A critic of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has ripped off Ethereum and Solana NFTs and placed them on a new torrent site for anyone to download for free.
Geoffrey Huntley, a former computer gaming entrepreneur who now lives “a minimalist lifestyle in a van,” modeled The NFT Bay after popular torrent site The Pirate Bay.
On the site, users can download ripped versions of Crypto Punks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Crypto Puppies and other popular NFTs.
Mere hours after the site's launch, The NFT Bay received 1.2 million visitors.
While NFTs are supposed to authenticate digital ownership and uniqueness, Huntley says that people do not understand what they’re investing in. In Huntley's GitHub commit, he claims that an NFT is only a hyperlink to an image hosted on various web 2.0 platforms, and has little to do with the blockchain. He also implies NFTs have a negative impact on the natural environment.
“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?!”
The new torrent site echoes ongoing debate over the intrinsic value of NFTs, and the idea that you can simply “right click, then ‘save as'” one. Huntley acknowledges the value in digital ownership and says it has a place in the world, but that the current state of the industry is filled with “greed/scamming.”
He also shared an unfortunate email he got from a supporter, asking “coiners” if they believed they were “on the right side of history.”
“Fundamentally, I hope through http://thenftbay.org people learn to understand what people are buying when purchasing NFT art right now is nothing more then directions on how to access or download a image. The image is not stored on the blockchain and the majority of images I've seen are hosted on web2.0 storage which is likely to end up as 404 meaning the NFT has even less value.”
At the time of writing, the NFT Bay is still online and it's unclear if there will be any legality issues surrounding the site.
