Rokas Tenys
- Geoffrey Huntley right-clicked and downloaded every non-fungible token.
- He made a nearly 20-terabyte index of all NFTs public on a site similar to The Pirate Bay Thursday.
- He said NFTs are "nothing more than directions on how to access or download a image."
Geoffrey Huntley has the ultimate right-clicker mentality.
In a project titled, "The Billion Dollar Torrent," the Australian software and DevOps engineer right-clicked and downloaded every non-fungible token on the solana and ethereum blockchains. The nearly 20-terabyte index appeared on The NFT Bay, a concept derived from the well-known torrent site The Pirate Bay, on Thursday.
"Omg who right-clicked all the NFTs?" He wrote on Twitter, linking to the torrent.
Huntley said it's an "educational art project" intended to teach people what they're actually buying when they purchase an NFT, which he thinks is "nothing more than directions on how to access or download a image."
By popular definition, the digital assets are artworks tied to the blockchain. This year, the market for NFTs has exploded to more than $10 billion in the third quarter alone. NFT skeptics, however, are becoming known for their right-clicker mentality, meaning they don't believe there's value in the assets as anyone can right click and download the image for free, Vice described.
"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," Huntley wrote in a frequently asked questions page on GitHub.
According to his website, Huntley works remotely from a van that he outfitted as an office and travels around Australia, documenting the "intersection of remote work, camping & #vanlife."
Huntley said the torrent contains every NFT, from Bored Apes Yacht Club, to CryptoPunks, and Axie Infinity, "so that future generations can study this generation's tulip mania and collectively go, 'WTF? We destroyed our planet for THIS?!'"
His exclamation is a response to blockchain technology's environmental impact that results from the massive amount of electricity it requires. Bitcoin mining alone uses seven times the amount of electricity Google does per year.
While some, like Huntley, have been skeptical of NFTs, others have touted their use cases in the up-and-coming Web3, better known as the metaverse, a term that went mainstream after the company formerly known as Facebook rebranded to Meta Platforms.
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