I have been seeing this hashtag going around a lot on Twitter lately, and an increasing number of artists are protecting themselves from it by locking/protecting their accounts.
https://twitter.com/DarekZabrocki/status/1369257814565265412
https://twitter.com/arvalis/status/1369230566843813891

I don't know much about it, but maybe someone could explain this better for me?
Apparently random people can now 'claim' a tweet and turn it into an exchangeable commodity (sellable using cryptocurrency)?
Essentially they can make money off of an artists' tweets and, in effect, their artworks.

I'm curious on what everyone's thoughts are about this. Is it something that we should be careful of?

From my very basic understanding of it, it seems like you got it right. People can basically turn tweets and the artwork posted in tweets into a "limited" commodity that can either be mined for or bought with crypto currency.

My thoughts on the whole NFT craze, to blunt, is it's stupid. Why should I or anyone mine or buy a "R@RE" somehow digitally signed version of digital art work when I can either just download it for free off the internet. Or, I can contact the original artist and just pay them for the probably higher resolution and better quality version of an image.

If I really wanted to go all out and have a truly "rare" one of a kind piece, I could also just commission an artist I like for an exclusive custom piece and ask for the image to be kept private. Something like that would feel more personal and special to me.

Someone "can" make money off of it, in theory, if someone was willing to pay for what is essentially metadata. NFTs have precisely zero legal implications. There's no legal framework applicable to them. I might as well print a copy of your artwork and tell you I own it now. Or run md5sum on it and charge $5 for a peek at the hash. Why would anyone take me up on it?

NFTs' only actual value is for speculation, and not even the popufurrest popufur that ever popufurred fetches high enough prices for any of those people to notice.

leotheairwolf said:
My thoughts on the whole NFT craze, to blunt, is it's stupid. Why should I or anyone mine or buy a "R@RE" somehow digitally signed version of digital art work when I can either just download it for free off the internet. Or, I can contact the original artist and just pay them for the probably higher resolution and better quality version of an image.

If I really wanted to go all out and have a truly "rare" one of a kind piece, I could also just commission an artist I like for an exclusive custom piece and ask for the image to be kept private. Something like that would feel more personal and special to me.

(Disclaimer, I'm anti-NFT, just wanted to set that tone going into my following statements.)
Yeah it's purely an "ownership" thing. It's being marketed as a way to retain/increase value even when a piece is publicly duplicated. The example I've seen thrown around is it's like how the original Mona Lisa retains its ownership and value when you can just look at photos of it elsewhere. So it's less about having view access to the image, and more about being able to potentially turn it back into more value than you paid sometime in the future.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Apparently random people can now 'claim' a tweet and turn it into an exchangeable commodity (sellable using cryptocurrency)?
Essentially they can make money off of an artists' tweets and, in effect, their artworks.

I'm still not sure why anyone would pay for this beyond the aforementioned speculative investing. It is essentially just taking a screencap or address and applying a value to it which is only relevant to other users of whichever tokenisation service they've done this through, and general users of the relevant cryptocurrency (usually Ethereum.)
I think most of these services have some form of takedown system but I wouldn't know what that would mean if copies of something have already been "minted" into NFTs.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Is it something that we should be careful of?

Nobody here's brought up the computational (therefore energy) costs involved with the crazy amount of cryptography involved with making this all tick, so here's one article for anyone interested in that:
https://memoakten.medium.com/the-unreasonable-ecological-cost-of-cryptoart-2221d3eb2053
And this is an interesting shuffler showing the energy costs behind specific artwork on one NFT marketplace.
Even if you don't care that much about carbon emissions, you should probably care about how high the resource cost is for what amounts to a digital ORIGINAL ARTWORK DONUT STEEL sign

Accounts are being privated because of this shit? What a disaster, lol.

They should be able to ignore or block with no ill effect.

lance_armstrong said:
Accounts are being privated because of this shit? What a disaster, lol.

They should be able to ignore or block with no ill effect.

You can block the current bot on twitter that does this, but the thing is they can always just make more bots to do this.