Work Text:
Futaba’s phone buzzed with what she subconsciously assumed was a text, until the buzz persisted for too long. Then it silenced, then buzzed again.
Before the realization that someone was trying to call her (on a cellphone??) sank in and filled her with unspeakable dread, she threw the phone across the room into a pile of dirty laundry. It bounced once on the soft plush of fabric and made a gentle thunk against the wall on the other side.
That settled, she continued to play video games.
“Why are you asking me this?” Akira said, equal parts wary and confused.
“Futaba wouldn’t answer her phone,” Yusuke responded. “I was hoping to seek her technological expertise on the matter. Failing that, I seek your help.”
“Right.” Akira scratched under the bridge of his glasses. “I was going to call the team together for a meeting at Leblanc’s this afternoon, anyway. Just ask her then.”
“Time is of the essence!” Yusuke insisted. His voice was clipping out from his proximity to the mouthpiece of his phone. “I have heard that this market is exceedingly volatile. What if it crashes within the next few hours?”
Akira pinched his brow as tightly as if holding onto the last thread of his patience. “Then you’ll have dodged a bullet,” he said. “Listen, I’ll see you after school. Don’t you need to eat lunch during your lunch break?”
“Well, you see,” began Yusuke haltingly, “I have had to make some purchases of art software as well as a drawing tablet, since this process applies primarily to digital art creation—”
“Right, I’ll tell Boss to make extra curry. See you, Yusuke.”
Yusuke’s sigh of relief flooded the speaker with peaking crackles. “Thank you.”
Yusuke was usually early to the Phantom Thieves’ hideout, owing to the fact that he knew the earlier he got there, the more snacks he would get to eat while he waited. Futaba was usually just as early, owing to the fact that she was only a short block away from the café, if she were not already there loitering around Sojiro in the kitchen. Today, however, she was late, and it was the Shujin Academy crew who arrived before her, in their usual bits and pieces.
Akira was always late to his own meeting. He and Morgana had their own errands to run between school and home, coming back with paper and plastic bags full of unusual pharmaceuticals, replica weapons, and reinforced clothing. Makoto generally had student council duties or other extracurricular items to attend to prior to leaving school, and if Haru did not have family business matters, she always had her rooftop garden. As such, Ryuji and Ann were the first to find Yusuke packing away curry with one hand while his eyes were glued to the phone in his other.
“Whatcha readin’?” Ryuji asked, dropping into the booth across from him. “New tips from the website?”
Yusuke shook his head and swallowed his curry with great effort. “I’m reviewing an application to register for NFT art trades as an artist,” he said with proud dignity.
Ann plastered on a supportive smile and opened her mouth to congratulate him at the same time that Ryuji said outright, “What the fuck does any of that mean?”
“It’s very simple,” lied Yusuke, to seem cool and sophisticated. “In the world of digital art, mass production prevents anyone from having true ownership of a piece of art, in the same way that one could own an original piece of art painted by the artist, rather than…” Yusuke glanced at the portrait of the gentle woman at the entrance of the café. “A replica, or a forgery.”
“Uh-huuh,” Ann said, and Ryuji nodded.
“To combat that, there is a way of producing a virtual certificate of authenticity unique to a piece of digital art, verified by the artist’s signature,” Yusuke said. “These certificates can then be auctioned to bidders to bestow ’ownership’.”
Ann nodded more slowly, eyes wandering as she processed the information he had laid out. Ryuji, on the other hand, stared straight at Yusuke with one eye narrowed. “The hell’s the point of a certificate of ownership?” he asked.
“It carries posterity and status of owning an original painting,” Yusuke explained, his hands lifting in gentle, elegant gesture, “but updated for the digital era.”
He held that pose for another moment while Ann continued to process the information unsuccessfully and Ryuji continued to stare at him with tacit incomprehension.
“Also, artists are making hundreds of dollars per sale,” Yusuke added quietly.
“Ohhhh,” said Ann and Ryuji together.
“You haven’t mentioned the part where it’s all done with Bitcoin.”
As the jingle from the swinging café door dampened, Akira planted his backpack on the table to announce his arrival to the meeting. Morgana slunk out with a luxurious stretch, padding directly across the sauce-laden plate so that he could lick the curry off of his beans. Yusuke stared in offense first at Morgana himself, then at the pawprints of emptiness lining his dish.
Ryuji interrupted his gaze by slamming his hands down on either side of the plate hard enough to rattle everything on the table, including Morgana himself. “Bitcoin?!” he repeated. “Aw, hell yeah, you’re making Bitcoins from this? That’s why it’s so much money!”
“Wait, what?” Ann interrupted. “What’s—okay, I kinda know what Bitcoin is, and I know it’s really complicated, so, like, don’t tell me what Bitcoin is. But… what?”
