Colm O'Regan: The founder of Twitter sold his first tweet for a few million euro

From selling recordings of farts to Whatsapp messages and Youtube clips, having digital proof that you own a digital thing is the latest way to make money

NFTs are the bees knees now

By the time you read this, I might already be a millionaire. I’ll still continue to do the column, of course. It would be my duty to report back from the 1%, to see if it’s all it’s cracked up to be. I’ll tone it down, of course. I won’t be talking about the Treble Crunch Crisps or the Tesco Finest.

How do I plan to make the money? It’s not prize bonds. I’ve given up on them a long time ago, with their teasing, ’you have won zero hundred thousand, zero ten thousand, zero thousand, zero hundred, one 50euro’ prize cheques.

No, it’s NFT: Non-fungible tokens. ‘Fungible’ pronounced ‘funj’. An awful yoke of a word. I can’t imagine ‘funj’ being anything nice. It’s like ‘gunge’, but only found somewhere between your navel and your knees.

But NFTs are the bees knees now. I couldn’t even begin to explain properly, so I’ll do it badly. It’s digital proof that you are the sole owner of a digital thing. Once you are recognised as the sole owner of the digital thing, then, technically, you could sell that proof of ownership to someone else, if the value of it went up.

The proof of ownership of the thing is guaranteed to be unique by a technology called Blockchain. Blockchain is a ...HEY WHAT’S THAT OVER THERE? [runs out the door, gets into a car and drives off]

The digital thing could be anything. The founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, sold his first tweet for a few million euro. If I want to, I can still see the tweet on twitter.com, but apparently, only one person is the owner: The person who paid a few mill’ for it. 

But that’s not the only thing you can buy. There is digital artwork, Youtube clips, Whatsapp messages. One man is even selling audio recordings … of his farts. You read that right. If you want to be the sole, official owner of the sound of someone else’s farts, the 21st century has an app for that. And you won’t even be kink-shamed. So far, he’s only up to a hundred or so euro in the bidding. That doesn’t sound like getting much for shaking your money maker, but if it were me, I could scale that up. My prodigious lockdown cottage(cheese)-industry production had been going to waste up until now. I’ll start recording. I don’t know much about fart, but I know what I like.

All of this seems utterly bizarre but it’s just people betting on flies going up a wall. And then recording the event and selling that for money. And farts.

But, really, it’s about what we place value in. And the thing is, it mightn’t be too long before what we think is a really weird thing now is not given a moment’s thought. There must be some of you who once thought taking money out of a wall was the weirdest thing ever. And now, an ATM is no more unusual than a sink. In fact, you use a sink less, because of bottled water, which itself was weird once. Or bitcoin, another digital thing that your computer ‘mines’ by solving maths problems, which you can use as currency and which I regret, every day, not doing something about when they were cheaper than sausages.

Remember when your uncle said, “Hah, Facebook? Pff Twitter? That’s just telling someone what you had for breakfast.” Now, they’re hurling abuse at someone in Massachusetts, calling them a communist for wanting to ‘end the filibuster’.

It seems like nothing is off the table in this weird, speculative fiction world we live in now.

And, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve had some cabbage and it’s time to go back to the recording studio.