This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. Thanks for tuning in today. This is Chris Guillebeau. Today, we're gonna talk about, you know, those crazy things people have been buying for large amounts of money online, digital images that are non-fungible.
That essentially means that they are unique, they can be transferred, but there's only one owner at a time. You can't just duplicate them over and over. Of course, I'm referring to NFTs, non-fungible tokens. Now this is a topic some of us are still getting our heads around. If you think it's kind of silly, if you don't understand it, either way or both, you are definitely not alone.
But many others, of course, find it really interesting and fascinating. There's a lot of money around it. There's a lot of controversy and conversation in the art world around it. So today's caller wants to know, can you really just right click and save someone else's NFT to your computer? You know, that same thing that they paid tens of thousands of dollars for, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases, or if they're Justin Bieber, who recently spent $1.3 million on a non-fungible ape.
True story. Can you just save that to your computer and sell it yourself? How about that? I love this kind of thinking. Can you just right click, save somebody else's NFT, and go and sell it yourself?
Why not? It's a crazy world out there, right? Well, perhaps not actually. So let's talk about it in my answer, detailed question, and that answer coming right up. [Music]
Hey, Chris, this is Jamie from Tampa, and I've been listening to the show for a couple years.
Everyone knows that NFTs are just digital art, and there's no way to make them truly exclusive. I mean, anyone can right click and save an image to their computer, yet so many of them are selling for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. So what's different about the version that people are buying and the one that you or I could save to our computer? Why is there so much interest around them? And also, is it possible for anyone else to sell the NFTs?
I'm thinking it can't be that easy, but I don't know what's stopping them. Thanks in advance for helping me understand this. [Music]
Hey, Jamie, this is a great question. It's something that is confusing to a lot of people. It's also something that is continuing to evolve.
Well, of course, it's continuing to evolve because it's very new. NFTs have been around for, I don't know, I think less than two years at this point, at least in the way that they are kind of mainstream now. So what is actually different, you know, from what you could save to your computer and what this supposed non-fungible original version is? Because it's correct that in a lot of cases, you can simply right click the image and save it to your computer. And then you have the same image.
You've got this awesome, amazing asset that's sold for a lot of money. You can carry it around with you, you can put it on your phone. You might have to screenshot it instead of saving directly. There are some NFT marketplaces that are trying to make these things more difficult, but really in the end, it's not that hard to copy any online image to your computer or phone. So you can do that.
But what do you end up with? And that is the million dollar question right there, sometimes literally. What do you end up with when you save a copy of the digital art? What people would say who are proponents of NFTs, they would say you could get a print of a Monet or a Picasso for $15, when you hang it up on your wall, but nobody's gonna think it's the real thing. They know it is a copy.
And basically that's the analogy they're gonna make because an NFT exists on a blockchain, meaning that there is a record of it. And there is proof of ownership. There could be only one owner of that record. It can change hands. There can be this transaction of buying and selling.
Multiple people can own it over time, but there's only one owner at any given time. And so that's the difference between something that you save and something that is the so-called asset. And whether you believe in NFTs as an asset, it really depends a lot on your perception, which is the case for all of art, right? I mean, how is it different from any other art form in that way? And you could also say all of money, all of money depends, the value of money depends on perception.
And that's also something that's been rapidly shifting in lots of different ways over the past couple of years. So that's a broader question. But as for the part about, can you sell the copy that you have downloaded? That's clearer. The answer there is clear.
The answer is no, unfortunately, at least not legally. I mean, people sell things that aren't theirs all the time, but in this case, not legally because it's somebody else's intellectual property. So sadly, Jamie and anybody else out there cannot resell Justin Bieber's $1.3 million digital ape, even for the low price of $1 million, even half a million dollars. You know, I would right click an image and I would give it away for just half a million dollars, even though Justin Bieber paid so much more. But unfortunately, I can't do that, at least not without violating his intellectual property rights.
So there we have it. It's a whole new world, of course. We'll continue to explore it together. If you've got a question, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Let me know what you're working on.
Let me know what you're wondering about. I look forward to all that is to come. That's all for now. My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