“It isn’t Bitcoin,” Yusuke said confidently. “Most of the art sales are done using Ethereum, which I understand is a more secure system, with a more aesthetically appealing name.”
“Bitcoin, Ethereum,” Ryuji said with a flippant wave of his hand, “whatever. They’re all crypto, right?”
“Crypto?” Ann repeated.
“Cryptocurrency,” Akira explained, dragging a stool from the bar to sit at the edge of the booth. “Bitcoin and Ethereum are both digital currencies. They all have their own different algorithm for how they’re generated and their own markets for how much they’re worth. There’s tons of different cryptocurrencies out there, those are just the most popular ones.” He gave a thoughtful glance upward and then shrugged. “At least, they’re the only ones I know of, so I’m guessing they’re the most popular ones.”
“There’s Dogecoin,” Ryuji chimed in.
“Ew,” said Morgana with a flick of his tail.
“Crypto is huge, though, right?” Ryuji persisted, his grin giddy. “Like, it totally blew up a few years ago, and people are making millions of dollars from tiny investments! And our boy Yusuke’s gonna get a piece of that?”
Yusuke gave a low, dignified chuckle. “I wouldn’t want to be consumed by something as distracting as investing in cryptocurrency myself,” he said. “I’m only interested in selling my artwork.”
Ryuji’s grin shrank slowly as his confusion grew. “But for Bitcoin,” he said. “Uh, I mean, Ethereum. Right?”
“That’s the thing I wasn’t clear on,” Akira said, turning to Yusuke with folded arms. “What exactly is the process?”
With a smug smile, Yusuke laid his phone on the table, the fine print of a contract running across its white screen. “It’s all very simple,” he lied yet again, preparing a series of buzzwords to make himself sound more educated than he actually was. “My art will become the unit of cryptocurrency. I will pay a small fee to have the image file and its associated metadata tokenized and registered on the Ethereum blockchain. This fee pays for the mining of the coin.”
In the midst of his explanation, Haru politely said her greetings to the café and to Sojiro behind the counter. She did not speak loudly enough, however, to block out the words that waved frantic red flags from her training as a future executive. “Oh dear,” she murmured, and slid into the booth behind Ryuji and Ann to hear more.
“After this registration process, I can then list the coin for sale to connoisseurs of art who follow the latest trends and wish to own the authentic coin that certifies them as the owner of the piece,” Yusuke continued. “This coin is induplicable. It has an inherent worth greater than that of an ordinary Bitcoin, because it contains the certificate of ownership—and embedded within, the content—of my original art.”
“So it’s like… printing money with your own face on it!” Ann said, with a self-satisfied smile for keeping up with the conversation. “But it still works like real money, too, right?”
Yusuke drew in an indignant, moritifed gasp. “Would you cut down Michaelangelo’s David to use the marble for countertops?!” he scoffed. “Its value is in what it signifies, not its material worth!”
“So, yes,” Ryuji muttered to Ann as Yusuke pumped more florid language into his ongoing tirade.
“Um, Yusuke-kun, I’m sorry to interrupt,” Haru piped up gently, raising one hand as if hoping to be called on. “I’m not sure I’ve heard everything that’s going on, so maybe I’m just not understanding things, but there’s something you said that worries me very much, if I could say something?”
Yusuke lowered his arms from where they had soared to great heights in his gesticulations and nodded at her with curious eyes.
“Well, it’s just that you said there’s some kind of entry fee for this, um…” She screwed up her eyebrows with a frown and seemed to settle on, “program.”
“Not to worry,” Yusuke said, eyes closed in that hopelessly self-assured look of his. “I have set aside half of my art school stipend for making those downpayments. In so doing, I have had to halve my meal plan budget from two meals a day to just one, however—”
“Um, I wasn’t really worried about where you were going to get the money, actually,” Haru said, “but now I am, but, um. The point is, whenever you have to pay money upfront in order to gain profit down the road, you should really be sure you’re not being tricked by a scam or a pyramid scheme.”
Yusuke’s face fell in shock. Around him, his friends had various nonverbal reactions, ranging from Ann’s wary-but-sympathetic little pout to Ryuji’s disappointed groan, to Morgana’s cheeky sneer.
“But so many artists are participating,” Yusuke protested.
“Yes, but, um, that’s kind of how pyramid schemes… work.” Haru shifted in her seat, looking uncomfortable for bringing an umbrella to a rainy parade. “The more people that participate, the more money gets made by the people at the top of the pyramid. The schemes rely on spreading by word of mouth to bring more people in and continue to fund the scam, but eventually, there won’t be any people left to join in. Even if some people are making money, it’s very possible you won’t make any at all, and you might actually lose money instead.” Her careful, pitying expression pulled into something forceful as she clenched a delicate fist against her chest. “And even if you make money, it would be at the detriment of whomever joins the scheme following you. It isn’t ethical.”
