Welp, NFTs got to "Charlie Bit My Finger," it will be auctioned off and deleted from Youtube
Aux Features Charlie Bit My Finger
It’s a simple scene. Two brothers sit and giggle on a chair together as their father looks on and records them, then ah! The younger one bites down on his older brother’s index finger, after which he exclaims, “Ouch! Ouch! Ouuuuuuch! Charlie! Ouuuuuch! That really hurt.” Moments pass and the baby brother giggles. His brother resumes, “Charlie bit me, and that really hurt.”
The “Charlie Bit My Finger” Youtube video has been viewed more than 882 million times since it was uploaded in 2007. It landed on the top of Time’s “Youtube’s 50 Best Videos” list in 2010, . Even after 14 years, it’s the most viewed viral video of all time. The two boys, Harry and Charlie Davies-Carr, then three and one, are now 17 and 15.
It was also a much simpler time. The first iPhone came out that year. We were still two years out from knowing that “Tik Tok” was a Ke$ha song, much less an app where homemade videos go viral every day. And, cryptocurrency did not exist yet, not even on black markets.
Now, “Charlie Bit My Finger” is getting the 2021 treatment, and that includes becoming an NFT, or non-fungible token. On May 23 the original video will be removed from Youtube and one person will own it, “memorializing them in internet history forever.” According to charliebitme.com, “the NFT winner will also get the opportunity to create their own parody of the video featuring the original stars.” The family, located in the U.K., is calling it not the end of an era, but the start of a “new beginning” as the boys enter a new chapter of their lives.
This is not the first early era meme to be NFT’d this year. Zoë Roth, the subject of the “Disaster Girl” image, recently sold the digital as an NFT for a whopping $500,000. She donated some of the money to charities and used the rest to pay off her student loans.
“Charlie Bit Me” may be gone soon, but it will not be forgotten.
The auction starts on May 22, at 10 a.m. ET.
65 Comments
Honestly, I had quite forgotten about it until today. It’s not a good video like How is Babby Formed, Gonads and Strife or The Terrible Secret of Space.
Do you have stairs in your house?
Stairs in homes are the debbil! And probably can be sold as an NFT too, as long as the buyer is the only one that can ever use them again.
So dumb.
NFT “winner”.There are no winners in this sordid game.
I’m thinking Charlie and his family are pretty big winners if they can sell a snippet of home video for hundreds of thousands of dollars…
At some point, one of these auctions is going to top out at $27 and I’m going to have a quite a chuckle. Quite. A. Chuckle.
Oh, hell, I’m busting a gut over all the guys over on Lifehacker who piled on me just last week.
Because I said cryptocurrency was a scam.
I’m laughing, I tell ya!
Feel free to get an early start.
Chuck L. Cheese
They’re not selling the snippet of home video. They’re selling the digital equivalent of a post-it with “I O U 1 home video” written on it.
‘Zoë Roth, the subject of the “Disaster Girl” image, recently sold the digital as an NFT for a whopping $500,000′
no, she sold it for roughly 500k in ‘etherium’ which is worth either 700 million bitcoins or one rusty nail depending on what the old shaman can scry from the shape of elon musk’s newest bowel movement
I can think of worse things than being handed a large block of whatever with a fluctuating value when you really had no reason to expect receiving anything.Right now’s the perfect time if you don’t want to try to pretend it’s an investment. I would happily take a large BitCoin or whatever payment of one of the trendy cryptos for the rights to a (checks article) 14 year old video that I’m guessing hasn’t earned much more than occasional news stories since it went viral. Crypto’d be sold and I’d be dealing with a solid currency before the day ended.
yeah, but then you have to trade it for cocaine and then buy baggies and a nice scale and split it all up evenly, go on down to the corner and sell off all the cocaine, then anger the local colombian hookup who will send their ukranian allied enforcers to ‘explain’ how the business works. it all sounds so exhausting
Eh, seems preferable to dealing with the IRS when cashing out.
The only person who made $500,000 from that deal is/are the person(s) who sold the crypto to the NFT purchaser.
A billion doll hairs.
I mean, while we’re on the subject, remember how an artist made 400 of these of the same image at the Oscars like a month ago? And now we’re all back to pretending that this is somehow a singular, original work that can be taken from the internet and given to one person?
I mean isn’t that the same as any non FIAT currency ..that its worth only exists because everyone believes that its worth that?
Sure, except with a state backed fiat currency its backed by the state. Which means that ultimately if someone refuses to accept your nickle in exchange for that gum, burly men with guns will make them. Good luck getting the cops to make 7-11 accept 55 dogchips so you can buy a slurpy
No. Fiat currancy is used to represent a collective value of goods, services, and labor for easy exchange. I don’t work to earn a dollar for the purpose of holding it or selling it based on if I think the value will skyrocket. I use it as a common medium to convert the value of items without the time, stress, and inefficiency of barter. Bitcoin and other crypto are not currencies. They are speculative investments. Nobody except for people forced to (black market) lives in a crypto ecosystem where it is a medium of exchange. At the end of the day, it is viewed as a commodity bought with real money with the hope of selling off for more real money. For me, I am dumping all my money into tulip bulbs. At least then I will have pretty flowers to look at when the bubble pops
Can you explain? This is all very dumb but it seems trivially easy to sell ethereum for cash. As long as they actually convert most of it to USD it’s a very easy six figures.
i speak with zero hyperbole when i say that everyone involved in NFTs deserves to be shot
Yes, the internet is a different place now than it was then. For example, if I was reading this article back then, it most likely wouldn’t have suddenly loaded an ad a full twenty seconds after I opened the page, suddenly bumping the part I was reading off the screen and making me lose my place, frustrating me almost to the point of simply leaving the website and never coming back.
They also didn’t have ad blockers, back then.
