Lately, NFTs have been the subject of countless spit-take headlines, part of a craze that began in December, when the cryptoartist Beeple sold a group of works for more than $3.5 million. By the spring, a dizzying array of digital files — video clips of LeBron James dunking, Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, the “disaster girl” meme — were being minted into NFTs and auctioned off for hundreds, thousands or even millions of dollars. The New York Times itself has participated in the craze: Its technology reporter Kevin Roose created an NFT out of one his columns and auctioned it for a sum worth, on the day of its sale, about $560,000, with the proceeds going to charity. No one quite agrees on what this gold rush means. If you ask hard-core champions of Bitcoin — the often-libertarian “crypto natives,” as they call themselves — NFTs presage the future of digital property. They’re a glimpse at a coming day when people spend their income on digital items they can trade, resell or hoard as an investment; when government will lose its unique power to mint currency and protect property, because people will instead trust the implacable math of blockchain networks. But there are abundant risks and downsides in this NFT vision, most notably environmental costs. The network Ether runs on requires vast amounts of energy, roughly the same amount per year as Hungary, by one estimate. NFT skeptics also regard the scene as yet more crypto zealotry meant primarily just to keep people talking about cryptocurrencies so that Ether and Bitcoin prices stay high. It looks to them like more empty speculation, the next phase in the decades-long financialization of everything.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/magazine/nft-art-crypto.html