With a familiar laugh near to a snort, Futaba popped up from the booth behind Yusuke, lazily chewing on the straw of a soft drink. “Right answer, wrong proof,” she interjected in a grating voice that emulated a buzzer.
Yusuke gave a start when she appeared. “Where have you been?” he demanded, clutching his heart. “I called you for advice on this earlier today, and you’re several minutes late to—”
“Oooooh, that’s what that call was,” Futaba realized, flicking her eyes back and forth like a pendulum as she sorted through the memories. “Yeah, phone calls freak me out, so I didn’t look at my notifications all day. I just came here to get some grub, and then boom! You guys are all here.” She glanced around. “Except Makoto. So I’m not even late.”
“Senpai texted ahead of time that she was running late,” Akira said blandly.
“And you live here,” Ryuji pointed out.
“What? Huh? Sorry, couldn’t hear you over the sound of you all being digital dummies about crypto.” She knocked against Yusuke’s head with her drink cup.
While Yusuke rubbed his scalp with one hand and swatted at Futaba with the other, Ryuji leaned forward with renewed excitement. “Oh, hell yeah, you gotta know, like, tons about crypto shit, right?” he said. “So cryptoart, is it legit?”
“Oh, it’s legit[1],” Futaba replied, twisting Yusuke’s arms up with both of hers hugged against her chest. “You’ll make money, sure, but—at what cost?”
Yusuke’s struggling arms went slack. “At what cost?” he asked warily.
“The entry fee?” Ann guessed.
“The entry fee,” said Futaba, “and also… your soul?!”
She wiggled her fingers with ominous spookiness directly onto the back of Yusuke’s neck. His shoulders shot up with his heebie jeebies, and he started throwing hands with her anew.
“Wait, seriously,” Ann said, reaching across the table to pull their arms apart. “Futaba-chan, what are you talking about? What’s so bad about cryptoart?”
“How much time you got?” Futaba asked, then slurped loudly on her drink.
Akira scrolled through his list of Mementos targets and decided they would have to wait.
“Basically, to get to the heart of why cryptoart stinks major doo-doo,” Futaba began, now lounging fully along the narrow cushion separating the two booths, “I have to explain to you how cryptocurrency works.”
Ann deflated with a long “nooooo” into the tabletop.
“Re-lax, I’ll dumb it down for ya,” Futaba drawled, kicking her legs up. “To start off, let’s talk about what a Bitcoin actually is, at its root. It’s just some special code that’s registered in a database that says, yep, that there’s a Bitcoin, and it belongs to some guy. That’s all stored in the Bitcoin code.”
“So if I copied down someone’s Bitcoin code,” Ryuji said, “could I steal it if I tried to… I dunno, type it in someplace?”
“Nah, because that’s part of the Bitcoin’s code,” Futaba said with a wag of her finger. “It says in the code, ‘Hey, I belong to Bob!’ And if Bob wants to sell his Bitcoin to someone else, then the Bitcoin gets reregistered over the old code to say ‘Hey, I used to belong to Bob, but now I belong to Jeffrey!’ So if Ryuji tries to enter in someone else’s code to pay for something, it’ll get invalidated, because Ryuji’s name isn’t on it.”
Ryuji nodded in awe. “That’s so cool,” he said. “It’s, like, theft-proof money. Right?”
“I mean, nothing is theft-proof when part of the security sits with a human,” Futaba said, rolling her eyes like this was obvious, “but, yeah, the idea was having that extra layer of authenticity and security. Plus, the info’s baked into the Bitcoin with encryption, so no one can just read who had the Bitcoin and where it’s been by looking at the code.”
“And that’s why its popularity started on the Dark Web,” Makoto said, darkly. With a quick inhale, she composed herself and put on a polite smile. “Sorry I’m late, everyone. We can get started now.”
“Nope,” said Akira, thumbing his phone’s feed.
Makoto took several blinks to register that simple word. “N,” she started, “nope?”
“Bitcoin time now,” he said with a shrug, as if he were helpless to stop the course of the conversation and not literally the leader of their group.
In a slow, staggered collapse, she resigned herself to sitting on the bench beside Haru, receiving a whispered play-by-play of the events she had missed up until this point in the conversation.
“So how do you get your own Bitcoin code?” Ryuji asked. “Where do they come from?”
“That’s the mining process,” Futaba said, pointing a lazy finger gun his way. “This part, I’m really gonna dumb down, because it’s complicated on purpose. Basically, every so often, the Bitcoin bank mints a new valid Bitcoin code, and they decide to give it to whosoever can solve their little puzzle.”
