he would give you a thoughtful reply.
This will be in a museum some day (Score:2)
This should be in a museum. I know the perfect place. [youtube.com]
The world ends not with a bang... (Score:2)
As our society collapses all around us, here we are, as the world ends with not a bang but a fart.
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For $85? (Score:2)
Correction (Score:1)
Can I get that on a Brown-Ray disc? (Score:2)
Swalwell (Score:2)
All your farts are belong to us (Score:1)
I admit I was wrong. (Score:2)
This story stinks (Score:1)
*rolls eyes* (Score:2)
People are fucking stupid. 'Nuff said.
now THAT (Score:1)
$85 .. a pop .. ??? (Score:1)
No shortage of idiots. (Score:2)
Fine, let the rubes part with their money to buy recorded f"ART"s. If people are willing to pay millions for mentally deranged scribbles that make no sense but they see some kind of "meaning" in them (whatever), how is this any worse?
I don't know how this is even "news for nerds" or "stuff that matters" other than somebody recorded this in .mp3 format rather than an audio tape (this too is really pushing it).