2021年经济学人 NFT引爆币圈,难道是下一个风口?(1)（在线收听）

Non-fungible tokens

非同质代币

What's wrong with this picture?

这幅图咋了？

Non-fungible tokens are useful, innovative—and frothy

非同质代币是有用的、创新的——但也是泡沫

"Equivalent VIII" by Carl Andre was a minimalist sculpture bought by Britain's Tate Gallery in 1972. The Tate described the work as "a rectangular arrangement of 120 firebricks...altering the viewer's relationship to the surrounding space". The public called it a pile of bricks. A few years later newspapers execrated the gallery for having wasted brick-shaped wads of cash on the avant-garde work.

卡尔·安德烈的《平衡8号》是一件极简主义雕塑，于1972年被英国泰特美术馆买下。泰特美术馆将这幅作品描述为“一个由120块防火砖组成的矩形结构……改变了观者与周围空间的关系”。公众则称其为“一堆砖头”。几年后，报纸谴责美术馆在这种前卫的作品上浪费了大量的砖形钞票。

Once again, a famous institution is embracing a controversial new genre. On March 11th Christie's sold a digital collage of images called "Everydays—The First 5,000 Days" for a cool $69.3m. The sale elevated the work's creator, Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, to the august company of David Hockney and Jeff Koons, the only two living painters to sell at such prices.

再一次，一个著名的机构拥抱了一个颇具争议的新流派。3月11日，佳士得以6930万美元的高价出售了一幅名为“每天——最初的5000天”的数字拼贴画。这次拍卖将这幅作品的创作者迈克·温克尔曼(又名Beeple)提升到了与大卫·霍克尼、杰夫·昆斯齐平的威严等级，他们是在世画家中仅有的两位以如此高的价格卖出作品的画家。

Christie's sold the artwork as a "non-fungible token" (NFT), a craze for which has gripped Silicon Valley's elite. An NFT is a secure, blockchain-based record that represents pieces of digital media. Invented a few years ago, it can link not only to digital art but also to text, videos or bits of code.

佳士得将这幅艺术品作为“非同质代币”出售，令狂热的硅谷精英们魂牵梦绕。NFT(非同质代币)是一种安全的代表数字媒体片段的基于区块链的收藏。它于几年前出世，不仅可以连接数字艺术，还可以连接文本、视频或者少量代码。

The pile-of-bricks criticism of digital artworks is that, in contrast to physical collectibles, they can be copied with perfect fidelity and consumed infinitely online. They thus have limited inherent value. A token brings bragging rights to a unique, authenticated version of a digital artwork, song or cute image of a cat (which first earned NFTS their popularity). Another attraction for the creative world is that NFTS make it easy to build in payments to artists when their works are sold on.

人们对数字艺术的批评比比皆是。他们认为，数字艺术和实物收藏品不同，它们可以被完美复制并被网民无限消费。因此它们的内在价值有限。一个代币可以给一个独特的、经过验证的数字艺术作品、歌曲或可爱的猫咪图片(带动NFTS流行起来)带来炫耀的权利。创意界的另外一个吸引力是，NFTS使得艺术家在其作品被出售时可以很容易拿到报酬。

Since almost anything can be tokenised and sold if punters are willing, the craze stretches beyond pictures. Kings of Leon, a rock band, is selling a new album as an NFT and the National Basketball Association is selling clips of famous dunks. Creators can turn to a growing collection of marketplaces, such as OpenSea and Nifty Gateway. Even individual tweets are going for big sums (leading some to wonder if the former tweeter-in-chief, Donald Trump, could flog bits of his oeuvre).

因为只要赌客愿意，几乎任何东西都可以被代币化并进行出售，所以这股狂热便延伸到了图片之外的领域。摇滚乐队“莱昂国王”正将其新专辑以NFT的形式出售，而美国国家篮球协会也在出售其著名的扣篮片段。创作者们可以诉诸更多的市场，如OpenSea和Nifty Gateway。就连一条推文也能赚大钱(这让一些人怀疑前推文总司令唐纳德·特朗普是否能将其毕生之作的一小部分进行出售)。