“Puzzle?” repeated Ann, cocking her head.
“Yup! That’s the key to almost all cryptocurrency.” Futaba rolled off of the partition just so that she could lean over it with her fingers steepled ominously. “Solving that puzzle, that’s called a proof of work. It shows that a computer put in the time and effort to earn itself a little-wittle Bitcoin like a gold star!”
“How did you do that with your voice,” Akira said.
Ignoring him, Futaba continued, “Crypto miners have processes running on their computers and servers dedicated to solving those puzzles and producing those PoW’s in exchange for Bitcoins, or whatever unit of cryptocurrency they’re mining on. It used to be something you could just run as a background process of your laptop using excess RAM.”
“Used to be?” Makoto narrowed her eyes.
“Oh-ho-ho-ho, yes,” Futaba cackled. “It’s about to get wild. Remember how Mr. Big Bitcoin at the Bitcoin Bank is the one coming up with the codes for the new Bitcoins and issuing them out?” Not waiting to see if anyone indeed remembered, she barreled on: “Well, when all these new people started hearing about Bitcoin, and how you could just run a little program on your laptop to hop down into the Bitcoin mines, suddenly you have waaaay more computers churning out all these PoW’s than before!”
“So the value of the Bitcoin gets degraded by inflation,” Haru guessed. “If additional Bitcoin units are introduced rapidly to the existing circulation, then the rate of inflation would bring the value of each individual Bitcoin down to worthlessness before long.”
“But Mr. Big Bitcoin thought that far ahead, too, Haru-chan!” Futaba said. “So instead of letting all these new miners come in and dig up infinite Bitcoins, he says, ‘Nah, nah, nah.’” Futaba put a finger under her nose like a mustache and assumed the gruff voice of Mr. Big Bitcoin. “‘If we’re gonna keep letting everybody mine Bitcoins, then they gotta do harder puzzles! We’ll increase the complexity of the PoW’s in scale with the number of miners there are, so that we’re only creating a fixed number of new Bitcoins no matter what.’ And so no matter how many processers are mining, Mr. Bitcoin has it fixed so he’s only gonna release one Bitcoin every ten minutes or so.”
Makoto and Haru both started chorusing some quiet “Oh”s towards the end of her explanation, but the rest of the crew was still in the dark. “I don’t get it,” Ryuji said, glancing over his shoulder at the seniors. “What happened?”
“Ryuji-kun,” Makoto began with her infinite but transparent patience, “there are probably millions of Bitcoin miners out there, all competing for one coin every ten minutes. To compare, can you think of anything in the world that takes your own PC as many as ten minutes to figure out?”
“Loading the Sims!” Ann blurted. “Like, all the modules that go across? Stabilizing moods… Loading chaos generator… Remember?”
Makoto closed her eyes firmly for a long second to draw up more of that infinite patience. “Okay,” she said, “now, um, let’s imagine you had a really good computer. A super-advanced, top of the line gaming PC. How long do you think it would take the Sims to load on that?”
“Probably, like, ten seconds,” Ann replied.
“And does your computer get really hot when it opens the Sims, or something else really intensive?” Makoto continued.
“Oh, yeah,” Ann said, looking down at her lap. “One time I burned my thighs because I fell asleep with a YouTube playlist on.”
“Okay, imagine one computer outputting the same amount of heat energy every ten seconds that yours does in ten minutes,” Makoto said, “continuously, without turning off, for years.” She leaned forward with her student-council-president intensity. “Now imagine a million.”
“Just get an air conditioner,” Morgana yawned.
Makoto gripped the cushion of the booth seat with all of the strength she was refraining from using to strangle a cat.
“It’s not just the heat. Think about all the electrical energy that’s getting sucked up to run those supercomputers,” Futaba picked up easily, “and powering the air conditioners, in an exponentially growing competition for a throttled resource. The PoW’s get harder and harder and require more and more energy to solve, and it’s all by design. There’s stats on this junk. The carbon footprint of everyone mining crypto is more per annum than what’s used by entire countries.”
“Holy shit,” Ryuji exhaled as he struggled to fathom the scope of the whole scheme. “All that effort, all that money for… what even is a Bitcoin, anyway?” He shook his head, gathering his forlorn face into one of determination. “I mean, you told us what it is, but how is it… why is it money? Where does the money come into it?”
“That’s the biggest bullshit of all, my boy,” replied Futaba with a 1920’s old-money voice. “It’s worth money just because people think it’s worth money. In reality, it’s just a funky little code.”
