Australian “steals” all NFTs – Is “The NFT Bay” performance art?

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have long since become commonplace, and alongside the video game industry, the art market is also rapidly moving towards blockchain and NFTs.

Was all the crypto art stolen? What happened?

However, Australian developer Geoffrey Huntley to prove just how uncertain all of this still is by downloading the images of all NFTs and uploading them to a website for public viewing.

With this action, he not only "stole" every existing NFT crypto artwork created on the basis of Ethereum and Solana , but also made it accessible to the public by uploading it to the website The NFT Bay – a direct homage to the now-closed piracy website The Pirate Bay .

A total of 17.96 terabytes of NFTs, also known as Non-Fungible Tokens, can now be found there.

Huntley's stated motive is performance art and education:

Basically, I hope that through The NFT Bay people will understand what they're getting when they buy NFT art. Right now, it's nothing more than instructions on how to access or download an image. Currently, there's a gap in understanding between buyers and sellers, who are used to exploiting people

However, it must be mentioned here that this is not about the NFTs themselves . The ownership rights of the uploaded images, the receipt so to speak, and the image stored on the blockchain, the possession of which is associated with sometimes absurd sums of money, cannot be found on The NFT Bay.

These are simply digital copies of the images, which anyone can download elsewhere with a mouse click.

Huntley nevertheless wants to make a clear statement and hopes that the collection of NFTs he has uploaded will be viewed and reflected upon by people all over the world in order to engage more with the "tulip mania of this generation" (also called tulip mania, tulip frenzy, tulip bubble, tulip fever or tulip hysteria – referring to a period in the Dutch Golden Agewhen tulip bulbs became a speculative commodity, with prices soaring to dizzying heights before plummeting again).

Further information and background on Huntley's Performance Art Coup can be found on his own FAQ page.

An important piece of performance art at the right time?

In what is perhaps one of the best performance art pieces of the year, Australian Geoffrey Huntley has The NFT Bay , a website that boldly promises that you can pull all NFTs from the blockchain with just a few clicks.

As a replica of a torrent site, it appears to do exactly what it promises. While ownership rights are not included in the download, this action can serve as a statement, sparking an interesting discussion about what it might mean when we claim (or wish to claim) ownership of virtual, publicly accessible, and available things on the internet.

Pretty much every link on the website eventually leads you to the description page. There you'll find an actual download link. Clicking it will give you the torrent, which allows you to download a file called "preview.jpg" containing a series of Bored Ape images, as well as ZIP files that supposedly contain all the NFTs from the Ethereum and Solana blockchains.

All in all, the download is almost 20 TB. That's a lot of image files, and if you're like me, your laptop probably doesn't have enough SSD storage for that 😉

Key arguments in the discussion are revealed in the responses to Huntley's announcement tweet. NFT opponents are calling it a triumph, proving that NFTs have no intrinsic value. On the other side, die-hard crypto fans to demonstrate how unaffected they are by this action, responding en masse that it is the proof of ownership, not the image itself, that gives NFTs their value. And, according to their argument, this proof of ownership cannot be stolen.

Which brings us right to the heart of the discussion? And isn't the point of good art to spark precisely these kinds of controversies and debates?

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

At the same time, he wryly exposes the absurdity of the whole thing to the ardent NFT proponents and the frenetic market surrounding it by taking them at their word and mocking the concept. "They want to claim ownership of something on the internet," he asks provocatively. "On the internet, that means someone is piracy."

Those who want to learn more and follow the discussions should visit Geoffrey Huntley's FAQ section and subscribe to The NFT Bay's Twitter channel.