Perhaps you are deeply involved in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology and know exactly what non-fungible tokens are. Or, like me, you may know little about the meaning of these words, but some bar guys love to listen to Bitcoin, and NFTs are some kind of digital art. I have a vague feeling. One NFT by an artist known as Beeple $ 69 million..
In any case, thanks to the four-month-old Israeli company, Bible passages can now be purchased as NFTs. CryptoVerses, It just announced that it sold a set of four consecutive poems of Exodus dealing with the Sabbath, the Year of the Sabbath, and idolatry for less than half the coins of the cryptocurrency Ethereum, or the equivalent of $ 1,500. Their first sale was 3.5 Ethereum in August and is now worth about $ 14,000, and the encrypted poetry provided both the original Hebrew and the 1917 English translation of the Jewish Publishing Association. increase.
It’s a bit cheaper than $ 69 million, but there’s still a fair amount of money you can read online for free, including CryptoVerses’ own website. NFT poetry is encrypted on the blockchain and cannot be modified and purchased, but can be freely viewed and read on the CryptoVerses site. Cryptoverses even says that owning a Bible NFT is not even owning the poem itself, because the Bible is in the public domain. In a press release, they compared owning an NFT to owning a “medallion in which the buyer becomes the owner of the medallion, but not the poem written in it.”
This is not really uncommon in the NFT world. Beeple’s $ 69 million work is not only available for viewing, but also available for free download. It remains a mystery to me why someone paid millions of dollars. In fact, you can take screenshots, download them, and otherwise access almost any NFT for free, even if you don’t officially own it. Some people insist Easy access to NFT content increases the popularity and fame of your artwork, and increases the value of your artwork depending on who knows it. Perhaps that is true. Isn’t all value basically a social contract created? Hell, it’s basically our implicit social consensus about the green paper we carry in our wallets.
NFT supporters say They are the future of art collection It empowers artists and gives them more financial control and a new audience hungry for digital art. However, the CryptoVerses project highlights relevant questions given its very well-known and highly accessible content. What does it mean to own something that everyone can access for free?
Yonatan Bendahan, co-founder of Cryptoverses, likened the NFT to owning the first printed Bible. You don’t own the content, but you do own a groundbreaking version of it. A rare piece of Jewish ceremonies, “he said in an email.
Bendahan also emphasized the potential conservation aspects of the project. Due to the unique technology that blockchain uses to store data, once a dataset is populated, it cannot be modified. “Once the poem is encrypted, no one, even us, can delete or modify it,” he said. “Just as the printing press revolutionized the spread and protection of the Bible, so did the blockchain.”
On the other hand, when explaining the project to a friend who really understands the world of cryptography and blockchain, he pointed out that the nature of the public domain of the Bible means that anyone can create exactly the same thing, but cryptography. Always has the status of being the first action for that.
Of course, most NFTs can be copied by anyone, but they are designed to prove that ownership belongs to only one person. Perhaps even if prints and posters of the original artwork are widely available, it is comparable to owning the original artwork. (Of course, this is an incomplete metaphor if both the original and the printed matter are the same digital work, one oil on canvas and the other laser printed on cardstock.) But of Cryptoverses Since the source material for the project is in the public domain, we actually create and own our own original NFT that has at least the same content and formal ownership, even without the Cryptoverses brand or the cache granted. can do.
But perhaps that’s where the real value comes in. Ownership of some NFTs, such as the BoredApeYacht Club collection, comes with benefits such as invitations to luxury parties, and most of the entire NFT world is hype, bragging rights, and specific purchase access. Flashy. This is especially highlighted by blockchain technology, which creates public records of ownership. Anyone can see You are the owner of the hype by Beeple. Values are relative and pedigree has always been important in the art world. If anything, NFTs simply boil down complex mathematics to pure fame.
So it’s cool to say that you own part of the Bible in NFT format in a crowd, and that alone is worth thousands of dollars.
You can now buy the Bible in NFT format. But why do you want to?