“The value of various cryptocurrencies rise and fall for the same reasons that any stock in the stock market does,” Haru said. “When there’s a demand, the price goes up. When there’s not, the price falls. It’s just, for a stock, you do actually buy into ownership of a company, whereas with cryptocurrency… you buy into nothing.” She stared at her empty hands as if to demonstrate, weaving her fingers together. “You buy into the idea that this artificial scarcity of codes makes having one of the codes worth something. Or maybe, you place a price on the energy put into earning that code.”
“There already is a price on energy. It’s called your utility bill,” Akira said. “Is the price of energy reciprocal to the value of the coin?”
Futaba grinned like the Cheshire Cat showing his truth. “Does it really matter when you’ve set the planet on fire to get it?” she asked in return.
“Oh!” Haru said, her face lit. She pounded her fist into her open palm. “Now I get what you were saying about it being a pyramid scheme! Yusuke’s cryptoart program might not be a pyramid scheme in and of itself, but the entirety of cryptocurrency is!” With a sunny smile and her head in the clouds, she detailed it out aloud. “There’s a high barrier of entry for investing in the equipment required to mine it, but the current population makes it so there are low returns. It’s not as clear-cut, but it really is the same thing at its core. Right down to the fact that there’s no product being sold.”
By this point, the Yusuke in question had melted into a sad heap in his seat, head laid on the table near Morgana’s side, in case he was feeling generous enough to offer his soft tummy for therapeutic purposes. (He was not, and in fact curled his tail around Yusuke’s nose to make it itch out of spite.)
“Oh, Yusuke,” Haru said despondently, hands over her mouth, “I’m sure it’s not that bad! Just because they might use cryptocurrency for this art exchange you’re doing—”
Just as Yusuke began to lift his head in hope, Futaba tossed her empty drink at him to knock him back down. “Nope!” she declared. “Actually, cryptoart is worse than just trading things for crypto, which is already pretty stinkin’ bad!”
“Oh, good. It gets worse.” Akira folded his phone into his pocket and leaned his elbows on the table to listen with morbid curiosity.
“First,” said Futaba, holding up her finger, “I have to explain why Bitcoin and Ethereum are actually super different types of crypto. And that’s because of the difference between fungible and non-fungible tokens.”
“Fungible?” Yusuke repeated. “Like fungus?” In a blink, his eyes were glittering with foodlust. “Mushrooms?”
“Ugh, no.” Futaba slumped over the back of the booth seat to sit halfway on Yusuke’s back, keeping him pressed against the table. “Fungibility is just a fancy way of saying… well, like saying that something could change, and it wouldn’t matter. Basically, if I have a hundred yen, and I spend it, and then later I find a hundred yen coin on the ground, I end my day with the same thing in my wallet as I started it with. It’s all the same to me, one coin versus another. And that’s how it is with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a fungible currency.”
Yusuke nodded with interest, seeming to be keeping up with the explanation until he asked, “And how do you find one hundred yen on the ground? Where was this?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” replied Futaba coyly. “Anyways, Ethereum, on the other hand…”
“Is non-fungible?” Makoto finished.
“Ding-ding-ding!” With a grin at Makoto, Futaba finally settled herself into sitting normally on the bench beside Yusuke, which is to say she hunched into a squat with her feet on the chair and her arms hanging between her knees, but no one is here to argue semantics. “Ethereum tokens are like when you get a thousand-yen note and somebody drew funny glasses on the guy on the bill. If you spend that, and then you find a thousand-yen bill on the ground, it ain’t the same! It doesn’t have funny glasses.”
“You could draw funny glasses on it, yourself,” Ann suggested.
“What do Noguchi-san’s glasses represent in actual cryptocurrency?” Haru asked.
“Where are you finding all of this money on the ground,” pleaded Yusuke.
“Ann, let’s go with your idea first,” Futaba said. “You totally can draw your own glasses on it, right? But it’s not gonna be exactly the same. Your glasses were drawn with a different pen, and the exact pen strokes are a little different… it’s just not the same as the bill you had before. Let’s say that’s how the non-fungibility of Ethereum tokens works.” With her hand masking her mouth from the side, she leaned away from Yusuke with a conspiratorial whisper. “It’s a convenient metaphor that will help us later!”
“Can you explain it non-metaphorically?” Makoto asked, a hand sliding down her face.
“Trust me, you wouldn’t want me to,” Futaba said flatly. “But I can explain it conceptually.”
Makoto sighed. “Okay, fine,” she relented. “That, then.”
“You know how Bitcoins were a special code?” Futaba said. “Weeeell, Ethereum tokens are, too, but that special code is constructed from some root piece of unique raw data. A miner submits that to Mr. Big Ethereum, along with his PoW, and it’ll mint his own special token on the blockchain. That data could be something random, but it’s more fun when it’s something specific.”
