The NFT auction for Jack Dorsey’s first tweet isn’t going so well

Just a heads up, if you buy something through our links, we may get a small share of the sale. It’s one of the ways we keep the lights on here. Click here for more.

What is an NFT? That question will not be answered here. If you don’t know what an NFT is, just know that it has a lot of questionable apes and luxury brands attempting relevancy and high-priced scams.

NFTs are a plaything of the rich, another way for those with means to fleece those without. The ongoing value of a single NFT is subjective and based on a constantly fluctuating market, as well as buyer gullibility.

All of this brings us to this auction at OpenSea, an NFT marketplace. Last year, an NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet (which you can take a screenshot of yourself here) sold for $2.9 million.

READ MORE: Is the NFT market crashing and burning?

Today, the auction to sell that tweet currently sits around $10k, a fraction of the original price. The owner was hoping for $50 million but instead might get enough to buy a certified pre-owned Buick. Naturally, the value of a used NFT is just as volatile as the market itself.

Someone out there is making money on NFTs, but it ain’t us. While there are some NFTs that are accessible to the public in a financial sense (consider the NBA’s Top Shot NFT collections), most are not. Considering NFTs are non-tangible digital assets, their existence is questionable to begin with.

Like cryptocurrencies, each NFT purchase is a simple investment in a theoretical currency. Value isn’t simply driven by market sentiment, but rather pump and dump schemes of high rollers.

READ MORE: Jack Dorsey is officially done with Twitter

Sure, some normies make money off the process sometimes, but that’s more about being at the right place at the right time.

To further obfuscate the perceptual reality of this marketplace, what is a tweet?

just setting up my twttr

— jack (@jack) March 21, 2006

Can a tweet, even in digital form on the blockchain, be owned? Naturally, that concept is being questioned. A tweet is an ephemeral thing by nature, it can be deleted.

But once it’s on the blockchain, can it be deleted? How does that even work? Does it exist in two places at once? The strangeness of this line of questioning only serves to disconnect the NFT marketplace from the real world.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter because people love to spend money in a capitalist world. NFTs present an opportunity to own literally nothing, but say you own something because you paid a heavy price for a digital version of it.

Someday you might be able to hold your NFTs in your hand in the metaverse. Is that then tangible value? Or is it just another deception created to squeeze our hard-earned cryptocurrency from our cold-storage crypto ledgers?

There are plenty more tweets for sale on OpenSea, varying in price from a few bucks to thousands. While they aren’t all from billionaire tech bros, some are mildly profound. Like room-temp salsa at a burrito chain restaurant.

There might be some spice, but it’s mostly just water and tomatoes. Bland and just a hint of something real.

The auction for Jack Dorsey’s first tweet ends today

It doesn’t matter if the tweet is real in any sense. It doesn’t matter if the tweet gets deleted. What matters is that the market has spoken. It has said that this picture of a thing embedded on the blockchain is not worth nearly $3 million. It is worth a whole lot less.

Sure, the bidding might increase as the day closes and this whole exercise could be for naught. Either way, we’ll see the news flash by on Twitter.

Perhaps if Jack tweets the results of the auction, that tweet too could be minted into an NFT, sold for a ridiculous amount, and then forgotten about as its perceived value plummets.

If you really want to own a tweet, this place will frame them for you. That’s a hell of a lot more tangible than an NFT.

Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

Editors’ Recommendations:

• Elon Musk just said he wants to buy 100% of Twitter
• Spotify could be entering the NFT world
• Scammers are stealing checks from mailboxes and turning them into bitcoin
• Tech companies don’t care if you hate NFTs

Just a heads up, if you buy something through our links, we may get a small share of the sale. It’s one of the ways we keep the lights on here. Click here for more.