I saw one of those “You’re the 5 Billionth Click! Claim your prize” pages popup the other day and wow, did it take me back.
Don’t forget shifting you into a different article because you intended to click to the comments and the infinite scroll janked out.
I’m always somewhat impressed by how reliably the feed jumps to another spot just as I tap the link to an article. Whatever scummy thing they’re pulling to get an ad hit twofer, it’s working.
It forced me to seek out better ad blocking browsers. Using Brave right now and it’s amazingly quiet.
You know, I’m going to try that one. People seem to like it.I gave up on mobile ad block browsers for Kinja back when they’d randomly not even display the comment section at all but only on certain sites, or refuse to let me log in, but I’m sure things have improved since then.
Blokada on Android is great too.
Reading on a computer (as opposed to a smart phone) makes a big difference. I fully recognize that logging in is a lot of extra effort in terms of what passes for effort if you’re still mostly at home.
Yeah, that’s the worst. They clearly figure that nobody wants to read the comments, and they’re doing their damndest to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
are you joking? pop ups used to be so much worse.
Shoot, if only someone had thought to make another copy of it off YouTube during the last 14 years.
Don’t talk crazy, you know that only one copy of a thing can exist on the internet!
Didn’t you hear? They’re deleting the file. That means it’s gone forever…the internet is a series of photo negatives, right?
Its ok ,I downloaded the Internet onto some floppies a while back..
If only there was some way to bring it down off the internet and load it onto my computer…
Hmmm. I wonder what would Malcolm Tucker do in a situation like this.
In full seriousness…that sounds like a lot of effort. This was a somewhat amusing video 30+ years ago (that’s when it became a thing, right? when I was 4?)…I feel like I still remember most of the main story beats? Don’t feel like looking it up again, can’t promise I won’t want to revisit it for a second time in another 30 (by which I mean 5-10) years. Truly a great loss for the interwebs.
Eh, NFTs are so played out. Fungibility, that’s the next big thing.
Like some sort of printed currency?
there are plentiful metals from which identical tokens could be fashioned to exchange value…we could call them “coins”
When idiots are willing to throw that much money at memes and viral videos, can you blame them for cashing in?
On one hand, I do kinda sympathize with all these “old” youtubers who unintentionally created some of the first memes and got nothing for it whereas today’s Youtube can be a full time career and actually pretty lucrative if you play the meta-game to get the algorithm gods to favor you. I know I’d be pretty pissed if I had my 15 minutes of fame in ‘07 and all I got in the end was a neat fun fact when I met a new person, then I read a story about some “influencer” like Logan fucking Paul making millions. But on the other hand, it’s not worth the cost. Look, you wanna make a GoFundMe for those two kids to get into college, fine, I’ll chuck in a couple of bucks, but I’d rather not burn down a forest for them to cash in on their ancient meme.
Why would people pay for something so valueless? Does someone with way too much money really think the world will never see this video again, only them? It will be backed up in no way?
ostentatious purchases that look like farting money into the wind are where you arrive when whores and cocaine can’t elicit a response anymore
Does anyone really need to see the video again? I’m good with never having seen it in the first place.
Most NFTs like Top Shops have no value. Just a token that says you “own” 1 of 1000 copies they sold. This is different. This includes the publishing rights. So it is more like the rights to a famous image, photo or video. There is some value here, as the video probably still generates $25K-50K a year in ad revenue on youtube and other ventures in commercials and such. The NFT part of it just like a unique token that gives you copyrights to the work.
i was wondering how people would handle NFT’s and video/digital rights, i mean what rights does the holder of the NFT have to copyright laws?
If I understand correctly, complete rights. As in, they could license out what they bought, make copyright strikes, sue people for unauthorized use, etc.NFT’s are really just people selling the rights to digital work.Or I am completely misunderstanding it all.
@Maplebb, none of that is inherent to buying an NFT. All an NFT does is give you “ownership” of a particular copy of a digital asset. It may be the only copy, it may be one of hundreds, or it could be a copy of something that was freely available on the internet for over a decade. All it really says is that you can point to your copy on the blockchain and say “I own this.”Whatever other rights the NFT comes with is determined by the seller, and likely needs a separate legal document to formalize/make official.
You own one specific copy of a digital asset, but this one you’re allowed call the original. If I take a picture of my balls and send it to you all you have is a copy. If you stick a USB in my phone and download it to your machine it’s still a copy. Short of taking my phone all you’ll ever have is a copy. An NFT is a thing that says “let’s make believe that what you have is the literal original since its literally impossible to share an original without giving the medium too.”
That’s honestly a good question (that I doubt anyone involved cared enough to consider).Shit seems to be purely a ‘bragging rights’ thing for these griftees.
This is probably my best reason for only using YT for nothing but music, late night talk show clips, and the occasional movie trailer. I pay attention to current trends and meme and shit, but crap like this…never heard of it, and never want to again.
I’m going to create the most exclusive NFT ever, an NFT for a piece of digital art that doesn’t even exist. You just get the NFT. I expect it to sell for $70 billion.
One ‘art’, please!
Garfunkel or Lange?
Carney or Clokey?
In a just society, shit like this would be a trap to decide who has too much money. Attempting to buy an NFT automatically increases your tax rate to 75% for the next 3 years.
Im selling an NFT of my ballsack for $500K if anyone wants to own it?
Oh well.It was apparently 14 years old. It’s time had passed. No meme and video hungry youths would see it. It was cute and the time but just seems weird now. Quaint.A dad meme.
NFTs: Tulip Mania for the 21st century where puh-lenty of people in the next few years will be losing their shirts over this charade. Just like what Tulip Mania suckers suffered when their market cratered.
So this is basically Martin Shkreli/Wu-Tang except in reverse?