Akira’s glasses flashed in the overhead lights when he lifted his head, like some kind of anime character. “The artwork,” he realized.
Futaba gave him double finger guns and a wink. “Bingo,” she said. “Cryptoart is all about making those non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, out of the data and metadata of a digital art piece.”
“You did that thing with your voice again,” Akira said warily.
“What’s the metadata?” Morgana asked. “Is it like the metaverse?”
“Heck no. The metaverse is kind of a stupid application of the meta- prefix that just sounds cool,” Futaba said. “Metadata is data about data. If the root data is Yusuke’s artwork, then the metadata is stuff like the name of the piece, his name, the date he painted it, what programs he used to create it, and whatever else he wants to tag it with.”
“I would like to tag it with a description of the inspirations that led to this piece,” Yusuke suggested, “as well as my artistic influences as a whole, and my thoughts during the creation process, including—”
“Dude, it’s gotta fit on a thousand-yen note,” Ryuji said. “Don’t write a whole essay.”
Futaba shrugged with one shoulder leaning towards approval. “He can fit as much as he wants, hypothetically,” she said. “Honestly, the number of bits dedicated to the art itself is gonna be way bigger than any text manifesto he wants to write. It all gets hashed down into the right size for Ethereum’s standard.”
“Then, when Yusuke-kun pays the fee to have his artwork placed on the blockchain,” Haru said, “he’s paying someone to mine a token of Ethereum for him?”
“Yep,” Futaba replied, popping the P at the end. “And he makes a profit selling it if someone decides his art is worth more than the market value of a token of Ethereum.”
“Does… does Ethereum have the same huge energy cost as Bitcoin?” Haru asked nervously.
“Yep,” Futaba said again, even more drawn out and enunciated than last time.
“That’s horrible,” Makoto stated with a shudder of hot anger. “I mean—even the act of placing your art on sale in this market is consuming unconscionable amounts of energy, right?”
“Right,” said Futaba, “and that’s not even the worst part. Data is supposed to be free and infinitely reproducible by design. If someone shares their art online for people to look at, for free, then anyone can download that data and keep a copy for themselves. But some crypto nut could download that data and upload it to the Ethereum blockchain as an NFT—without even asking for the artist’s permission.”
Yusuke’s hip banged against the table when he shot upright, and he didn’t seem to notice. “What?!” he shouted.
“And it’s not limited to art, either,” Futaba went on, folding her hands behind her head and leaning back with a bittersweet little smirk. “You can tokenize anything. Data is data. Anything you put online can be copied. Anything in real life can be written down, photographed, recorded, or documented digitally in some form, and that can get tokenized, too. When NFT art trades started getting popular on Twitter, a whole bunch of bot accounts cropped up and offered services where you could tokenize people’s tweets.”
“That’s disgusting,” Makoto uttered. “That’s blatant copyright infringement.”
“A lot of them have copyright takedown procedures listed on their website,” Futaba said. “But the nature of crypto is that, once it’s minted, you can’t remove it from the market. That’s a permanent token. So they’re just posturing, and their entire platform is built on IP theft.”
“What if someone uses these Twittered robots to create an NFT from my artwork before I can?!” Yusuke worried.
“You’re not seriously considering making NFTs after this whole explanation, are you?” Makoto groaned.
“Honestly, they could create an NFT of your art after you did,” Futaba said. “Each token is usually created from a chunk of data stored as a JSON object—don’t worry what that is if you don’t know, it’s just a way to structure data—which holds all your metadata, plus a URL to your artwork. You can’t tokenize the exact same data twice, but if you change one little thing—if you add a new description field, if you host the art on a different URL—then bam! That’s new data to the blockchain.” She wiggled her glasses with her fingers on their rims, smirking at Ann. “That’s the glasses metaphor. You can just steal ideas.”
Yusuke gasped with indignation, a hand over his mouth. “How do I stop these Twitterers!” he cried.
“Do you even have a Twitter account?” Ann asked.
“If you do have a Twitter account,” Futaba said, pulling out her own phone, “then you should pre-emptively start blocking those NFT bots, plus anyone who’s notorious for tagging them. If someone running one of the bot accounts tries to make a new bot account because they’ve been blocked everywhere, you’ll see those same bad actors trying to tag the new bots.” She pushed the curry platter to the side and slid her phone into the center of the table. “There’s a tool someone wrote up to help out called Blockasaurus. It’s got robust text processing so you can put in a list of usernames, separated by spaces, commas, line breaks, basically anything. With or without the @ sign, even with slashes or periods to break the @ link, doesn’t matter. Just paste the whole block of text in and it’ll go through and block ’em all for ya. The user who built the tool, @JoeSondow, quote-tweeted a thread of users to block related to the whole tokenization fiasco.”
