The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
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Hello! This week's episode is an old-fashioned internet mystery, except with a bit of an unusual twist. It's both a story about tracking down something extremely valuable that was stolen online, and it's also an attempt to understand why that thing, a digital image of a bored ape, would be so valuable in the first place. A story of a heist that is also asking, was the thing that was stolen itself a kind of scam? I really love this story. It ended up being a snapshot from atop the height of the NFT frenzy. It also happens to include one of the funniest interviews with an anonymous or pseudonymous source I've ever gotten to conduct. I hope you enjoy it. We'll play it after some brief ads. Surge Engine is brought to you by ShipStation. These days, it feels like every device we use is getting smarter and more connected. We have smartwatches. We have Wi-Fi-enabled LED light bulbs. The world keeps getting smarter. Your e-commerce business should, too.
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Should we have audio? Because that would be awesome.
It doesn't look that way.
This is a video recorded back in May of 2014. We're at a technology conference in Manhattan where, in a few moments, something surprisingly consequential is about to be born.
The idea that we wanted to share with you all, and I think it actually speaks for the idea in its entirety, so we'll play that just a little bit.
On stage, sitting behind matching MacBooks, we have a technologist and an artist. The artist's name is Kevin McCoy. He and his wife Jennifer make digitally native art, just art that's meant to live on the internet itself. And tonight, he's taking this gift that she made.
It's an animated gif of what looks to me like psychedelic chattering teeth.
He's got a few of these gifs. And he explains that what's actually special about them is not the art itself. It's where they've been put on the internet. The blockchain.
And so this is a document that exists right now on Namecoin, in the Namecoin blockchain.
To help everyone understand what it means to put the record of who owns a piece of art onto the blockchain, they're going to, right here in this room, sell another GIF they've made. The technologist, his name is Anil Dash, and the artist Kevin asks him, Hey, are you interested in some animated GIF art?
Am I ever?
I got a good... The absurdity of all this, it's making the room a bit giggly.
Yeah, name your price in any currency.
They land on a price, $4, and moments later, the deal is done.
Boom.
Sold.
Sweet.
So in just three or four hours... We have just transferred the digital title of this work to Mr. Anil Dash for four frickin' bucks. Oh, you gave me an extra one. Well, keep the tip.
This thing they've invented, they don't call it this in the room, but it will soon be named an NFT, a non-fungible token. That clumsy phrase non-fungible, it just refers to the idea that each piece of art has a unique value, unlike two Bitcoins, which will always be worth the same as one another. That moment we just watched, very recent history, 2014. But from there, the genie sprints out of the bottle. Three years later, Ethereum users are making giant NFT collections. You can buy a very valuable pixelated image of a face and then join a community with everyone else who owns slightly different versions of the same face. you all root for the price of the faces to go up together. There are crypto punks, there are crypto kiddies.
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