Tomato Pizza Toast, and Ethereum

20210506, #breakfastdiary 82, 7°C/clear Spread tomato sauce on thick slices of bread, top with onion, mushrooms, olives, and mozzarella, then grate some Gruyère over it. Bake in a 180°C oven for 15 minutes — a breakfast only possible when there's fresh basil on hand. At Christie's New York auction, Mike Winkelmann's (Beeple's) JPEG piece 'Everydays: The First 5000 Days' sold for $69.3 million (roughly 78.5 billion won), and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's first tweet broke the $2.5 million mark (about 2.7 billion won) at auction. This is all about non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The idea is to store ownership of a digital file on the blockchain so it can never be forged or altered and is preserved permanently, with that ownership verifiable in a decentralized way — but put simply, it's just a 'digital certificate of authenticity.' I remember, a very long time ago, sitting in a sunlit corner of a library, carefully turning the yellowed pages (afraid they might tear) of Walter Benjamin's 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.' He argued that an original has an 'aura' that a reproduction can never possess. But with a digital product made of nothing but 0s and 1s, no matter how much unique identity you assign it, doesn't its fundamental nature as 0s and 1s remain unchanged? Then again, like paper currency, if enough people agree to recognize its value, doesn't an NFT become meaningful too? A morning full of one thought chasing the next.