As Ann logged into her Twitter account, glancing at Futaba’s phone screen for the details intermittently, Haru tapped out a text message to her company’s public relations manager and social media representative relaying the information. Ryuji thumbed out his own message to Mishima with unsure wording, in case the Phantom Thieves website had any social media links. Meanwhile, Akira narrowed his eyes at Futaba and muttered, “You did a hyperlink with your voice this time. Two of them.”
“Do I truly need to block them in advance?” Yusuke asked. “In the event that I do create a Twit account.”
“Oh, a hundred percent, for sure,” Futaba said. “All that stuff I said about copyright takedown being useless? Yeah, that’s half of it, that’s IP theft. But the other part of it that’s even more evil, is that when someone tags one of those bots to make an NFT from your stuff, they’re basically expending all of that energy to mine a token in your name.”
Makoto’s clenched fists shook with righteous fury. “This isn’t just criminal. This is downright villainous,” she said. “This… this makes me so angry.”
“And you aren’t even at risk of being plagiarized.” Yusuke shook his head with disgust. “I am appalled that the people within the field of art would sink to such heinous depths, and inspire such wasteful trends in their wake!”
“Is there some way to outlaw this?” Makoto asked. “Data is free, like you said, but…”
Futaba rolled her eyes and gestured at the gathering of vigilante heroes of justice. “Uh. No? Earth to Mako-chan,” she said, “the law can’t fix anything. Especially not when it comes to new tech. Those old fogies in the Diet wouldn’t know a Bitcoin unless it hit ’em in the face, and it won’t, ’cuz it’s virtual.”
“So the Phantom Thieves gotta stop it,” Ryuji said, pounding his fist into his palm.
“You guys already proved you can’t stop a decentralized anonymous online force with any tech savvy when some Medjed punks tried to threaten you.” Futaba kicked her legs up on top of the table with a smug grin.
“Then, can you stop them?” Makoto asked.
“I mean, yeah, but I’m not real,” Futaba replied. “Like, sure, I’ll take care of it tonight. If I just bring down the few main sites hosting the images for the NFTs, that’ll technically render those certificates useless trash and jeopardize the entire trade, and I could do that in a blink. Crash the cryptoart market before dawn, no prob. But that’s not gonna fix crypto, and it’s definitely not gonna the real world.”
Everyone looked around warily.
“At least, not until the startups owning those hosting URLs inevitably go bankrupt as a victim of their own pyramid scheme,” Futaba tacked on, “but that’s not gonna happen anytime soon. Not for another two, three years max.” She snort-laughed at her own joke. “Oh, those tokens are a ticking time bomb.”
No one else so much as cracked a smile.
“Look, don’t worry about it,” she said. “For the sake of argument, let’s say I can’t do anything.”
“How could cryptoart be so corrupt?” Yusuke wondered. “It was supposed to be for a good cause. It was supposed to be a source of income for independent artists in the digital sphere. Isn’t there something we can do to regulate the tokenization of intellectual property and—or at the very least—reduce the carbon footprint of tokenization?”
“What if, like, all the crypto-mines were glued to an energy grid that was totally solar-powered?” Ann suggested. “So all the energy it’s using is solar-powered!”
“Yeah, yeah, and wind-powered, and stuff!” Ryuji chimed in. “What if they made it illegal to mine Bitcoins if you ain’t using green energy?”
“Green energy isn’t carbon-free,” Futaba said. “Everything’s got a cost. There’s the cost to make a grid that powerful, and just to spend it all on Bitcoin instead of powering people’s lives, and then there’s just the laws of thermodynamics. Solar and wind and geothermal and whatever other renewable energy sources are renewable, but that doesn’t mean they’re a hundred percent carbon free. Everything burns a little.”
“Well, what if you donated a portion of the proceeds to reforestation and stuff!” Ann beamed at her own idea. “You know, like, those organizations that plant a tree for every yen donated…”
“Unfortunately, those are often feel-good scams,” Haru said softly. “A lot of those hypothetical seeds never make it into the ground for various bureaucratic or just selfish reasons. I wouldn’t put a lot of stock into that.”
“The root of the problem is that proof of work thing,” Akira deduced. “We’re forcing computers to do complex, energy-intensive processes for entirely arbitrary reasons. It’s just what Mr. Big Bitcoin and Mr. Big Ethereum and all the rest decided on.” He turned to Futaba. “Isn’t there some other way to mine cryptocurrency?”
