With the NFT craze rising, more and more people are creating their own non-fungible tokens and investing in them. The idea behind NFTs is that someone can purchase a piece of digital art, which includes anything from a portrait to a comic character to the World Wide Web’s source code, using the same blockchain technology that powers the cryptocurrency world. This allows the artist to get paid for their work and the buyer can claim proof that they own the piece of art. There’s one problem though. The NFT is just an electronic file and there’s no stopping anyone from right-clicking and downloading a copy of it.
But right-clicking on every NFT file for download can be a tiring process. So an Australian artist, Geoffrey Huntley, has launched a website that allows users to torrent an entire blockchain’s worth of NFTs. It’s called, appropriately, the NFT Bay, which is an exact mirror image of The Pirate Bay. Many believe Huntley’s site could start an interesting debate on what it means to claim ownership over something on the Internet.
“People are dropping millions of instructions on how to download images,” says the description on the NFT Bay page. “That’s why you can right-click save-as because they are standard images. The image is not stored in the blockchain. The image is not stored in the blockchain contract. As web 2.0 web hosts are known to go offline, this handy torrent contains all of the NFTs so that future generations can study this generation’s tulip mania and collectively go ‘WTF? We destroyed our planet for this,” it adds.
The NFT Bay’s major section has a number of individual non-fungible tokens. It has around 18 TB of NFTs from a database on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains, that is, to put it mildly, a lot of images. All these images can be downloaded via the visitor’s torrent client of choice.