“Oh, totally.” Futaba held up four fingers. “There’s four big alternatives, and they all really boil down to the same thing.” Counting down her fingers, she listed, “There’s proof of stake, proof of capacity, proof of assignment, and proof of donation. But basically, they all function like a lottery system. It just changes how they hand out the lottery tickets.”
“So instead of making computers work constantly for the tickets,” Makoto said, “they just issue out a new winner every ten minutes to idle processes? That seems a lot better.”
“Definitely, for the environment,” Futaba said. “But not for wealth inequality. How do you think people buy tickets?”
Ryuji gritted his teeth. “Money,” he grumbled.
“Yup. Just money in different forms,” Futaba said. “Proof of stake is based on how many tokens of the cryptocurrency you already have. One Bitcoin, one Bitcoin lottery ticket. So the rich just get richer. And proof of stake is the most popular one.”
“I’m afraid to ask about the others,” Makoto muttered.
“No need to ask! I’m in the thick of infodumping, and you couldn’t stop me if you tried,” replied Futaba proudly. “Proof of capacity is basically just as bad, because it assigns out tickets based on how much hard drive space you have available. And proof of assignment is based on how many internet-connected devices you have.”
“Wait… internet-connected devices?” Ann raised her finger to her lip in deep thought. “Could I assign my parents’ smart fridge a lottery ticket?”
“If you jailbroke it, probably,” Futaba said with a shrug.
“Okay, so, yeah, another way rich people are winning,” Ryuji said. “I only got my phone and my crummy laptop that doesn’t stay connected to the WiFi anyway.”
“And proof of donation is exactly what it says on the tin,” Futaba finished. “You get assigned a ticket if you donate to charity, depending on how the rules are set up. But you need money to donate.”
“It’s like charity raffles at fundraising events,” Haru said. “The tickets are several thousands of yen each, and the prizes aren’t particularly grand in comparison, but everyone participates because it’s for a good cause and it’s in the spirit of the thing.” As her eyes settled back down to the group staring at her in awe of her wildly non-universal life experiences, her cheeks turned pink. “Um, and because everyone’s, er, rich, I suppose.”
“So there’s no egalitarian way to dole out the tickets,” Futaba explained. “I mean, there could be, but we live under capitalism, right? The whole point is that the rich get richer and the poor stay poor. The people designing the system are gonna make it work for them.”
“But why limit it to a lottery system as an alternative?” Yusuke pressed. “That seems to be an awfully black-and-white argument. Surely there must be another way, perhaps a method yet undiscovered—”
“Inari, lookie here.” Futaba grabbed his face with both hands, squishing his cheeks and jutting out his lips, and turned it towards her. “Cryptocurrency has value because time and energy went into mining it. If you take away the time and energy, it stops being worth anything. So if someone comes up with an eco-friendly system, no one’s going to buy into it, because it doesn’t have that time and energy cost baked into its conception. Crypto. Is. Unethical.”
As Futaba slapped against his cheeks with each of her final, enunciated remarks, Yusuke shrank down into his seat with dismal resignation. “I suppose I will just have to find some other way to make money from my digital artwork,” he sighed.
“People sell prints all the time, right?” Ann offered.
“Prints do not sell for several hundred dollars,” Yusuke stated.
“But they are infinite,” Haru said. “One print may only sell for a small profit, but hundreds of buyers could earn you the several hundreds of—oh my goodness, I just realized we’ve been estimating the price of cryptoart NFTs in dollars this entire time while trying to stick to yen for everything else. Oh, gosh, well, it’s too late to fix it now.”
“But what about the prestige of art ownership that existed when dealing with traditional, physical art?” Yusuke asked.
“You could have a limited run of glossy prints that you number and personally sign and sell it for a higher markup,” Ann said. “I did that for prints from a photoshoot, once!”
“Or you could just write in pen on a napkin that says ‘I hereby certify the following dumb idiot to ownership of my piece, Yusuke’s Latest Bullshit, by the power vested in me as its artist and by the power of the five hundred dollars they gave me,’ and paste in the name of whoever pays the most for it, and mail it to ’em.” Futaba took the hand she was waving back and forth and yawned into it. “It’s just as official as an NFT certificate is.”
“So, Yusuke-kun?” Makoto said expectantly. “Have you decided not to participate in the cryptoart trade?”
“Of course,” he promised with a solemn nod. “I’ve been misled by greed, away from the heart of true artistry. I should not have let material needs cloud my vision.”
“Oh, my God, shut the fuck up.” Akira reached into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet, and then pulled out a fat wad of Metaverse cash. “I’ve had enough with your Bohemian schtick, it’s not clever, it’s just annoying and frankly insulting writing to anyone who’s pursuing a career in the arts. Cryptoart is total dogshit but artists deserve to be paid. I love you. Here’s five hundred thousand yen.”